Fat nibs

The two pens I currently have inked up are sporting the two fattest, wettest nibs I own. Its going to be a week of very big handwriting!

From the top: Pelikan M200 Cafe Creme with Broad nib, Vintage Esterbrook with 2314-B Relief Broad nib.

Putting a new (old) nib on a Noodler’s Konrad

I recently decided I loved this 14k flex nib on my vintage Wahl Eversharp desk pen, but the pen was not the most useful form factor to me. So I got a Noodlers Konrad in Dixie 10 Red Rebellion, to match the original red hard rubber desk pen, and modified the feed to better fit the narrower Eversharp nib. Everything was then heat set together. Here are the results!

Yes. I did it.

I put a genuine Lamy nib on my Hero Safari-Kakuno 359a.
I think I will use the knockoff-antiknockoff tension captured in this device to power my scooter to save gas.

Fountain-pen-oholics pen-o-phernalia for the office

There are two things I keep at work that make me look horribly eccentric, but hey it keeps me happy and productive!

1. A 15ml bottle of each of my inks

2. Aluminum nib flossing, cut out of the lid of a Chipotle tin. They’re much softer than brass so they won’t hold up to some of the tougher work you can do with brass shims or a spark plug gapping tool, but they’re great incase you’re at work and your poor pen has just had enough of marking up that pulpy copy paper. And they’re a nice free bonus if you’ve had Chipotle fpr lunch!

Nib Regrind on the funny Parker Frontier

Alright so here’s that Parker Frontier with the creepy nib that was tipped twice. As you can see here, that seam between the extra ball of tipping makes for a blotchy and scratchy writing experience that just won’t do, so I’m giving this thing a nose job.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any nib grinding so I decided to take it slow, and did all the grinding by hand on an arkansas stone instead of taking out the Dremel grinding wheel.

I ground the top off completely level with the rest of the nib, and took in the sides until that wrinkle disappeared. On the underside, I used the corner of the stone to round out the bottom until the wrinkle was not longer in the way of the writing surface of the nib. After all the strangeness from the double tipping was ground down, I decided to shape it into a cursive italic nib. Smoothing was done on 2500, 6000, and 12000 micro mesh.

And the pics:

Before:

After:

A “sticky” note:

While I haven’t shown it here I thought it might be useful to note that some models of the Parker Frontier were made with a soft-touch finish. After many years this soft-touch finish can degrade into a gooey sticky mess. Don’t chuck your pen out if this has happened to you!

The soft touch finish (or what’s left of it) can be removed with rubbing alcohol and some elbow grease. The material underneath is a very pleasant pearlescent plastic. It’s so nice I really don’t understand why they covered it up with the soft-touch yuck anyway.

There’s double stamped coins, then there’s double tipped fountain pens!

Like this poor #parker #frontier here that received a double dose to tipping!

When highlighter ink is just too much

This is one of the nerdiest study tools I own, and I don’t know how I got along without it! The pentel multi8 is a leadholder that contains 8 different leads. Changing colors isn’t as easy as those multicolored pens, but it gets easier with practice. You have to press a button on the top of the pen (best to just turn the whole thing upside down amd press it down on the desk) to release the cluch on the current color and then dial up the new color and release the cluch again to let it slide into place.
Besides making textbook reading reminiscent of driving a manual transmission car, I love the highlighter colors! One of my pet peeves is that textbooks often have pages so thin that highlighters bleed through. Not so with these leads, since they are dry, there’s no annoying bleed through! The yellow, blue, and green leads are soft and apply a smooth saturated line onto glossy textbook paper. The red is a little chalky and the orange a little more so. Both red and orange don’t make quite as smooth a line on glossy paper as the other colors but it is still useable and the difference is not as noticable on notebook or copy paper.
If you’re into fancy study gadets or are looking for a great drylighter, this is a great pen to have.

Jason Ku’s Origami Nazgul 8.1

I folded this a while ago, but I was just looking at it today, and I still think it’s awesome!
The diagrams are published in Tanteidan Magazine #129. It took about 10 hours to fold start to finish. I did it in 5 two-hour sessions.
Model: Nazgul 8.1
Designed by: Jason Ku
Paper: 21in Black/Green double tissue

Taccia Tanto: I just can’t.

Taccia is releasing a limited edition fountain pen in honor of the Samurai in Japanese History, and sports the tag line, “The pen is mightier than the sword”

From their release posted on FPgeeks.com, the pen is “Hand-polished from an ebonite barrel, the TACCIA Tanto is then sealed with fine Japanese urushi lacquer, and fitted with a sting ray leather cap, sterling silver sword pin ornament, and Japanese 14-karat gold with rhodium two tone nib, the TACCIA Tanto is our finest homage to the power of the written word.” Only 100 were made, and they are available for $1,595.00.

Ok. So they made a pen out of ebonite shaped like a teeny little sword. That’s sort of cute and punny and funny. But personally I think it looks a little silly. They made the cap portion look like the handle, but it’s not proportioned like an believable tanto, and that’s forgivable because we all know it’s really a pen that’s an abstraction of a tanto. But the pen’s attempt to even suggest a tanto gets even more pathetic when you uncap it, because it gives the impression you’ve just unsheathed your mighty “tanto” out of it’s handle by the scabbard.

The folks at Taccia even had the nerve to put in this little bit about self defense: “The “Tanto” was a classic short sword in Japan, mostly used by samurai as a weapon of self-defense . Men, women, and sometimes children carried the Tanto for self-defence.”

This is to know about tanto, but it just makes the pen look even more incapable. As you’re writing, you’re basically holding your “tanto” by the scabbard. But here’s the thing, yhe tanto scabbard is actually a very effective self-defense tool. I’m a little bit of a martial arts geek as well as a pen geek and I think this is why this pen is irritating me so much because the pen, just like the tanto scabbard it looks like, can be used like a very short staff, or as a yawara or kubotan. Like this:

So, actually, your Taccia Tanto pen COULD be used in self-defense as a small kubotan, which makes it’s shape like a tanto scabbard really fun and exciting because the artistic suggestion is reinforced by the subversive utility to it. What Taccia has done instead is to make the pen out of brittle ebonite… So it’s useless. The end result is the message that the pen is indeed NOT mightier than the sword. Heck, it’s not even mightier than the scabbard.

Satoshi Kamiya’s Tenma (not H7)

Here’s my latest fold of  Satoshi Kamiya’s Tenma.

Tenma is japanese for ‘pegasus’ -‘ten’ meaning sky and ‘ma’ meaning horse.

It is folded from a 25cm square of tan/tan tissue foil.

This is not the later H7 version, but the earlier tenma diagrammed in ‘The Works of Satoshi Kamiya’. The table of contents is covered in the Origami Database.

I’m a little bit of a Percy Jackson fan, so I’m calling this particular shot Scipio’s Ambition.