Further thoughts on fountain pens in 2024

While I didn't really set a theme or intention for my fountain pen collection last year, I ended up having one anyway: nib exploration. I love that many of my fountain pens are pieces of art that I get to use. But sometimes I'm kind of let down by a boring stock nib writing experience, especially the fancier a pen gets. So I began to look into specialty nibs that I could buy from a manufacturer to swap into existing pens, like how Lamy offers a cursive nib (which I actually first purchased in 2023) separately. I was also interested in how some pen retailers like Esterbrook or Stilo et Stile worked with nibmeisters to offer custom ground nibs with their pens. And finally, I thought about getting my own stock nibs custom ground at a pen show. Below are the explorations I pursued throughout the year.

My First Custom Nib

I had some Christmas money at the beginning of 2024 which I put towards my very first custom nib from @sallymander_nibs on Instagram. Her tagline is: "In the business of making weird nibs". 😀 I'd seen her post about a stacked architect nib she made for someone else for a Pilot Vanishing Point pen, which just blew me away. I reached out and had a conversation of what my preferences would be, what my writing style and angle are, etc., and crossed my fingers that the nib would work as well as I hoped when it arrived.

The nib was completed and shipped pretty quickly. The one slight hiccup was that it came as a loose nib which I had to fit onto a nib unit that I already had. I had a couple Pilot VP nib units, and 2 or 3 Majohn A1 units that I could use; that wasn't the problem. The first nib unit I tried to pry the nib off of was being very uncooperative, and I was concerned I wouldn't be able to install the stacked nib and might have to wait to talk to a local nibmeister. Luckily I tried another nib unit for a black Pilot stub nib and was able to wrangle the original nib off. After some finagling, I got the stacked nib fitted onto the housing and was instantly enamored of how it looked in my Pilot Capless Fermo, and even more by how it performed.

This is a really special nib for the Pilot Vanishing Point line (and similar pens) that I am incredibly happy to have in my collection. It instantly made my beloved Pilot Capless Fermo even better. I would be tempted to order another one, or ask if it's possible to have a reverse architect stacked nib. 🤔

While I wanted MOAR NIBS, I didn't have that much of a budget, certainly not enough to go ahead and order another nib right away from Sallymander Nibs. So I looked around for options that either came with inexpensive pens (for example, some Chinese pen manufacturers offer things like "long blade" or "naginata-style" nibs, which I had experimented with in 2023), or could be purchased separately, nib unit only, from retailers and would be usable in multiple pens.

Some okay options

I saw a Monteverde Ritma Espresso with a nice medium reddish-brown pen body with a satin finish and gunmetal accents. Since I'd gotten into brown inks at the time, I thought this would be a great pen to match inks to. Plus the coffee "theme" got me. 😅 It was only $40, so it was an affordable experiment.

I chose an "Omniflex" nib. From previous experience, I knew steel "flex" nibs in these pens were at the very best, semi-flex. But I wanted it anyway, since it would at least be different from a regular fine or medium nib. It's not the best nib out there, but it has a bit of an EF or F italic shape, so even without flexing, it offered a different look to my block printing. I liked using this pen with KWZ's Smells Like Coffee ink. 😀

Later on, I saw that Fountain Pen Revolution (FPR), besides offering their own steel flex nibs (which are actually better flex nibs than the Omniflex above), started offering different nibs in JoWo-compatible housings, so I grabbed an architect nib and a fine nib from them, since I didn't have a F JoWo yet. The architect felt a bit too broad/rounded-edged for my liking. But I actually put it back into one of my pens recently and am using it now, even though I prefer another architect nib that I'll talk about later, or a Lamy cursive nib which writes finer. I'm also not fully on board with the JoWo-compatible fine nib I bought; it kind of wrote dry when I first tried it, but it did seem to have a bit of an italic look to it (IIRC). I'll have to revisit it later with a wetter ink.

Neither of the options listed above – the Monteverde Omniflex nib, or the FPR architect nib – were that great an option in the end for my tastes. I wouldn't recommend either of them. Instead, I suggest camping out on the Monty Winnfield or Franklin-Christoph sites and watch out for interesting nibs to become available there.

An oops purchase

Galen Leather offered a Kaweco Sport in a transparent dark red color called Carmine a while back. They were offering cool specialty nibs as an option and/or add-on. I didn't really want another Kaweco Sport, but I was attracted by the nib options. Paying $60 for a pen with a nib I could swap among my other Kaweco Sports seemed reasonable.

Because I had plenty of experiences already with architect nibs, I decided to get a "bilateral fude" nib on the Kaweco Sport I bought. I had a fude nib on a Hongdian pen I bought early in my fountain pen collecting days that I liked, so I thought having a fude nib that could be used in reverse writing could be cool. But I didn't pay close enough attention to how the fude nib was constructed. It was actually a bent stub nib, so it was too wide in either regular or reverse writing for my small writing. 😐

I was super annoyed I didn't just get an architect nib. It looked like a pretty good one. But this is what happens when I venture off the beaten path; sometimes I end up with something that isn't for me. The same thing happens when I am adventurous with a food or drink order. Sometimes it doesn't work out, but I try my best not to get too bogged down by the negative experience and learn from it.

P.S. I still have the Carmine Kaweco Sport. If anyone's interested in buying it, let me know! 😆

Introduction to Bock nibs

In my experience, a lot of fountain pens I came across, whether I purchased them or not, commonly came with JoWo #6 nibs. So for a long time, those were the nibs I was familiar with, if I wasn't using pens from Pilot, Lamy, or TWSBI, for example. I do have a few BENU pens that use Schmidt nibs (which are great and quite reliable), but other than that, JoWo was it for a lot of western fountain pens. It wasn't until I bought a couple Namisu pens that I had my first experiences with Bock nibs.

Because I was into finer nibs at the time, I ordered a Namisu Horizon Petrol with an EF Bock nib. It was interesting, because it had a kind of pencil-like feedback that I imagined might be similar to Sailor nibs.

The second Namisu I got via their Kickstarter project was the Nova Pocket, which I bought with a medium titanium Bock nib.

I never had a titanium nib before, and had heard they were softer and bouncier than steel nibs, so I was excited to try one. While the medium nib I got works well and does feel different from a medium steel nib, I was kind of disappointed that it didn't feel as bouncy as I thought it would. But I think that was due to a couple reasons: a) my expectations of a "bouncy" nib came from my experiences with gold Pilot nibs (a soft F on a Pilot Elite, and the falcon nib on a Pilot Falcon), which are likely going to feel softer than titanium, and b) perhaps a medium titanium nib doesn't show as much bounciness as a F or EF would have. Sadly I cannot find anywhere that has a F or EF titanium Bock nib in stock online right now. 😒

Vintage gold nib and another custom nib grind

In the late summer, I signed up to attend my first Pelikan Hub. But I didn't have any experience with Pelikan fountain pens. I know that people have said it's not required for attendees to have Pelikan pens, but I would've felt awkward if I didn't have any, so I made it a goal to pick up a vintage Pelikan 140 at the San Francisco Pen Show. I saw a couple people on YouTube and elsewhere online talk about their Pelikan 140s and thought it would be a good entry point for both Pelikan pens and for vintage pens. There were several on eBay I could've bought, but I thought buying from someone at the pen show would be a better experience, so I waited for that opportunity. I asked for advice on which tables to visit and saw several recommendations to visit Rick Propas's table, who is known for his expertise on Pelikan pens. So his table was my first stop when I got to the show floor. I ended up with a really nice Pelikan 140, but spent a little more than I had expected I would, given the prices I saw on eBay.

(The pen kind of blew the budget I set for myself which put a damper on looking at other stuff at the show. I still did buy some things, but limited myself a lot. 😐 But I digress.)

Ultimately I have been happy with the 140, and really love its vintage gold nib. Now that's bouncy! It's disappointing that more modern pens don't have such lovely, soft nibs like those on vintage pens, but we'll revisit that point a little later.

While I was at the pen show, I happened to luck into a timeslot with JJ Lax to get a nib ground. I'd gotten a Gourmet Pens x BENU Talisman True Unicorn pen for my birthday, but its nib was broad, which just wouldn't work with my small writing. So I had JJ Lax grind it into an architect shape.

No messing around with experimental stuff this time! 😆 It is a crisp architect grind and flows ink very well. I wish I could've had several more pens custom ground, but it was not to be this time. I'll have to try out some of his other specialty nib grinds in the future.

A quick note about rollerballs

I'm going to write about rollerball pens that use fountain pen ink separately, but I did want to mention that I purchased a "hybrid" pen from Kakimori called the Frost which can use both fountain pen nibs and a rollerball unit with a cartridge converter. I have been using the pen primarily as a rollerball pen and wasn't actually too keen on the fountain pen nibs that I purchased with the pen body (F and M nibs) and tested out. Of course rollerballs aren't nibs, but they are mechanisms that can be used with fountain pen inks, so I thought it would be fun to see how well it works. I also have been testing out a Pilot V5 Hi-Tecpoint rollerball pen that uses Pilot cartridges. Again, I'll write much more about this later.

Final specialty nib purchase of the year, the Pilot FA

Once again I had some Christmas money in the form of an Amazon gift card, so I searched for a special fountain pen. I almost picked up a stainless steel Lamy 2000 which would've been my first Lamy 2000, but I remembered that I wanted to try a Pilot FA nib. Luckily there was a Custom 742 with an FA nib at a pretty reasonable price. I actually didn't realize I could get one of the Pilot Custom pens for under $200.

Normally I wouldn't be into a plain, black, cigar-shaped fountain pen with gold trim, but I was going for the FA nib, so the body was incidental. But now that I have the Custom 742, I actually don't mind its classic look. I thought I would prefer a flat-topped pen with silver trim instead, which I could get in the form of the Custom 912, but the 742 has grown on me.

A long time ago, I'd read articles and seen videos about people having trouble with the feed keeping up while people were writing. I saw that people were buying upgraded feeds from Flexible Nib Factory to address this issue. I didn't think that I would run into this problem because I didn't think that I wrote overly fast or used so much pressure to cause so much ink to flow and starve the feed. But when I filled the pen with a non-Iroshizuku ink, I did end up having really horrible skipping problems, so much so that I thought the pen was faulty, like maybe I had gotten a return or something? But some people on the Pen Addict Slack recommended I give the nib and feed a thorough cleaning with soap and water, and consider flossing the nib and feed. I did this and it seemed to work. Perhaps the nib and feed had some manufacturing/assembly residue that wasn't cleared out by the two water-only flushes I did. I also filled the pen with Iroshizuku Fuyu-Syogun just to be safe. For now I'll use the pen like this, but I think I will pick up an upgraded feed later so that I can use whatever ink I want and not have to worry whether an ink is wet enough to provide a consistent flow.

Anyway, now that it is working more as expected, the FA nib is pretty nice. It feels similar in bounciness and flex as my vintage Pelikan 140's nib. The Pelikan nib feels kind of "sturdier" in a way, while the FA feels springy. And because it has tipping, it doesn't feel scratchy like other calligraphic flex nibs. I don't do calligraphy or really any lettering, but I do enjoy writing with bouncy nibs, so the FA nib provides a cool experience and simple line variation with my regular writing. It just makes me feel fancy! 😀

So that's it for my year of nib experimentation and exploration. I know there is still a lot for me to play around with and check out, so if you all have any recommendations of what I'd enjoy, keeping in mind that I have small block print writing, I'd love to hear them here, on Mastodon, or on Bluesky. And thank you for reading this long account; I appreciate you.