New Pen: Esterbrook Estie Avalanche

We recently took a short trip out to Los Angeles over the new year holiday, a much appreciated break from our routines. I knew I wanted to stop at Flax Pen to Paper while we were there, but the shop was closed for the holidays until Jan 2. Luckily our last day in LA was Jan 2, so we went to Flax on our way out of town.

I browsed Flax's website to see what brands they carried and put together a list of things I wanted to check out: the Platinum 3776 Nice demonstrator in rose gold and some other Platinum pens, PLOTTER notebooks, a couple TWSBI ECOs I want to add to my breakfast/drink collection of models, and some cute glass nib pens with cats. 😺 I was looking to purchase something nice as a souvenir for the trip.

When I got to the shop, I browsed around and saw one of my grail pens, the Platinum Izumo Raden Galaxy, and pointed it out to my husband.

He didn't seem inclined to let me purchase it spontaneously (it costs over $1000 USD). 😆 😆 😆 Someday, it will be mine...

Anyway, I also looked at the Platinum 3776 Nice demonstrator, but in person I didn't like the way it looked as much as I thought I would, so I decided to look at other things.

When I found the glass nib dip pens with a little orange cat on the end, I also saw some Esterbrook Esties in the display case, and a couple of them caught my eye. One, marked "RB" was in the Sweet Dreams resin, and the other marked F was in an unknown creamy blue-green, copper, and white sparkly resin. I asked to see both pens and found out the "RB" meant rollerball (duh, and darn!). So I asked to see the fountain pen. It looked really nice in person, so I decided I'd pick this as my "trip pen". It is my first Esterbrook pen.

The person helping me said that usually the pen is only available with a M nib, but someone had done a nib swap for a F. I wanted a F nib, so I was cool with it, not making the connection that perhaps this was a pen that someone returned...? It's also weird that the salesperson mentioned it's only available in M when on other retailer sites, the full stock nib range is available for the Avalanche, as I found out later. 🤔 🤷‍♀️

I'm still not sure on what happened there, but the pen itself looked fine. The nib did have some condensation on it as if it had been cleaned and retained some moisture, but otherwise, nothing else out of the ordinary. I paid for it and went on my happy way. I didn't note which model the Estie was when I was in the store (the purchasing process happened so quickly 😅), but realized afterwards it was the limited edition Avalanche, which I had seen when it was first announced, but wasn't particularly interested at the time. I think the resin looks much better in person than in the pictures online.

When we got home I was eager to test out the pen, especially since I'd finally realized that perhaps someone had purchased the pen before and returned it. I was kind of kicking myself not asking for some kind of discount since it wasn't brand new, but whatever. I just hoped there was nothing wrong with the nib.

Before we left for our trip, I'd met up with a pen friend and picked up the San Francisco pen show ink by Colorverse that I asked her to purchase for me, since I didn't go to the show myself. It is a lovely, cool, foggy blue-gray, as appropriate for its name, San Francisco Fog.

I immediately filled the Estie with this ink even though it doesn't match at all, and did some writing samples. It initially felt kind of dry or skippy, and I thought I might have to switch out the ink, but I wrote a few heavy downstrokes to help loosen up the tines, and I used a brass shim to floss the tines a bit. After a little bit of that, the pen appears to be writing just fine...phew! The tines weren't out of alignment or anything, I think they were just a little tight.

For my first Esterbrook, I think this is a pretty nice one. Now I'm curious to get an adapter for vintage Esterbrook nibs and try those out. That could be a very cool mod for this pen. The JoWo F writes well, but I prefer different nib grinds. It's too bad I couldn't have gotten a Journaler or Scribe nib with the pen.

Flax Pen to Paper was a nice little shop. I didn't browse for too long, as we were hoping to get back on the road sooner rather than later, and wanted to get lunch before leaving. I wish there were more shops like this in the SF Bay Area. Why aren't there? :sigh: Anyway, it was nice that I could visit Flax this time and will return whenever we're back in LA. But I also want to check out other shops I didn't get a chance to hit, like Vroman's Bookstore. Any other stationery shops in LA I should put on my list? Please let me know. 🙂