Quick first impressions of the Flexible Nib Factory ebonite feed

Yesterday I received the red ebonite feed that I ordered from Flexible Nib Factory for my Pilot Custom 742 and FA nib. Incidentally, it's the first fountain-pen related purchase I've made this year. I successfully did a no-buy January. 🙂

It seems it might've gotten stuck in the sorting machinery, because the envelope arrived with this concerning damage:

This is my theory for why the package seemed to be stuck at the San Francisco distribution center longer than expected. 😒 I'm just happy it didn't get lost!

Luckily when I opened the package, the feed itself was unscathed.

Here you can see the speckled red ebonite feed more closely.

Compared to the stock Pilot feed, it's clear that ink will flow better through the ebonite feed.

Update: For full comparison's sake, here is the underside of the stock Pilot feed.

There's this "divot" in the center of the feed part right under the nib, which apparently is a hole that makes it easier for you to fill the pen from a shallow ink bottle (thanks for the info, @jimp!). I wonder if this is why the pen wouldn't fill properly after I fitted it with the ebonite feed? The new feed doesn't have a hole in the underside. I have never used an ebonite feed before, so I don't really know how filling is supposed to work.

Interestingly, there is maybe a 1 cm long section in the middle of the Pilot feed that looks like the 2 deep slits carved into the top of the ebonite feed. Perhaps this is how Pilot intended to pull more ink into the feed, but it just doesn't work well enough.

I don't know why Pilot made such a restricted feed for the FA nib. Even when very wet Pilot Iroshizuku ink is used with the pen and stock feed, I saw lots of skipping, so much that I stopped using the pen until I could get the upgraded feed installed. It is a very surprising and confusing move from Pilot.

The red ebonite feed looks pretty handsome in the Custom 742.

I've only had the feed installed for fewer than 24 hours, so I only have some first impressions to share. Originally, I put Sailor Yurameku Date Gokoro in the Custom 742 because I wanted to see what would happen with a drier ink. I was really stress testing the feed, I guess. But the CON-70 didn't fill properly from the ink bottle, instead getting filled with bubbles, no matter how I tilted the ink in the bottle to help cover the nib and breather hole while filling. Regardless, there was at least enough ink in the feed to test the pen. On a loose sheet of Kokuyo Business paper sitting directly on my desk, the pen seemed to be performing much better, though I still saw few minor skips while I was writing. But I saw even more skips on a page of Tomoe River paper in my Wonderland 222 planner, which was super frustrating. I decided to clean out the Date Gokoro since not much of it had actually filled the converter and I installed a cartridge of Pilot Iroshizuku Fuyu-Syogun, taking the CON-70 out of the equation, too. This time I wasn't messing around. I wanted to give the pen its best chance at succeeding the test. I think it is working well now.

I still saw a couple very minor skips on initial downstrokes, but maybe there's a little bit of a "compatibility" issue with the paper in my notebook. For one thing, the notebook has a soft cover, so when I lay it on my closed laptop as a makeshift writing desk (😅) it's still not quite flat near the binding and some parts in the middle of the page. And that's kind of where I was noticing some skipping, as if the page isn't flat enough, so maybe the slightly uneven surface causes me not to make full contact with the paper. When I wrote on Kokuyo Business paper in a truly flat-lay disc notebook, I didn't see that many skips (though I still did see some). The texture of Kokuyo Business paper is slightly different from Tomoe River also, even though both show ink properties similarly. Perhaps that's a factor. 🤷‍♀️

I'm kind of reaching here, though, because I don't see this issue with other pens. To be clear, most of my other pens have non-flex steel nibs, though, so the difference between that and a soft, bouncy gold FA nib is probably a factor. The fact that I haven't written a lot with this FA nib yet and need to get used to it is also probably a factor. I do think that I am focusing a lot on skipping and hard starts with this pen since I had so much trouble with it before and am looking for all of that to be fixed. But my other pens can occasionally skip anyway, so I'll probably mellow out in my monitoring of this pen soon.

For now, I'm cautiously happy with the Custom 742's performance with the new ebonite feed. I'll try out different wet inks and see how it goes. It would be rather disappointing if the pen only performs this well with Pilot inks, even though there are enough Iroshizuku inks I'd be okay rotating through with this pen. I want to be able to use whatever ink I want, even if it's not a "gusher" ink. I'll check back in once I've done more testing.