Welcome to Issue#34!

This is a short but interesting issue. Are you a wielder of the ink syringe? I certainly am and that lets me enjoy the hobby in a fun and different way!

As I told you last week, I’ve been delving into some technical reading on the materials we use on our nibs. In this issue I explain the reason Sailor has the characteristic feedback, and how they keep that consistent. I hope to have a few more such explainers that break down very technical things into easier to understand chunks.

If you are in the fountain pen hobby., it is only a matter of time before you hit the syringe phase. Let me explain what I mean.

Each of us has our own favourite filling mechanism - my current obsession is with eyedropper fillers. We have piston-filler fanatics, we have those that swear by cartridges only and then there is the converter crowd. Then there are all the vintage-filling-system folks with their sacs and buttons and levers.

Your ink filling system preferences also change along with your ink type preferences. When your attention falls on more of the shimmery varieties, you gravitate towards easier-to-clean filling systems. Sometimes you settle on a specific ink for an extended period of time, and you don’t care that much about cleaning your pen out as you are just refilling the same ink - then you find a piston filler convenient.

And then you come across the syringe. By this, I mean you use a syringe for yourself for the first time. Usually it is because you want to refill a cartridge. Once you have done that a few times, you naturally start using the syringe for other things, like filling your eyedropper pens with them. Then you fill your convertors with them. The final step in the rabbit hole is when you start filling your piston fillers with the syringe.

The appeal is easy enough to understand - syringes are a low-mess method, give you precise control over your ink filling, and once you get used to them, the quickest method by far of going from “Oh I’m out of ink” to writing again.

And for those of us who go through a lot of samples, a syringe is the best way of getting to the last drop of the sample without any wastage.

I am currently at that stage where I just syringe everything. Even when I am doing a quick dip test, it’s so much easier to just use a syringe to put some ink on the nib than to:

1) Pour out the ink into a smaller container (like an old glass inkwell, or a dinky dip) to dip the nib into

Or

2) (The horror of it!) Dip the nib directly into the bottle, risking contamination as well as a mess on the section of the pen.

For filling ink in my pen - it doesn’t matter what pen it is - all of them get syringed! I am still fascinated and obsessed by the amount of control I get from the syringe, plus, I am yet to see any form of contamination in any of my bottles. I am unable to see myself becoming a non-syringe person any time soon!

The tip on the nib of most fountain pens is a very specialised part of the pen that is manufactured by only a handful of companies in the world. The tipping has to be made out of very wear-resistant material which should also have the right amount of stickiness for ink. Making this involves very precisely handling really hard-to-work materials in very precise ways.

Wear resistance is the ability of the nib tip to withstand writing without wearing to an extent where the desired line is lost. The line width is determined to be lost according to the standard prescribed by the relevant authority. For example, the Chinese Industrial Standard considers a line width to have been lost when there is a wear of 0.15mm on the tipping. Keep in mind that the loss of line width does not represent a loss of usability of the nib - it merely represents the point at which the nib no longer writes at the nib width it declares. While a nib point could be rated to have a life-span of 5 million characters, its actual usable lifespan may be several times that limit. This information is incidental, and does not have to do with the title of the article!

The hardest, most wear-resistant tipping material is made from alloys that use osmiridium, naturally occurring alloy. Osmium is the most wear resistant of metals, and by using an alloy of it along with ruthenium, rhenium and platinum, the most wear resistant nib tipping materials are achieved. These are found on the higher end Pilot nibs, and are made in-house with osmiridium sourced apparently from Pilot’s own mine.

On Pilot’s mid and lower end pens, the tipping material used is an alloy of tungsten, rhenium and cobalt. While this is less wear resistant than the osmiridium alloys, it is still one of the more wear resistant tips out there. Interestingly, even Pilot’s steel nibs use the same tungsten-rhenium-cobalt alloy.

Now, both the alloys that Pilot uses are extremely dense, which is why they can be polished to give a very smooth writing experience.

Sailor pens have tipping material made with a tungsten-rhenium-nickel alloy. This is less dense and has cavities and internal voids. When the tipping material made of this is polished, the lower density with internal voids result in the characteristic “Sailor feedback.” By deliberately choosing a material with specific physical characteristics, Sailor ensures that this is consistent across all its pens, and is converted into a sought-after USP for the brand.

Share your take on fountain pens and related things in one (or more!) of our upcoming issues.

Any and all content you share will belong to you and will be credited to your name (or a pen name of your choice) and linked to any of your online profiles. Ideal content would be a write-up between 200 and 400 words with 1 to 5 images.

Here are a few things that can go in the Fountain Pen Weekly:

• Pen / ink / paper ownership experience

• Favorites in FP, ink, paper etc.

• Your social handles with your FP content - Insta, FB, Twitter, Reddit

• Any FP-related content you want to call out - articles, podcasts, videos.

If you have any other ideas as well, do share, and I will be happy to think about it.

That’s all from me this week.

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