What’s your favourite that you want to share? Let’s hear them!
My absolute favourite hack is for people who don’t own brass shims to floss a nib that has collected a lot of paper fibre. If you get mail with a plastic window, you can carefully trim a strip long enough that you can hold between your fingers so there is tension. This is often enough to floss a tine.
If you’re an occasional sample user that tends to forget about using them, have a nice eyedropper in the collection. I’m not a huge samples owner and a little forgetful, I found my samples started evaporating before I finished them. Things changed when I got an Opus 88 Demonstrator. Now when I get a sample from a local swap meet, I can drop 3.56ml into the tank, so often that’s an entire sample.
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I always wipe the hand section of the barrel on the back of my hand before using a fountain pen, if a small amount of ink got out into the cap I find that in a pinch oddly the best place to wipe it off where it won’t get on something else is the back of my hand.
Blunt nosed syringes are super useful, get some!
A Wing Sung 698 fits Pilot nibs perfectly from a metropolitan or other similar price range pilot fountain pen. Get the italic stub nib on a Pilot pen and then get a Wing Sung 698, swap the nibs and you have a brilliant but affordable piston filler.
Get some cheap pens, fuck the nibs up, mess around with figuring out how to re-align the tines. Once you learn the skill fountain pens are way less frustrating especially when ordering online without the ability to try them. One great way to “gently hammer” a nib back into shape is to get a thick book with lots of pages that you don’t care about. Take the nib off the pen and slip it in between the pages up to where the bend or crease is. Now you can adjust how many pages to cover the nib with so when you make a hit with a hammer or mallet you can adjust how acutely focused the force is. This is important because if a bend is very sharp you might want to only cover the nib with a small amount of pages to focus the hammer hit on the precise spot of the bend, but if the bend is broad and smoothly distributed you can bury the nib with a lot of pages and make sure that even a firm hammer hit doesn’t focus a bunch of force on bending the nib along a crease and make a new problem. It goes without saying, don’t do this with an expensive nib unless you are confident, but you can repair quite ridiculous nib bends with this method if you are careful.
Get a jewel magnify glass, learn what it looks like up close in terms of tine alignment when a fountain pens feels perfect for you.
Gold fountain pen nibs are special because they are jewelry, they aren’t softer or superior to a well designed steel nib. This holds true for flex nibs and they were plenty of flexible steel nib fountain pens in the past. Look at FPR’s Himalaya flex-iest steel nib for the best modern example.
For people who don’t have anywhere to grab a single blunt nose syringe for a reasonable price, go to your local pharmacy and see if they can sell you a single syringe with a gauge of 23 or lower. I found larger pharmacies and ones attached to hospitals have a larger selection. When you get home, carefully grind down the sharp bit using a sharpening stone or a patio stone. Once that’s done, give it a rinse by running some dish soap and water through it and you are good to go. It might be a little awkward to ask for a single needle, but if it makes you feel better, you can always tell them you need a blunt nose syringe to transfer liquids into a small container and can’t find one so you’re making one yourself.
You can tweak ink into your own colors and they can’t stop you! If you like an ink but it is too light/dark you can add a few drops of water or black or dark brown ink, respectively, to tweak it several shades in either direction without significantly changing the characteristics or hue of the ink. I suggest pipetting a bit out onto a nonabsorbent surface (I use takeout container lids) and adding 1-2 drops at a time and testing until I get my desired shade.
For people thinking about this 100% do not do this in the original bottle. Some inks have known to react with each other to form sludge and such. Non-absorbant surface is definitely the way to go.
I’ve been told De Atramentis Document Ink was designed to be safely mixed with each other. It might be something you would be interested in if you like mixing ink!
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After filling piston pen drop 5 or so drops back in to bottle, turn the pen up and pull back the remaining ink. Your pen will be filled but there won’t be much excess ink to wipe off. Not only are you saving ink you are also reducing chances of getting any ink on your hands;
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When flying with your pens keep nibs pointing up. That way air expanding due to pressure can’t push any ink out.
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I never buy samples but I always decant some ink in smaller containers so I don’t contaminate the bottle with dirty pens (some inks are too annoying to wash out completely as well), your trick sounds good to me. If ink dries though, usually you can go back to the previous level by topping it up with distilled water, it might need some vigorous mixing and/or a day to go back to a solution close enough to the original.
I’ve had moderately good results with ink that’s 50 years old doing this.
