I find it quite difficult to use, to my great surprise! I’ve recently written a long letter with it and every top of the page it behaved well, wrote smoothly, great line variation. Then by the bottom of every page it would start scratching and skipping. Clearly I somehow must be rotating the pen as I move my hand down the lines but it must be tiny movements because I don’t see any difference myself! Anyway, the stub is much less tolerant to changing angles and rotation compared to a regular round nib.
@kalanggam As others have said, the Hobonichi's are great with fountain pens, or if it's more of a pure journal you're after the Luechtturm1917 Bullet Journal performs excellently.
Nice! If you actually need help figuring out how to get it working, check out this video from Goulet.
I would suggest doing a quick pen clean first. Some Jinhaos come with a bit of ink in them for testing or some oils from the factory. This doesn’t have to be anything fancy - it’s a $9 pen! Here are some tips but don’t feel the need to get distilled water or anything like that. Just push any ink out, pull up some water with the converter out of a cup, and repeat a few times until any ink that was in there at first is gone. Then dry the nib by holding a paper towel or cloth against it until all of the water is sucked out. Then ink it up!
Especially with these cheaper pens, I try not to be super precious about cleaning them. People get really fussy about it. But the pens are meant to be used and if a few drops of ink are left, it doesn’t really matter. You might see that the ink is a slightly different color at first due to ink mixing, but oh well! It’ll work itself out.
Just use the pen, and if you aren’t going to use it for a while, remove the ink and rinse it out so that it’s not drying inside.
Thanks for the tips! It took a bit of fussing, but once I got how it worked, the converter was pretty intuitive. Overall, it was a lot simpler than I expected. I plan on making pretty heavy use of this, but I’ll keep your advice for storage in mind.
Great! If ink dries in it, just get what you can out then soak it in water for a few hours / overnight. If you’re like the rest of us, you’ll have more pens than you can keep inked & working soon enough!
I went with the fine nib cause I wanted it small but was afraid extra fine would feel a little scratchy. after trying it and it felt like writing with butter I kinda wanna try a extra fine sometime 😅 ordered mine online so i couldn’t try them out but i am very happy with it! kinda feel bad my other pens get so little use now 😁
Wow, that’s pretty. I’ve been flirting with the idea of buying a fountain pen but I found the good ones expensive considering I rarely even write on paper anymore.
Oh, the Vista! Rather than be lured by the many colors of the safari, you have sought out the clarity of the clear. Great choice! Welcome to fountain pens!
Nice, I’m using my lammy today. I’d like to get one with a slightly flat tip so I can write with some slighly more interesting calligraphy. I’ll have to research what to get
Kon-Peki is such a pretty blue. When I saw you wrote its name in Kanji, I asked myself excitedly if this person knows how to write. Then I saw the rest of your page :)
Yeah I’ve always wanted to try the Iroshizuku inks because the bottle is so pretty and they look nice but buying whole jars of ink is intimidating for me lol. Glad I finally bit the bullet because it’s prob already my fav blue.
And I’m just self studying atm. I’m going to Japan later this year and I wanted to (hopefully) be able to speak some Japanese outside of just ありがとうございます and like すみません lol. I don’t expect to be fluent or anything, but if nothing else maybe be able to decipher some signs based off the katakana or familiar kanji.
I had an 18 hour layover in Taiwan years ago, which encouraged me to learn Mandarin. Same boat as you, not enough to be anywhere close to fluent, but at least not a complete stranger to the language and culture. I find it fun to write.
fountainpens
Oldest