This lemmy inspired me to buy my first fountain pen! ( sh.itjust.works )

coys25 , 11 months ago

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.

qwamqwamqwam OP , 11 months ago

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.

coys25 , 11 months ago

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!