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Episode: 3197
Title: HPR3197: Pens, pencils, paper and ink - 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3197/hpr3197.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 18:38:30
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3197 for Tuesday 3 November 2020. Today's show is entitled
Pens, Pencils, Paper and Ink 3,
and is part of the series The Art of Writing. It is hosted by Dave Morris,
and is about 24 minutes long
and carries an explicit flag. The summary is
looking at another batch of writing equipment.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthost.com.
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Hello everybody. Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. This is Dave Morris,
and I'm just going to do a show on the pens, pencils, paper and ink.
The third in the little group, even sure it's a series that I've been doing.
It's been a fair while since I last did one of these.
Somehow other time runs away.
I think this might be the last one because I don't have a huge lot more to say
than I'm going to say in this episode.
But if I think of anything else to add or come back,
but for the moment it's likely to be the last one.
But I know there are a few people out there who are also interested
in this subject of stationery and the like,
and I strongly encourage them to come up with a show themselves.
I know it's an interesting subject.
Just listening to somebody who enjoys a thing talking about is interesting.
But I know there's a number of people who are quite like the whole area of pens
and calligraphy and that type of thing.
Go for it.
And we're short of shows, so it's very appropriate to think about doing that now.
So today I'm going to talk in this third episode about two Chinese fountain pens.
I have a mechanical pencil, a gel pen, and some inks and some paper.
Now a few years ago I was tempted by a Chinese range of pens,
which I think is pronounced Jin Hao.
And you can see them all over the place.
I think they're quite attractive looking pens that usually quite solidly made
or look, look as if they are with an attractive finish.
And they're also very low priced, actually, considering what you can pay for a pen.
So I bought the two of them.
One is the Jin Hao X450.
It's a wilder guy, actually.
2013 I bought this one.
And it cost me £5.28, which is minuscule amount.
And I also bought a Jin Hao 500 from eBay as well.
And that was 2016.
And it cost $8.99 US dollars.
The 500 seems to have been discontinued now.
But the X450 is available still.
So there's a couple of pictures.
One with the two pens closed up.
And then they open up to show the nibs.
They're really big chunky nibs they have on them.
And they are heavy pens they're made of.
I think probably brass, but I don't really know.
It's not easy to tell because they're enameled.
They write really nicely, actually.
It depends whether you like a heavy pen or not.
I quite like the feel of these.
I like the Jin Hao 500 more than the other one.
Because it's got a straight barrel.
And it's just has got a cap with a flat top to it.
I think it's quite elegant.
And it's pretty cool.
I mean, there's some aspects of that look a little bit towardry.
But on the whole, it's not bad.
They come with converters in them.
Both of these have a colourful finish.
I think the material that they use for them is celluloid.
Not sure.
Push fit caps, which is a bit of a down downside.
With the 450, you can't put the cap on the end of the barrel.
You can't post it as the term is just falls off.
And with it on, it makes the whole thing a bit too heavy
and uncomfortable anyway.
The 500 cap can be posted, but the balance doesn't seem right.
So these are too big and heavy for working that way.
I probably won't have big enough hands to make that a comfortable thing to do.
I think they take international sized cartridges, but I've never tried them.
They both write really nicely.
The X450 seems like a very large pen you're writing with it
compared to many other fountain pens I have.
And it takes a little bit to get used to them I find anyway.
The nibs are medium and they're steel.
I think you'd refer to them as fine if it was a European pen.
I've mentioned before that Asian pens tend to have names
that imply a larger size nib than they really are.
But the main downside of these two pens is that they dry out.
A pen will dry it if you leave it with the cap off.
You're writing with it, you put it to one side, you do something else
for half an hour and come back to it.
You might find that it's not going to be coming out that easily.
You should put the cap on.
But even with the cap on these pens dry out.
Not during a writing session, but they do if you put them away
we think in them and come back to them a few weeks later they're dry.
Or they've completely dried out in some cases.
And it makes me reluctant to use them to a large extent
because I was writing the notes for this.
I was going to say I wouldn't recommend either of them.
I did ink up the 500 and used it for a few days
and I really enjoyed using it.
And I found it was very pleasant.
Well the weight I got used to, but the effect of the nib was really nice.
The nib is smooth and the ink flow is good.
I actually keep a paper journal or you should be called
a commonplace book back in the day.
And I keep sort of thoughts and observations
and general jottings in there.
And I also use it as a writing practice.
I can ensure I use a fountain pen on a regular basis.
And the Ginha 500 was great for this.
The X 450 had been left out.
The time I was preparing this episode.
And it was completely dried out.
It was dry ink in it and need to be cleaned out and re-inked.
It's not my favourite pen.
It's too big. The nibs are not fine enough.
I'm not sure I would really rush to use it anymore.
So it's one of these investments that was maybe a bad investment.
It'll be stuck away in a box for the rest of its life most likely.
And the fact that they dry out.
They're really like, think of a way of coming up
with a seal of some sort that stops them drying out.
But I don't know. I can't think of anything that would achieve that.
Unless you wrap them up in a plastic bag or something.
Anyway, that's enough about the Ginhaurs.
There's loads of them, by the way,
of different types.
Maybe some of the men in the range are better than others.
If they look attractive to you,
it might be worth having a shot.
Just to see whether you can find one that you like and works well for you.
But I think my foray into this is probably over now.
So I have a number of mechanical pencils.
Like these for a long, long time.
I've never seen thick became available,
which is probably in the 1960s.
Maybe before that.
But they were popularly available then, I think.
Always liked them and used them.
But yeah, I like to use a pencil for just making odd jottings,
notes about a thing I want to do or something like that,
making shopping lists or whatever.
I do a little bit of woodworking from time to time.
But I not really got into using a mechanical pencil
for marking wood.
Use a tent user, an ordinary pencil, mostly for that.
Anyway, the pencil I have most recently bought
is called the Graph Gear 1000.
And it's from the pen and pencil manufacturer Pentel.
It's a pretty robust mechanical pencil made of metal.
It's got a knurled grip which has a sort of translucent rubber insert,
rubber or plastic insert.
So that stops it sliding through your fingers.
That's one of the downsides of sort of polished metal barrels.
I find it is quite heavy.
My first reaction was I wasn't sure I liked it because of the heaviness,
but I've actually grown to enjoy using it a lot.
So it was my favourite at the moment.
Pressing the button on the top causes the lead
and the surrounding sleeve to extend.
You can see in my pictures that it shows the sleeve
and the leather sticking out and also when it's retracted.
So when you use the clip to fasten the pen in your pocket,
or you just press the top of the clip,
then the sleeve and the leather retracted.
So that makes it quite safe from damage.
Because that's one of the things that can happen to a mechanical pencil.
If you remove the cap, then you find an eraser.
That's usually the case.
You can add more leads by taking the eraser out.
I tend not to use that eraser, I have to use a separate one.
There's a picture to show what I'm talking about anyway.
Apparently this pencil is very popular with engineers and woodworkers
because it can stand up to nox and stuff in a workshop.
I am not that keen to use it in that context that I've said
because I've probably ruined it.
I've already dropped this once and was lucky I didn't break anything.
So I'm going to go with a standard pencil, I think.
Once I have a better workshop, I'm trying to organise that.
And I might think again about that.
I bought a set of three of these pencils from Amazon.
They cost 19 pounds, 99 in February 2020.
I kept one for myself and passed the other two to my children,
both of whom enjoy using them.
There are other sizes other than the 0.5mm I bought.
There's a 0.3mm, 0.4mm, 0.7mm, 0.9mm.
You could have a whole bunch of these things if it was appropriate
to have different leads, different diameters and that sort of thing.
If you wanted that, that's not a thing I'm likely to get into.
If you were into sketching with a pencil then it might be an appropriate thing to do.
One downside of this pencil and with other pencils nowadays
is if the section where the lead protrudes,
if for whatever reason you get lead dust and particles in there,
which really you want to be able to clean out,
then it's extremely difficult to do that.
It did happen to me when I dropped it, it dropped onto the lead
and it broke inside this tube.
It didn't damage the tube, but it made all these particles
and then when I came to feed more lead through, it wouldn't go.
Back in the day, the first bought a mechanical pencil,
the bottom side of the eraser had a very fine wire into it in the end of it
and you could poke it down this channel where the lead goes to clean it out.
Not seen a mechanical pencil that does that for a very, very long time.
It's a shame, but I've actually used a fuse wire, whatever rating it would be.
One of the small pieces of fuse wire to do it as well,
because I don't have fuse wire anymore, because my house has circuit breakers.
But anyway, you can actually shove a piece of broken piece of lead down there if you want to.
That's what I did in the end to clear it out, but it should be easier.
Maybe there are ways in which you get hold of really fine wire that would do it,
but I don't have anything for electronics or anything of that.
So I would do it in a pin or a needle or something, it's nowhere near.
It's small enough.
Anyway, moving on, I talked briefly about gel pens.
I do use a gel pen from time to time.
If I'm not using a fountain pen or a mechanical pencil,
then a gel pen's often the thing I would reach out for.
And I bought one called the Zebra.
Zebra is a known pen maker, and it's called a Sarasa clip.
And I bought one of these back in 2019, because I've seen all people mention them.
This is black.
This one I've got with a 0.5mm tip.
There's pictures of it.
Points are retractable.
There's a button on the top.
Let's you stick it forward or retract.
It's got rubber sort of grip to it, so it's nice to hold.
Ink dries nice and quickly, and as far as I can see,
it's a certain amount of water resistance.
It doesn't say so, though.
Looking at the pictures in my episode,
I've used good proportion of the ink in this one.
I think you just have to throw it away when you finish it and get another one.
There's no, as far as I'm aware, there's no refill available.
But it's a really nice thing to use.
It's one of the few gel pens that I like.
So I thought it was worth mentioning it to just pass on the possibility of you grabbing hold of one and seeing what you think of it.
So next is Inks.
And I'm not going to go into great detail here.
There are podcasts and YouTube channels that talk about ink to the 15th degree.
I don't really want to get into that, because I'm not that bothered by the ink characteristics.
There are a lot of inks out there.
The ones I tend to go for are the simpler type.
They just have different colors and water soluble.
But there are other inks which have tiny particles of metal, I assume,
which makes them shimmer when you write with them inks with scents or inks that change color as they dry and permanent inks.
I've never used a permanent ink, because it's really hard to get out of your pen to clean your pen out after you've used them.
I've never really had a need to use any of these.
My first example of an ink that I really enjoy is from the French company, J'ais à ban, H-E-R-B-I-N.
They produce quite a lot of pens. I've got some pens.
I mentioned them in one of the earlier shows.
They sell ink, sealing wax and lots of other stationery things,
and there's a link to the website if you're interested in the history.
But the ink I like for my fountain pens is called Blu-Père-Rouche,
which means Periwinkle Blue.
Per Rouche is a Periwinkle, a little blue flower.
I also have some brown cartridges for a pen, which can use an ink called Tère de Fœur,
which is French for Tère de Fœur or Land of Fire, the southernmost tip of South America.
So there's some cool things in the range.
If you go looking at the website, there's loads and loads and loads of them listed out there with colour,
examples and stuff, as much as you can rely on the colours when you're looking at the website.
But they're a little bit expensive, but they're pretty good.
I just like it because I like that colour.
That particular colour is really, it's a nice blue, it's not too dark.
I quite like some dark inks, but some lighter colours are nice.
The other ink that I have loads of is from a company called Diamon.
They've been producing ink for quite some time, 1864.
They're a UK company based in Liverpool, and you can buy bottles of ink various sizes and cartridges.
I have a collection of these, and I've got the 30mm and the 80mm bottles.
The 80mm bottles are moderately expensive, though they will last a long time.
I think £6 or something for an 80mm.
I usually check out the colours by buying a 30mm bottle to see whether I like them.
And if I do, I would buy the larger bottle.
I've listed out what I have in my 30mm.
It's a photograph of my collection or some of it.
You can actually tell what the colours are from the bottles, because it's on the top,
and I took a picture of them from the front.
There's a list of the 30mm colours that I have, and things like the brown, ancient copper,
and purple, teary and purple.
I like that one, actually, violet.
I also quite like, I don't know why, but if somebody writes you a letter in violet,
you're going to think they're a little bit cracked, but whatever.
I just like the variety.
Then I've got a bunch of 80mm bottles.
I seem to have five of those at the moment.
I guess my go-to one is Onyx Black, because that's boring, and it's black.
But I didn't enjoy dams in very much.
I bought that without sampling it.
It's a sort of blue-ishy, purple-ishy thing, not very keen on it.
But the A's a blue, billbrow, I enjoy.
Sure would green.
If you feel like writing a green letter, then it's sure would green to good colour.
You can see loads and loads of information about their inks on their website, which is listed here.
So that's all I'll say about inks.
But I would recommend the diamond if you have access to them there.
If you want to get into coloured inks in your phantom bend, those are a good place to go.
Just a little bit about paper.
And I've mentioned already that there are specialist papers for phantom pens.
I mentioned the rodeo company in their paper, which I know a lot of people go for,
because it's generally available.
And you can write on this sort of paper in it.
It doesn't seek through to the other side and so forth.
Fountain pen, friendly as the way a lot of people put it.
So one brand I use a bit is called Claire Fontaine, which is a French company.
And I just chopped a bit out of their website to see where they are and stuff.
I'll leave you to read that if you're interested.
I have one A4 notebook, which I've taken a close-up picture of.
You can see the logo.
It's a sort of leathery, is a card cover.
It's a stapled paper.
It's got this ruled paper.
It's got a card cover that has a sort of leather-like look to it.
It's quite nice, actually, I think it's quite attractive.
Not used it yet, actually.
But I have some smaller ones, some A5 sizes that I use a bit more,
which are also quite good value.
Why do they call the A41 age bag?
I have no idea.
Maybe it needs something in French, I don't know.
So that's a brand that if you come across it is quite good for.
Fan-to-Pen-Frendi.
That's really the message.
Then there's the Oxford Stationary brand,
which is a UK-based brand.
But I think their products are pretty widely available.
There are two things which are quite good.
First is, if you're into a bound notebooks,
then choose something from the Oxford black and red case bound notebooks.
I bought some of these.
These were cheap on Amazon a few years ago.
I bought a whole stash of them.
They're five pounds each.
You get about 192 pages that says in the brochure.
So there's a fair bit of paper.
It's 90 GSM paper.
It's really good to write on.
The notebook is a sewn together type thing.
It's a really old-fashioned sort of thing.
But it opens out reasonably flat.
It's just something that if you want to have notes
in a more or less permanent form,
it's good to use one of these.
I used a cheaper version of this when I was studying for my university exams.
Though I didn't do it when I got to university,
because it turned out to be a bit expensive.
Anyway, they're pretty good.
There's even a ribbon marker in these things,
so they're quite old fashioned and quite classy, I think, anyway.
I'm also going to put a photo in the notes,
but I couldn't find them.
Tied them away somewhere.
Obviously I'm not using them at any great rate, or even at all.
The thing I am using quite a lot is another Oxford product,
which is the...
There's a whole range of campus refills and notebooks that you can buy.
When my kids are at school,
and they needed to take their own paper
along to the classes and stuff.
I still look out for these, because at the start of the school year,
they were available in the supermarkets,
and they were cheap and plentiful.
I think they were half-price, not less.
I used to just grab a handful of them,
and keep them around, and they were used quite a lot,
but I didn't judge the rate of use against their need,
against the time they'd need them at school.
And so they stopped going to school,
and didn't want to continue using them afterwards.
I think they maybe moved towards taking a computer with them
to their lectures and stuff.
So I've got a fair number of them in the house,
but I do use them.
Great for...
I did an astronomy course a year or two back,
and I dedicated one of these spiral bound notebooks to that course,
and related stuff.
So that's quite good.
I plan on doing something to another university course.
There's still three courses available.
It's going to do another one using one of these.
There's also a pad, which has got sheets that you can take out
and add to a ring binder.
You don't need to snipe the advantage,
and it's only slight, is that all of these are ruled paper,
which is fine, but I wish there was a narrow-ruled version.
Am I writing tends to be quite small?
And with a narrow paper, narrow-ruled paper,
I tend to write between those lines more effective than when there's
what they're wide ruled.
It's fun to leave a lot more space on a page than I really wanted to,
but anyway, I can live with it.
So there's a picture of the various notebooks and refills and stuff.
And as I said, it's the same as the case bound book.
It's a 90 GSM paper.
So it's really good.
There are many other suppliers of paper and stuff,
but I haven't had any direct experience of them,
so I'll leave you to investigate further.
So I think that that's the end.
There's not anything else that I need to say.
I hope you found it useful.
If you would like me to do anything more on this subject,
there's things like fixing a nib on a pen,
which I was going to do in this one,
but I'd never got around to doing making the fix.
Things like how you clean a pen, how often you do that,
and various other things, refilling pens, various different ways.
There's a lot of subjects there,
but I don't know how many people are interested in it.
If you would like to hear more on that subject, let me know,
and I'll maybe add another one to this small series.
But otherwise, we've probably done at this point.
I hope you found it useful.
And catch you later.
Bye.
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