Episode: 2273
Title: HPR2273: Fountain Pens
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2273/hpr2273.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 00:42:46

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This is HPR episode 2,273 entitled Fountain Pen.
It is hosted by M1RAR Nero R5H4D35 and is about 23 minutes long and currently an exquisite
flag.
The summary is in this episode, I cover some of the basics on Fountain Pen.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honest Host.com.
It 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Hello world, you're listening to Hacker Public Radio and I, Mayor Shades, and today I'm
going to talk about Fountain Pens.
What?
Yeah, I want to talk about Fountain Pens and I'm not the first person to actually bring
this up on HPR.
It's been mentioned before by Dave Morris and Drupes, I know both either mention them or
have done shows about them, but yeah, I am very much into technology, but there are certain
pieces of older technology that I just find so fascinating, so as into technology as
I am, I still very much like to write on paper.
I don't know why, I'm sure I'm not the only one like that, I have a bunch of notebooks,
a bunch of journals, there's something about the tactile sensation of writing and your
thoughts, at least for me, seem to flow a little better when I can just scribble them down
in a notebook.
So all that aside, why use a Fountain Pen and what is it, it's sort of the precursor
to modern ballpoint pens, so Fountain Pens used to be very common in the US and pretty
much throughout the world, they're still, you still see them probably more often than
anything, but they are an older technology.
I know, excuse me, in Dave's episode, he went over some of the parts of a Fountain Pen,
I'm going to just real briefly rehash just for the sake of brevity, so you don't have
to look around a bunch of different places, but there are besides here, there's also a
ton of YouTube videos out there that will go over all the parts, and if you actually just
Google parts of a Fountain Pen and look at the images, there's actually diagrams, I'll
see if I can find one of those to attach to the show notes, don't quote me on that, I
may not be able to, but at any rate, there's some parts that you would recognize from any
pen, the body or the barrel, the cap, the clip, there's some other parts that you may not
be as familiar with, the ends of the pen are usually referred to as the finial, and on
some pins and the finial, the manufacturer will put, I don't know how to describe it, it's
like a little disc or a button, it's almost like a maker's mark, it just identifies the manufacturer
of the pen, there's also the section, and the section is kind of the part that you hold
with your fingers, and attach to the section will be the feed, the nib, and whatever type
of reservoir the pen uses, so I'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute, so basically
the mechanism for how this works, in the past it has been described as a controlled
week, so you have some kind of reservoir in the back that holds all the ink, and it runs
down the feed and is sort of delivered to the nib, which is the metal part that touches
the paper, and just as an aside here, when you write with a fountain pen, you have to kind
of keep them in the same, you can't really twist it in your hand like you do a ballpoint,
you have to keep the shiny part of the nib upright, so doing that, I find, it does force
me to slow down just a little bit, but that's a good thing, it helps me to write a little
planer and a little clearer, I'll talk a little bit more about handwriting towards the end
of this episode, because I know a lot of times people talk about fountain pens, they also
talk about wanting to improve their handwriting, so we'll get to that a little bit later,
now like many other kinds of technology, fountain pens are moderately hackable, and there
are some things you can do to a fountain pen, I'll get into some of that in a minute, so
when we talk about some of the specifics of the individual parts, so when we're talking
about the reservoir a minute ago, there's different kinds, some of them are piston fillers,
some of them are vacuum fillers, some of them use cartridges or converters, and there's
generally a couple of different kinds, and most all converters are piston type converters
that plug in where a cartridge would go, basically what converters allow you to do is a pen that
is designed to work with an ink cartridge, instead of buying the cartridges you can buy
the ink in a bottle, and then use the converter to fill the pen, rather than having to buy
a bunch of cartridges and use them, the cartridges are kind of expensive, actually, it's cheaper
to buy it by the bottle, you get a lot more ink for a lot less money, piston fillers and
vacuum type fillers are, most of the piston fillers I think that I've seen out there generally
use the entire body of the pen as the reservoir, so you pull up a piston and that evacuates
all the air and the chamber, and then you dip the nib and feed into a bottle of ink and
then push the piston down, and that creates a vacuum and sucks a whole bunch of ink up inside
the pen, most of the vacuum type non-piston ones, you know I don't see this too much on modern pens
anymore, a lot of older pens, I have an old Esther Brook pen that has this type of, it's like a
rubber bladder inside the pen, and it's got a little lever on the side, and when you pull the lever
up, it depresses that bladder, and then when you dip the pen in the ink and then when you release
the lever, it releases the bladder and creates kind of a vacuum and sucks a little bit of ink up
in there, it doesn't really work that good, it works okay, it doesn't suck up a whole lot of ink
like you would expect it to, at least it's not been my experience, it doesn't work as well as
say a piston filler, most of your cartridge based, this is the most common, most fountain pens are
generally designed to work with ink cartridges, and the converters, you know I've had various levels
of success, they do their job, generally sometimes I have on some pens, they have trouble sometimes
wanting to actually get the ink flow going through, but once it's, once you start getting the ink
through, it's not that hard to fill them, I said there's a couple of different kinds of converters
because they're some that just pop on like the cartridges do, and then there's some that are
designed where they actually have threads, so you have to actually screw the converter into the
section, those are kind of nice, they keep the the converter on there pretty secure,
so a bit about the cartridges, so for the most part, most of your pens out there are going to use
what's called international shorts, they're these kind of a standardized cartridge, it's the most
common, most pens will accept them, however there are some pens by some manufacturers that
are designed to work with only their ink cartridges, their proprietary cartridges,
Schiefer is a company that does this, Parker is a company that does this, I think Pilot does it,
maybe Waterman, and I can't remember, I think Waterman does it, but that being said,
a vast majority of them are just designed to use with your standard international shorts,
most ink companies sell cartridges in international shorts, so
also some pens can be, you can do what's called the idriper conversion on them, and basically
you take a regular fountain pen that's designed to use, either cartridge or converter,
and you can, depending on the type of the way it's designed, you can put a gasket and some
grease on there, and essentially use the whole body of the pen as the reservoir,
some people are really into that, doing, you know, modifying that way, I generally don't
modify my pens that much, there's also some modifications you can do to the nibs, so I'm going to
talk about the nibs next, the nib is the actual metal part that comes in contact with the paper,
it's got a split down the metal and creates two halves, and those are called the tines,
like on fork, it does end in kind of a little ball or blob that allows the, the nib to move smoothly
across the paper, the generally most companies will make nibs in several different sizes,
a lot of them will come in extra fine fine medium broad extra broad, and some won't even make
triple broad, I don't know if there's an extra extra fine, I've not seen those, but I haven't
really seen too many triple broads either, I know they're out there, but I've not actually seen them,
and there's no real standard on that either, I'm just going to go out and say it, I have pens that are
like mediums that are really more like a broad, and then I have some that are mediums that are
what you would expect a medium to be, and then it's kind of all over the place, generally I would say
if it's a more inexpensive pen, it's probably a lot of times they're just sold with a sort of generic
medium nib, and usually that medium is more like a, I guess, a European broad.
That being said, some, not all, but a good portion of fountain pens, the nib and feed can be
removed from the section, and in some cases you can swap those, most of the nibs I've seen
on ones that are removable are fairly interchangeable, a good way to tell if you want to swap a nib
in one pen to another pen is look at their feeds, if the feeds on the bottom are more or less identical,
and they probably will be, they'll be very obvious, okay, if they are, then there's a good chance
that the nib and the feed will interchange between those two pens, I actually had to do this on a pen
of mine, I bought, it's the most expensive pen I own, which isn't saying much, most of my pens are
just cheapos, but I have a Monteverde Invincia Stealth, and this is normally like a $70 pen, I caught
it on sale for $45 or $42 or something like that, I really, really wanted it, so I went ahead and
picked it up, and it had a lot of issues getting it to, to write correctly, and I even sent it back
to the pen to see, had been looked at it, and they couldn't find anything wrong with it, but it
just did not want to write very good, and I suspected there was a problem with the feed, and I
turned it over and looked at it, and so I'm going to tell you a dirty little secret of the pen world is
that, even on many of the very expensive pens, the feeds on them are the exact same feeds that you'll
find on cheap pens, I suspect they all come out of the same factory somewhere, and probably South
East Asia, they're probably just, they're just little injection-molded pieces of plastic, so
no real shock that they're identical, but I swapped it out with the feed from a cheaper pen,
and now it writes just fine, so I definitely think the feed was the problem, but now I have no
feed for the other pen, so I'm going to have to probably track down or buy another one,
not that big a deal, they're not very expensive, but you can also, besides swapping them out and
changing them, some people will do, they'll grind the nib, you can kind of put a grind on a nib
to smooth it out or modify it to your own handwriting, there's actually, I wouldn't really recommend
doing this, just maybe a minor quick sanding or something to smooth it out, if it's kind of rough
or scratchy, because there's actually an entire art form behind nib grinding, and you really,
you have to find one of these, like, why forget what they're called, like nib masters or something,
that seriously, that's what they're called, and they have years of experience in grinding nibs,
and they usually have to have a handwriting sample, so they can grind the nib to your style
writing, but yeah, that's just another customization that can be done to a fountain pen.
The, let's see, another thing I should probably mention is that there's different kinds of
inks out there, fountain pen ink is water based, dip pens and fountain pens are not the same thing,
do not ever try to fill your fountain pen with dip pen ink, dip pen ink is very bright,
very opaque, and it also contains a bunch of shellaxe in it that are very bad for fountain pens,
so avoid those, if the bottle doesn't say what kind of ink it is, I would avoid it for your fountain pen,
I actually have dip pens too, I used to be, I used to practice calligraphy a lot,
I was introduced to that at a very young age, so I kind of know what to look for, but
yeah, just be aware, if you're buying ink for your fountain pen, if you go out and buy a fountain pen,
make sure you get fountain pen ink for it, you can use fountain pen ink with a dip pen,
but you cannot use dip pen ink in a fountain pen. Let's see, there's different levels of
expense, like when it comes to fountain pens, and the cost is all over the place, the cheapest
fountain pen I ever bought, brand new, was like $2.25, that was cheaper than a good ballpoint pen,
the most expensive one, like I said, I paid $42 for it is typically a $70 pen, I don't even know,
I shoulder to think what the most expensive fountain pen I've ever seen, if you go on Amazon and
just do a search, and then sort them, sometimes you can find the ones that are made by jewelers,
and they cost like $90,000, that's obviously ridiculous, but I can almost promise you that a $90,000
fountain pen isn't going to write any better than a $100 fountain pen, generally when it comes down to
around a $100 to $150 range is probably the highest in as far as actual performance, you're going to
get some of the differences are in the resins that are used to make the pen itself, the types of
metals that are used, some of the nibs, some of them are steel, some of them are made out of
ridium, some of them are gold, and there's even titanium nibs out there now,
I think most of mine are just steel or a ridium,
but anyway, there's, I don't know, there are some expensive inks out there, I've seen
some bottles of ink as high as almost $30 for a bottle, but your typical inks are going to run
you about ten bucks for a bottle usually, I know private reserve makes a whole line of all kinds
of different colors, they're very reasonable, reasonably priced anywhere from seven to ten bucks,
and they're way cheaper than the cartridges, that's what a lot of people wind up using is private
reserve, I think, but there are some noodleers makes ink, Monteverde makes ink, I don't know,
there's a bunch of companies out there making ink, paper is another thing, so your
the tactile sensation of writing is going to change drastically depending on the kind of paper
you are trying to write on, some papers are very absorbent, and sometimes I've seen like very
coarse and absorbent paper, something that's almost as coarse as construction paper, but not
as thick, and it was very absorbent and ink just splotched all over, it was terrible, sometimes you
see that with a very cheap notebook paper, I know sometimes the kind of notebook paper they sell
and places like the dollar store or whatever it can be, it's okay with for a ballpoint pen to
probably not your fountain pen, either you might have issues with ink bleed through or just splotching
or it sometimes is kind of rough, it's kind of ragged paper, and you won't get the smoothest
feeling writing on it, paper can get expensive too, you know if you're willing to buy
there's several kinds of paper out there, I find the name of that company,
of day or something like that, I can't remember where we are, and there's those
mulliskin notebooks that people are real big on, but apparently the paper is real high grade for
those and it lends itself to this phenomenon that people in the fountain pens refer to as
it's like writing on glass, in other words it's an extremely smooth writing experience and
that's what you want, but you know what, I don't always do that, I actually buy journals and so
the quality of the paper and sometimes it's really good, sometimes it's not so good and I just
wing it, I have a lot of like I said, a lot of inexpensive pens right now, I'm using a pen that
cost me just under $5, and I'm using actually, I'm trying to use up some of this cheap ink that I
have, it was black ink and I was like I've never heard of this before and I just bought it on
because it was cheap and it's really not that bad, it gets the job done, it's not my favorite, but
but yeah it works, I'll try to put some links in the show notes for some resources, there's a
couple of guides on YouTube, I know there's the gulay pen company makes a lot of videos, they also
have a store where they sell fountain pens and related stuff, but they also make like review videos
of a lot of fountain pens and some instructional videos, there's a guy named Stephen Brown
who does, he has, I think a couple of channels now to a three, I don't know, he has an absolute
ton of fountain pen videos and they're very good, he does reviews of fountain pens, he does writing
samples with them, and then there's also a guy, his channel is called the pen habit, and if you
look up on YouTube the pen habit you can see his videos too, most of these are, you know there's
going to be a lot of pen reviews, but there's also, you're going to pick up the stuff, the jargon
and the parts of the pen and stuff, some of these guys are very serious about their pens,
I, there's a couple of pens out there, I wanted and kind of missed the boat on, one of the pens
that I really really wanted was an Edison callier, do yourself a favor and look that up, they
actually still make that pen, but I wanted it in a specific color called steel marble which
was absolutely gorgeous and I don't think they make that anymore sadly, anyway that's all for me.
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