hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3092.txt

Episode: 3092
Title: HPR3092: Pens, pencils, paper and ink - 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3092/hpr3092.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 16:37:23

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,092 for Tuesday, 9 June 2020. Today's show is entitled Pen,
Pencils, Paper and Ink 2 Inches,
and is part of the series, The Art of Writing. It is the 120th anniversary show of Dave Morris,
and is about 21 minutes long
and carries an explicit flag. The summary is
looking at more writing equipment. This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
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Hello everybody, welcome to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Dave Morris, and I'm going to talk today about pens, pencils, paper and ink,
and it's the second show with that name.
This is a fairly short series and I don't want the show to be too long either.
And this time I'm going to look at three more fountain pens, two which are lower price,
and another one around 50 pounds or so. I'm going to look at a mechanical pencil and some paper.
So my first pen is called the Kavekull, which is spelled K-A-W-E-C-O.
Kavekull Sport, it comes from Germany, I'm pretty certain.
And its main feature is that it's quite a small pen when it's closed up.
It's a van to pen obviously, but it gets bigger, comes a more comfortable size when you take the cab off and post it.
Remember that the term posting in the pen world means that you put the cab on the back end of the main barrel.
Not all pens can do that, not all of them are designed to do that, and some of them make them too heavy in the wrong direction.
But this one is designed to work that way.
I bought a black one of the Kavekull Sport, and it's got a fine nib on it.
It takes a small international standard size cartridge, and I've also got a piston converter available for it.
But I haven't started using it yet, I've got it for Christmas, and I'm still working through my cartridges.
The pen doesn't have a clip on it for clipping any pocket, you can buy one of these as an extra.
The pen itself costs under £20, or at least it did when I bought it.
And it's a neat little pen that you can keep in the pocket, or it's more container or something.
The converter is around £5, and the clip is around £2.50, it's a metal clip.
I don't really feel a need for one, to be honest.
There's a wide range of these pens, different colours, most of them are made of acrylic, I think.
But they're also versions made from steel, aluminium brass, and so forth.
I'd really like to own the brass one, because it looks really nice, and I like brass.
But I'm not about to spend £65 on such a thing just at the moment.
The pictures show the closed-up pen sitting beside its cap,
and then the pen with the cartridge exposed by taking the barrel off.
The cartridge is actually quite small, which is a slight downside, but I'm not that bothered.
And if you use the converter, you can obviously refill, if you need to, if you'd prefer to carry ink around with you.
I've got to close up the nib, and I've also got a comparison of the pen with the Lami Vista,
which I spoke about in the last episode.
It's a nice pen to use, it's small, but my hands are not particularly large, but I like a more chunky pen.
The size seems normal to me when the cap is posted, I wouldn't use it without the cap on though.
In this particular case, the fine nib is a little dry, dry in the sense that it doesn't, the ink doesn't flow quite as well as it could.
This can happen when a fountain pen is running out of ink, which it isn't, obviously because it's just got a new cartridge in.
Or there's, it's been left to dry out for a while, and the ink's not flowing properly, which again can't be the case.
So it's also down to the nib is not allowing the ink to flow through it as it should.
Now I bought a second hand pen on eBay a few years ago, but this was a serious problem, ink just wouldn't flow through it at all.
And I found out how to correct this from advice on YouTube, of course.
And it's corrected by making the two tines of the nib move apart fractionally.
And I've got tools to deal with it, so I was able to solve the problem on my other pen.
I'm going to see how the Kivego settles down in use.
Maybe it will get better, but if it doesn't, I will fix it.
And if I do, I'll add that to my next episode.
So my next pen is from Platinum, a Japanese manufacturer.
And this one's called a, I think it's pronounced pre-fante pre-fante.
P-R-E-F-O-U-N-T-E.
Doesn't mean anything as far as I'm concerned with it, anyway.
It's a standard sized pen, it's fairly basic.
I bought it because I noticed it and thought I'd give it a try.
And it costs under £10.
So it seemed like a good experiment.
It's a refillable cartridge pen, though I haven't yet found a converter for it.
I'm not sure whether they exist or not.
I haven't really gone searching that.
I find it a really nice pen for the price.
I bought a green model with the fine nib, which is 0.3mm, which is pretty fine.
And I bought green ink cartridges to go with the current pen.
I'm really enjoying using it.
It's a pleasant pen.
For the price, definitely.
A few pictures of it.
I don't know if it's a handwriting sample, you can see the green ink.
It's a bit similar to another Platinum pen called the Preppy.
And I mentioned this in the first episode of this series.
Well, series of me talking about pens and stuff.
As a good one to maybe try out if you're interested in getting into a fountain pens
because it's not an expensive thing to do if you go for that type of pen.
The two pens seem to use the same nib, not too surprisingly.
They differ in shape with the barrel and the cap and the clip.
The pre-fante pre-fante has a metal clip, which is good.
The plastic ones tend to break off if you use them I've found anyway.
Maybe I'm just amvisted, but I'm not sure they last well.
One of the selling points of the pre-fante is that the push-on cap seals very well.
So much so, the pen doesn't try out after being left unused for a year.
They say this in all the advertising material.
I think the preppy is similar in this respect since mine hasn't dried out.
And it's not been used for a good while.
But it's not pushed as a selling point in that particular pen.
But it's a factor.
I've got several pens that I really like, but they dry out.
If you leave them inked up and unused for a month or so.
And that's so frustrating because you end up with a pen all full of dry ink.
If it's going to do that, your best bet is to ink it, use it and then empty it and clean it.
When you imagine you're not going to be using it for a while,
it's not always easy to know where I run my life.
I don't know who is now.
Third pen is called italics.
ITALX.
And that's the brand.
And the name of the pen is the Parsons Essential.
The names of these pens are a little bit whimsical.
I've just quite liked it.
Years ago when I was in my following years of high school,
there's a little late teens and stuff.
I wanted to learn to write in the italic style.
I bought a fountain pen, a parker it was, with an italic nib and root,
everything in a italic style.
Well, I wouldn't have had time to anyway.
Wasn't that good at it?
It needs a lot of practice and you need to write slowly until you really got to
add it at it.
I kept up the style for a few years,
but I couldn't use it to take notes in lectures once I got to university,
so I gradually used it less and less.
My handwriting did become influenced by the italic style,
and I haven't tried to write in the four more italic style for ages.
This Parsons Essential, I saw it,
so I found that it had a range of italic nibs available with it.
And non-Italic, actually, I think, but I haven't looked at that one in much detail.
I decided to buy one just to try and get back into italic writing again.
The Parsons Essential is very solid, old-fashioned style of pen,
with, I think it's made of brass, it's quite heavy.
It's definitely metal, it's got a lac, I finish on it, which is black in this case.
It's in the picture, and it's got gold-trimmed, gold-colored, probably trim on it.
There's a whole range of different pens that have these types of characteristics
of the heavy metal barrel with a italic style nibs.
I think the company buys them in from elsewhere,
and then grinds the nib into the italic style.
What I have is fitted with a straight medium italic nib.
I say straight because you can get left and right-handed italics,
which I've never got into.
I think left is the more, more likely one,
because it's quite hard to write italics if you're left-handed.
This one came with a piston-toped converter already installed.
You can use European style cartridges, standard ones,
with it by taking the converter out.
It's not a piston filler per se.
It's originally a cartridge pen that's got a converter added to it.
The company that makes it is called Mr Pen Limited,
and it's based in the UK.
The italics brand is just the brand they've created for this range of pens.
Basically, they're a pen seller.
I think they sell a whole range of other brands,
but they make this one selling, which is great.
Just a bit idiosyncratic to my way of thinking.
The current price for this pen is under £50.
It's a bit more expensive.
It's not a thing to buy on a whim, really,
though I guess I probably did that.
You can use it with the cab off.
It's quite a heavy, reasonable sized pen.
You can post the cab, but I don't do that because it just changes the balance.
You can see it close-up noises off today, sorry about that.
There's an aeroplane, you haven't had them for a while.
There's a fairly close-up picture of the nib.
It's a pretty looking thing,
and you can see the flat end to the nib, moderately wise.
There's a medium size, so it's not huge.
I've also shown the pen disassembled so you can see the converter in it as well.
My handwriting example,
I redid several times because I might have found my handwriting suits
an italic pen much these days,
really need to get back into more practice,
because I do quite like writing that way.
I suppose you might write a letter if you're into writing letters.
That would be quite fun.
You need to be slow and steady about it.
I'm not sure I would want to write a sharpiness that way,
but then I don't do that anyway these days.
Moving on from the Fountain Benz to Mechanical Pencil,
I've always quite enjoyed using Mechanical Pencils
ever since they started to become available.
Don't remember when really,
when I was at university I was using them.
They've been available for a long time for draftsmen and things like that,
but using an old-style clutch pencil.
I may be talking about that in another show,
not sure if it's worth talking about the different styles.
Anyway, this one is from a company called Unibor
and it's called the Kuru Toga,
it's from Japan.
My son saw this pencil when he was in Japan in 2017
and told me about it.
It looked really, really nice.
He and his girlfriend were going to be away for quite some time,
so I checked with UK dealers and found that they stocked that particular make,
and so I ordered one.
This is it.
I found it really pleasant to use.
It's a plastic pen, it's nothing.
Nothing spectacular.
Pencil, I should say, it's nothing spectacular,
but I find it's really nice,
and it does this thing where rotates the lead in it as you write.
Every time you press down on it,
there's a mechanism inside that rotates the lead,
so you don't end up with a flat side to the lead,
which you can do with other star pencils.
There's some pictures of it,
and the cap and the end comes off,
and there's an eraser.
I've never been keen on using them,
because they use them up,
and they're not always that easy to get replacements for.
It's a 0.5mm lead that it takes.
There are an enormous number of pencils named Kurutoga.
The guys went to Japan again last year,
2019, I think so,
and my daughter came back with one least,
I think you've buy them themed.
I think this was a Studio Ghibli one, she bought.
I don't have it to hand, she's not around,
but yeah, there's a lot of different versions,
and different styles,
and different branding and stuff on them.
Quite a popular pencil anyway.
There's not much of a range that you can buy in the UK,
but the various online sellers seem to have a number of them.
But I think mostly you need to get them from Japan,
because they're interested.
The final point in this episode is to mention paper,
fountain pen, friendly papers,
where I put it.
The quality of the paper you use is important.
You really want something that you can write on with a fountain pen
without the writing looking horrible.
Explain what I mean in a minute.
More fountain pen-friendly paper types have become available
in the past decade or so.
When I was a kid using a fountain pen,
you'd use school exercise books and that's everything,
and they weren't always that good.
They tended to blot, rather,
and have problems with them.
The various stationers and pen shops often sell paper brands
that work well with fountain pens in my experience.
So this time I'm talking about paper called
from a company called Rodea, R-H-O-D-I-A.
It's a smooth and quite heavy paper.
The weight is usually 80 grams per square meter or greater.
So that's quite a chunky paper.
You can feel that it's not flimsy.
And it's got a very smooth surface,
fountain pen glides well over the paper.
And the ink from the writing doesn't pass through the paper
to the other side, which is one of the issues
that you can get with lower quality paper.
It doesn't show feathering
where the writing strokes develop rough edges
because the ink has soaked into the paper fibers.
I made a little footnote here to say that
when I was using the passons essential in my writing sample,
I don't know how clear it is in the picture
because I've shrunk the picture sizes
and I haven't included the full size picture.
But for this I used paper from a company that makes...
I'm not sure who the company is,
but they make these writing pads called Pucker Pads,
P-U-S-K-K-A.
It's a T-G-S-M paper,
and it's got a grid marking on it, which I like.
But it's not wonderful for all fountain pens.
Either the ink or the nib on the passons essential
didn't get on well with the Pucker Pads.
So you can see that just on the edge of some of the strokes,
there's a feathering of the ink,
sort of sunk into the fibers of the paper.
You wouldn't get that with the rodeo.
If you're interested in knowing more about this,
it's so called bleeding and ghosting.
Bleeding with the ink passes through the paper
and you can see it from the other side or even
on the next sheet in your pad of book paper.
And ghosting is where you can see the writing
from the back paper.
And so on, there's an article I've referenced here
what's the difference between ink feathering,
bleeding and ghosting,
if you're interested in the whole business.
And the terminology used.
Anyway, going back to a rodeo,
it's a French company quite long standing,
established in 1934,
and they make a wide range of paper products,
and they also make writing implements
such as mechanical pencils I discovered.
But living as I do in a city with,
that's Edinburgh, with six universities,
a wide number of stationery shops around
that cater to students.
And they stock rodeo notebooks and pads.
And often their prices are quite reasonable.
Better, in fact, than you would often get on Amazon
or the various stationery shops.
So when I'm passing by,
one of these student shops,
I tend to grab some of these notepads of a can.
It's the thing I collect.
Quite like the grid and the dock papers.
The example of a rodeo pad is an A51,
which has got lines and a margin.
The margin is huge.
I don't know why you would have paper
with such a wide margin.
But I just use this one for general gash, things.
I sometimes hang up with some friends
who are into a band of pens,
and having one of these around
to test out pens and stuff is really any quite nice.
So I like the grid paper.
I've used rodeo grid paper
for most of my writing samples in the photos of these notes.
So that's it really.
I think I will stop at that point.
I've got a few things that I want to talk about next time.
I'm nearly gone through all of my fountain pens,
but there's a few more other types of pens
and pencils and paper and inks and stuff
that I'll talk about later.
So that's it for the moment.
Okay then, bye-bye.
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