Fountain-Pens on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

What the heck, it's only a buck

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 02:05:31 -0400

The best deal in quality writing instruments going today is, without a doubt, the Jinhao X450. This pen, for only 99 cents shipped from China to the US, should prove to be a gateway drug into the good shit for anyone with good taste and frugal spending habits.

Buying the Jinhao X450 is easy. If you go out on eBay, you’ll find a bunch of them in all kinds of different colors. But you probably won’t find any for 99 cents… unless you know where to look.

William Hannah: paper tough enough for fountain pens?

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 21:15:54 -0400

Fountain pens are brutal on paper. Moleskines are among the first to fall, paper failing in some disgusting combination of feathering, shadowing, and bleeding through when subjected to the abuse of a fountain pen. When the William Hannah Limited fan page on Facebook led a status update with the following, I expected them to fail:

Ever since our notebooks came to the attention of the Fountain Pen community, the attractiveness of our incoming mail has increased significantly….

I can quit any time I want to

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 00:48:58 -0400

https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/677320386053144576

This single tweet has been my undoing.

Both pens have been on my radar for years, and because of the costs involved I’ve never really risked buying either one.

Now I have both.

And sure enough, both of them have been exquisite. They are my two favorite pens now out of what must be over two dozen (admittedly far less expensive fountain pens).

Both are going with me to my top secret writing location to work on “Two Seconds of Your Time”. I’ve been breaking them in and they are definitely up to the task.

Fountain Pen Addendum: Neil Gaiman made me do it

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 18:47:33 -0400

In a recent blog, I shined a little bit of a light on something that I found both curious and validating. No, I’m not mad for wanting to try writing a serious literary work with a fountain pen. Neil Gaiman does it all the time. But that seed took root and bore sweet fruit.

The Pilot Custom 823 had been on my radar before, but like most other pens over $25, it wasn’t likely to happen. My cheap pens write pretty well. Some of them write very well. But I was indeed looking for a pen so comfortable that I could write with it all day without tiring, and with such a high ink capacity that filling it up at the beginning of the day would hold all the ink I could need no matter how much writing I did that day.

various nibs on a Jinhao X750

Wed, 27 Jan 2016 23:37:46 -0400

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering how to get better performance out of your cheap Chinese fountain pens. I spent a few bucks and got my hands filthy with Hero blue-black ink so that you won’t have to.

I was super excited that our friends over at Goulet Pens (who did not sponsor or participate in this in any way) got through the giant snow storm that just pummeled the US east coast recently, and got a care package out to me. I’ve been collecting their nibs, you see. And this order gave me a pretty nice variety of nibs to work with. Goulet’s nibs are made by JoWo in Germany, stamped attractively with Goulet’s logo, and only cost fifteen bucks bare (use the feed that came with your pen).

Neil Gaiman writes books with fountain pens?

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 22:30:10 -0400

Yup. His tastes are a bit more expensive than my own, though both pens are fantastic and I’d write with either/both if I could stomach spending that much on a pen.

https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/677320386053144576

When he originally tweeted this, I was pretty pleased with his taste in pens. For myself, I’ve given some amount of thought to investing in a Pilot Vanishing Point, in large part because of the Extra Fine Nib that is available with it for long writing sessions in one of my notebooks. Most of my pens have medium or stub nibs, which can be a bit thick for my tastes if I’m writing long form (at which point I wish to write smaller).

Beware the Hooded Nib

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 00:54:03 -0400

I didn’t want to call out any particular pen today, though my image shows a Jinhao 699. The problem I’ve been observing spans multiple value brands from China, including Jinhao and Baoer. There are some nibs out there that should be avoided. Let me explain.

Most of the Chinese pens you’ll find for sale in the West come with a Medium nib. These nibs aren’t bad at all, but usually require five to ten minutes of fine tuning before they are particularly practical and enjoyable to write with. I’d already mentioned previously that the Jinhao broad nibs are, in my limited experience with them, not worth the extra effort or expense to procure.

This Just In: Jinhao 159

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 13:30:25 -0400

Next to a common (and spendy) Lamy Safari, the Jinhao 159 is a beast of a fountain pen. Total cost: $3.59 on eBay.

State of the Nerd: Pens, Homelab, Docker/Rancher, Intel NUC

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 07:43:26 -0400

This is just a quick check-in round to cover an assortment of subjects.

Fountain Pens

Last time I checked in, I let you in on my dirty little secret about loving cheap fountain pens. Well, that was so much fun that I went ahead and set up a new blog just to focus on great values in analog writing tools (especially fountain pens, inks, and paper). Enter: Chronicles of a Cheap Geezer.

Jinhao 1200: Enter the Dragon!

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 02:36:23 -0400

When I saw this pen in my auction trawling, the seller piqued my curiosity with promises that this would be a mysterious pen. Is this pen some avatar of Eastern mysticism?

While this pen did not conjure any actual dragons (yet), it’s been quite a treat so far. It’s actually a rather challenging pen to photograph because my God, the bling! This isn’t just a gold colored pen, or a shiny pen. But this is a pen that mysteriously seems to be beaming myriad lasers into your eyeballs whenever you try to gaze upon it in any sort of light. To call it shiny or shimmery would understate just what Jinhao pulled off here; this pen is obnoxiously shiny, and I love it.

Baoer 388: Simple, svelte, and only two bucks

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 08:15:55 -0400

As soon as I saw this handsome pen available for only two bucks, I had to pull the trigger and see what it was all about. I mean, sure it looked good online in a photograph. But would it hold up to closer scrutiny? And could it write worth a damn?

There was only one way to find out; I had to buy it and see for myself.

Size comparison between the Baoer 388 (top), Uniball Vision (center), and Lamy Safari (bottom). The Baoer is indeed a slender fountain pen.

The Jinhao X750: The pen that started it all

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 20:57:16 -0400

I’ve been a fountain pen user for about five years now. The number of pens I had was actually pretty small, and the few times I’d dabbled with “cheap” pens it ended with disappointment. Actually, the first time I dabbled with an expensive pen (the Namiki Falcon) was bitterly disappointing.

But then I read a blog about mounting a flexible dip pen nib onto a cheap Chinese fountain pen. Since the total cost was pretty low, I went ahead and pulled the trigger on a Jinhao X750 and a pack of titanium Zebra G nibs. At the time, the Jinhao pen cost almost six bucks. I really thought I was getting a great deal. And I did get a great deal, but I paid a lot more than I should have for it. This pen started me down the rabbit hole of admiring absurdly inexpensive Chinese fountain pens.

Enter the Geezer

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 23:15:37 -0400

I had a pretty interesting childhood. My mother was from a very frugal working class family. Her’s was a big family with lots of brothers and sisters. Her father was a blue collar worker, and her mother stayed at home to raise the kids. I remember my grandfather on that side of the family being of notoriously cheap scruples. Hardly a week would go by that he wasn’t proud of something he’d salvaged from the side of the road.

Fountain Pens for Cheap Bastards

Sat, 19 Dec 2015 13:30:34 -0400

I’ve enjoyed using fountain pens for a number of years. This probably tickles the same part of my brain that appreciates typewriters and Victrolas. This is a really elegant writing instrument that never should have been allowed to fade back into obscurity and the hobbies of overpaid eccentrics.

If you’re curious about fountain pens, you might be put off by the enthusiasts who pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a pen. You just want something nice to write with, right? Maybe spending $25 to $30 on a Lamy would make sense to you if you already knew that you liked fountain pens.

Reading & Writing Updates

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 09:44:22 -0400

During this calm before our family Christmas storm, I thought I’d drop a fresh State of the Nerd report. This one was going to be all over the map, as I’ve been very busy with a lot of things. But it became clear as I was writing it that it would be too long even if I just narrowed the scope to what I was reading and writing.

Reading Stuff

I’m back to my old habit of parallelized reading, so I’ve got a number of in-progress books right now that I’m jumping back and forth between.