I've had this one for a while, but am looking to get some more because the entire concept tickles me pink.

Hey,

We've recently been discussing the capless clones. Doodlebud just made a video comparing the real deal with the clones.

Conclusion:

Thank you, everyone, for your expertise, experience, recommendations, suggestions, and patience!!

I have decided to go with the Platinum Preppy in Blue Black with fine nib. I didn't want to jump too far into it with an expensive (to me) one without any experience. So far, granted it's the first day, I love it. A lot. I'm going to give it a few days to see how it feels as a daily driver, but if the few bits I wrote are an indication, it won't be an issue.

Again, thank you all SO MUCH for your help!

Here's a (poor quality, sorry, it's night) picture of my new favorite pen:

Original Post

I didn't see anything on the sidebar where this is not allowed. BUT, if it isn't, please accept my sincerest apologies, and feel free to remove the post (or let me know, and I'll remove it).

A little backstory:

Ever since a quill that I happened to use (without permission, might I add) at a friend's grandfather's house oh so many moons ago, my fascination with pens began. Up until then, all I've used were pencils, markers, crayons, and a couple cheap ballpoint pens.

Over the many years, I have gone from pen to pen, never really finding "that pen feel" I've craved since that single-digit age. Now, I understand that quills write very differently to ballpoints, and even differently to many nibs. However, price has always been an object for me, regrettably, limiting my choices, forcing me to stay on the 'budget' side of things.

The closest I've found to that feel was a 0.8mm Micron felt-tipped pen. However, it wasn't close enough for me to stay with it, so the search continues.

(The feel: smooth, light, almost effortless glide on the page, while still feeling the tactility of the page with each stroke. The resulting line is smooth, but crisp.)

Recently (past couple years), I've been thinking more and more about that quill, and started searching for it again, to no avail. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if his grandfather had it custom made.

I would ask the friend or grandfather, but the grandfather has long passed, and the friend has disappeared shortly after uni (he always talked about going full hermit... I guess he did).

Yesterday, as I was aimlessly scrolling Lemmy, after, what seemed like the billionth time searching for that quill, I came across this community, filled with people searching for their illusive perfect pen; my people.

The ask

As before, price is an object (again, regrettably). Are there recommendations for budget fountain pens or quills with a few must-haves?

Would-Really-Like-To-Have ~~Must-Haves~~

1. non-scratchy nib
2. 0.5-0.7mm line is preferred, but no more than 0.8mm
3. it can use ink cartridges, but it needs to also handle other inks from bottles (pumps or wells, I think it's called)
4. budget, so within the 5-10€ range (I know this might be the biggest ask here)

The original quill that started it all

The shaft looked like a thick feather, with the feathery bits removed. I don't think it was an actual feather, though, as it was much thicker than any I've ever felt. The shaft held the ink, which was added by unscrewing the nib and pouring the ink in (or, as he did it, using a pipette), then screwing the nib back on. The nib was ornate; etched gold on the outside, smooth silver on the inside, split down the middle, with a small hole halfway down the split.

A preemptive thank you to everyone, for reading and considering this post.

Edit: added the last section about the original quill

Edit: change to really like to have, since it seems I was being too wishy with them being a 'must' : )

I took this photo and the one below for my post about the Dialog, but did not wind up using it therein.

From left to right:

• Platinum Curidas
• Majohn A2 Press (Modified)
• Lamy Dialog 3
• Pilot Vanishing Point
• Oaso K016

Gentlemen.

I promise I'm not doing this as a showing-up. Given my predilection for retractable fountain pens, I've had my eye on one of these for years and it's the one I've never actually been able to own. Up until now, anyway, because I finally found the opportunity to get my hands on one without going broke. This legitimately did just show up the mail just recently.

And since we don't get to do this every day, why not share in the unboxing experience of a pen that lists for four hundred United States dollars?

It seems how seriously the manufacturer takes any given pen is directly proportional to the size of the box it shows up in. The box my Oaso K012 came in, for instance, could barely contain a deck of cards. Hell, my Ohto F-Lapa didn't even come in a box at all, just a flimsy baggie.

The Dialog, meanwhile, comes in a woven-textured matte presentation box that's so big it won't even fit in my illuminated photo booth, so to get this picture I had to take it outside. Hence the shadow. It's 7-1/8" square and if my algebra is correct, if you were so inclined you could easily fill it with about 44 Lamy Dialogs.

But alas, inside you only get one.

The box is lined with some kind of fuzzy fabric all over the inner surfaces, and the walls of the lower half of it, at least, feel like they're about five layers thick.

The Dialog is one of Lamy's flagship pens. Thus as you would expect, the Germans left very few stops unpulled when they were constructing it. The body is all aluminum, with various internal structures made of stainless steel. It's ridiculously dense, weighing 46 grams precisely with a standard Lamy ink cartridge installed. It is without a doubt the heaviest fountain pen I own and possibly the heaviest I've ever handled for any length of time. For comparison, my OG Pilot Vanishing point -- which is made of brass, mind you -- also feels incredibly dense but still only weighs 29.8 grams.

Lamy always go for a Euro-chic minimalist vibe with their nicer pens and the Dialog is certainly no exception. Its profile is a postmodern, completely untapered capsule shape with nearly spherical ends. It is thus exactly 14mm in diameter down its entire length by my measure, or 0.551", not including the clip. So that's actually slightly thicker than a Platinum Curidas and noticeably thicker than a Vanishing Point or clone thereof. If you are a fancier of slim pens, this one probably isn't for you.

It's available in four finishes: The satin silver I got, matte black, and a duo of "piano" gloss black or gloss white that frankly I'd be terrified to even store outside of the box. The latter two have got to be both fingerprint and scratch magnets. That, and they almost look like they're trying to be an Apple product.

So yeah, I got the silver one.

And this is the current Dialog 3, not the slightly newer Dialog CC which is shorter, has an aesthetically different tail, and lacks the pocket clip. What kind of heathen philistine would want a pen like that with no clip is beyond me, but the option to pander to such strange individuals does at least exist.

The Dialog is, needless to say, a retractable fountain pen. One of the very few entries into that select brotherhood, in fact, along with the Pilot Vanishing Point and its clones, the Platinum Curidas, the aforementioned Oaso K012, and the historical and quite collectible Platinum Knock and OG Pilot Capless. There may be others. Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

As the youngsters are fond of saying these days, no cap.

The Dialog is unique among all of these because it's the only one that's not a click pen -- It is a twist-to-extend mechanism, instead.

Here's the part you all want to see.

The various retractable fountain pens of the world use an array of mechanisms to prevent themselves from drying out when their points are retracted. Hinged or spring loaded trap doors, or in the case of Oaso's entry a flexible rubber diaphragm. The Dialog meanwhile uses what Lamy describes as a "ball valve," a hemispherical rotary cover that pivots into place over the open end of the pen when you retract the point.

The Dialog's operation is a mechanical symphony conducted by a helical thread inside the grip section that drives three separate mechanical actions. First is the extension and retraction of the point itself, second is the operation of the ball valve cover...

...And third is the slight but noticeable retraction of the clip when the point is extended. Now, Lamy's marketing materials try pretty hard to imply that the clip sinks flush into the pen body but this is not the case. It would be rad it if it did. But the retraction is only probably about two millimeters. Note the difference in the amount of daylight showing through the gap in the pictures above.

The Dialog's twist mechanism has a tactile detent in it when you rotate it into either the fully extended or retracted positions. There is no tactile indicator on the surface of the pen body, though; it's completely smooth all the way around. Instead there is a visual indicator in the form of these two pairs of lines marked on both halves of the body. When the point is fully retracted these all line up with each other as shown.

The Dialog comes packing Lamy's fanciest premium nib, their "Z 55" which is made of 14k gold with platinum plating. I got the medium variant, the 585. The gold nib is fairly flexible although at least with the medium point the variation in stroke width with pressure and direction is fairly subtle. (Magnified shot here, although it fell out of my depth of field slightly.)

I prefer a broad-ish stroke and the 585 certainly delivers on that front. It's the second fattest you can get in Lamy's gold nibs, and the second fattest overall without going to one of their calligraphy or oblique options. Lamy's entire line of nib widths -- which they inexplicably call "grades" as if to imply that one is better than another which is obviously nonsense -- trend wider than their Asian counterparts. A Lamy fine is probably more akin to a medium from many of the Japanese makers, for instance.

So this nib combined with the Dialog's feed is a very wet writer as evidenced by the feathering on the cheap Post-It I used for my headline photo as well as this comparison:

Some of this may be down to the ink, since both of my Lamy pens are currently loaded with genuine Lamy branded ink which seems pretty thin, and they both do this. The Majohn in the middle is filled with Diamine Shimmering Seas which, although weird, seems to be slightly better behaved on bad paper.

This thing would certainly drive any writers of tiny katakana completely nuts. Which is exactly how I like it. Lamy's blue is also a very transparent ink which combined with the high output results in a pleasing display of shading variation, if you're into that kind of thing. If you like novelty metallized, shimmering, glittery, or iridescent inks that require you to flood the paper with them in order to do their thing, I think they should all work exceptionally in the Dialog. At least if you select one of the broader nib options.

Towards that end, though, all of Lamy's nibs are interchangeable (except on their 2000 pen) so you could in theory yank the stock nib off of this and replace it with anything. The nib mounting interface is obviously exactly the same as Lamy's other pens, as shown here. The Z 55 series nibs retail separately for an eye-watering $155, so if gold isn't your jam you could probably flog yours on eBay and buy a lifetime supply of steel Lamy nibs of all shapes and sizes.

You're on your own for figuring out how to get the stock nib off without damaging it, though. Lamy describes the standard procedure as to clamp the nib upside down against a table using the bottom of your pen's cap and yank it off thusly, but the Dialog hasn't got a cap and the notion of applying unknown tools to a $155 nib isn't one I find immediately appealing. Especially one that isn't made of indestructible stainless steel.

And for its part, the included 39 page double-sided full color glossy instructions manual doesn't describe how they intend for you to remove the nib from this pen, either, despite going into significant detail about everything else.

Not even the page specifically about (and titled) the nib.

So I think I'll leave mine right where it is for now, thanks.

For four hundred bucks you figure they could at least include more than one poxy cartridge. But all you get is a single lonely blue T10 cartridge, an inkwell converter, the pen itself, and one official Lamy Dialog Kurled Thingy.

Lamy apparently do straight-facedly expect you to dip this thing into an inkwell as one of its intended modes of operation, which I think is deeply silly. An entire page is devoted to this in the manual, in fact. Sane people, if using the inkwell converter, will probably want to fill it with a syringe separate from the pen so as not to get ink trapped in every nook and cranny inside that expensive retractable mechanism.

Like most (possibly all?) Lamy pens, the cartridge is not held captive by the tail end of the pen body once assembled and just screwing the halves together won't pierce a cartridge like on a Sheaffer or Parker. You have to shove it home yourself all the way to get the ink flowing. It's not even close to being restrained even with the pen assembled and the point fully retracted, with at least half an inch of empty air behind the tail of the cartridge. So it is theoretically possible for it to get knocked off the feed in transit somehow, although I have to imagine any force capable of doing that to a fresh cartridge would probably cause other problems for the pen... or you. But if you're a habitual cartridge-refiller, be mindful of the necks of your cartridges eventually getting wallered out and loose over time. The neck of the inkwell converter has a rubber gasket on it but the plastic cartridges don't.

The Dialog comes apart simply by unscrewing it beyond its tip-retracted position.

Inside Lamy is surely showing off with the core feed and nib carrier precision machined with fine crosshatched grip knurling, not to mention various threaded parts. This unscrews from the front section rather than pulling straight out, and is captive until you do so. Unlike other retractables, the Dialog doesn't appear to contain any springs.

The Knurled Thingy is actually a cleaning tool.

It can be screwed on in place of the core, and if you twist it further it'll open the ball valve mechanism at the front of the pen, the same as if you'd deployed the point normally.

This enables you not only to peer straight through the thing and out the other side, but also gets the valve out of the way so you can rinse the section out or get a Q-tip through it.

As far as feel in the hand goes, the Dialog is, of course, absolutely boss. Flawless provided only that you can handle its girth. I was surprised to find that mine did require a noticeable amount of break in before it would write reliably, however. Maybe this is normal for Lamy's gold nibs, but it's the first and only one of those I've ever owned (despite having handled oodles of their steel ones in my time) so maybe that's normal.

Out of the box it was reliably unreliable, invariantly failing to write for the first quarter inch or so any time it'd been left idle without putting down any ink for more than a few seconds. Once it got going it was bulletproof. This behavior stopped after about two days of use.

I've seen this sort of thing before and it's either cured by a few lashes on a fine Arkansas stone or a thorough cleaning, both of which I was avoiding at first to see if the Dialog would improve on its own, because at the price it retails for it's the principle of the thing, damn it.

And it eventually did. So that's nice.

Like most modern pens, the Dialog (and by extension one must assume all Lamy Z 55 nibs) seems to be designed for "smoothness" first and foremost, that being the quality that most fountain pen writers constantly rave about. So its nib is indeed extremely smooth and quite polished. It has no noticeable scratchiness at all, even on cheap paper. It produces a very low resistance writing experience, which is fine if that's your preference but if your writing style relies on friction against the paper to maintain control then the Dialog may annoy you because it has very, very little of that.

Also, despite its massive heft it actually will not reliably write with no pressure on the paper other than its own weight. Very little pressure is required to get the ink to flow, for sure, but some is always required. More pressure results in a wider stroke, and depending on your habitual baseline level of pressure against the paper you may find you wind up with little to no variation at all which is certainly the case for me. If you conscientiously try to begin all of your strokes with the absolute minimum of pressure to get the Dialog to write reliably you can achieve about a 2:1 variation in stroke width. With my medium nib and by my measure, the Dialog will produce a 0.52mm line at minimum and 1.04mm at maximum. I don't know how that ranks on the scale of "expressiveness," but I have $2 Speedball dip pen nibs that are capable of more variation and are more controllable to boot. Make of that what you will.

Everyday practicality is where retractable fountain pens aim to shine, of course. That's why I like all mine, anyway, but on the topic of the Dialog I'm of two minds about that. It is, undoubtedly, a very fine pen. Exquisitely constructed, luxurious, and without a doubt a very special object to behold. I can't say a single thing against it, there.

It's just that the twist mechanism is kind of a pain in the ass.

Don't get me wrong, mechanically it's certainly very competently built. It's just not exactly practical. It's essentially impossible to deploy the Dialog with one hand, which is something that allows its myriad plunger-clicker competitors to walk all over it. Getting out the Dialog certainly feels like an event, a sense that's no doubt also contributed to by its price. But for quick note taking, intermittent on-again, off-again use, or any spur of the moment anything, it's just much easier and more convenient to use a clicker pen instead.

There's also the issue of its completely round cross section. Sure, the sleek Bauhaus minimalism makes it look very swank. But it also makes the bugger very prone to rolling away on you. On a flat surface this is no problem, because any casual accidental bump or nudge will be stopped fairly shortly by the clip. But if you ever use an angled work surface like, oh, a drawing or drafting table, the clip doesn't protrude enough to stop the pen's own weight and inertia. The rounded edges on the clip also don't help. It doesn't take too steep of a slope at all to enable the Dialog to roll right over its own clip and onto the floor.

Said floor had better then be carpeted, because otherwise you are sure to utter a word that starts with F and ends with K, and it sure won't be "fire truck." Especially if the point is deployed at the time.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The Lamy Dialog is a very, very nice pen.

It is certain that the majority of its owners, however, will only be two types of people. Type the first will be those who buy it as a bauble or a status symbol, a prestige piece, probably to use it rarely if ever. Type the second will be dyed-in-the-wool enthusiasts, who will buy and use it despite knowing all of its shortcomings because of what it is, and that's the type of people they are.

Either camp will have to be willing to part with the better part of a week's paycheck or more to afford one. For a pen that ultimately doesn't do much to functionally outshine its competition, that's a pretty high bar to clear.

But none of that prevents the Dialog from being an item that is even at a glance from a casual observer, uniquely and unquestionably special.

So far, I'm liking it. I rinsed it out before using, and there was trace amounts of blue ink already in the pen. Mysterious.

I filled it with Noodler's Heart of Darkness, and it writes very smoothly. Left it sitting overnight, and it continued writing smoothly this morning with no hiccups whatsoever. Very nice! It's supposed to be a "fine," but it really seems like more of a "medium" to me. It comes with a piston filling cartridge converter which didn't seem removable at first, but it just slides out if you pull on it a little.

I got it from AliExpress, if you're wondering. It will surely be available on eBay soon enough.

This is a Pixelfed post for further information. TL;DR summary: Wooden barrels with machined brass section adapters and caps.

I am looking to put together a maintenance kit for my pens and was wondering: do you have any particular supplies that you prefer to use for your pens? What storage solution do you use for your maintenance kit? Thanks in advance for your recommendations.

Nahvalur Original Plus in Matira Quartz with a Medium Steel nib, and inked up with Diamine Frosted Orchid. Absolutely stunning combination! Bonus definition of the word chatoyant.

Platinum Preppy fine point (0.3mm) for scale.

I found these thread-bound kraft paper covered travelers' notebooks in A6 Size with grid lined pages for a good price that had good reviews with pictures from fountain pen users on Amazon. [$9]

And this 5.3" x 8.26" (not quite A5 size but close enough) hard covered notebook with 120 gsm graph lined paper and few niceties like an attched ribbon bookmark, elastic strap, and elastic pen holder also had good reviews from fountain pen users. [$7]

I figured at those prices, even if they aren't the greatest, they'd be a step up from the thin weight randomly acquired notebooks I've been using. With ballpoint and gel pens, I never really considered the paper quality for my notetaking and journaling.

Side note:
Not sure if I'm going to eyedropper convert the Preppy. I might buy another one or two with a different ink color and then convert a few at the same time.

Thought these stamps were super cool when I saw them. I bought the cat and fountain pen, plus the hedgehog ink bottle one. They were selling for 650 yen each, so about 5 USD.

We talk about writing instruments a lot, but equally important is the paper and related bits.

So tell us, what paper do you use? Do you use any cover/case for your notebook?

[Reposting because it failed to federate again]

Picked this up for £11 from Aliexpress and I reckon it's one of the best FPs I own. Great for quick note taking.

Sure, it's a shameless clone of a pilot capless, but I'm never going to spend that kind of money.

Note also: only comes in . Writes like an if you ask me.

Considering buying a few more to gift to friends.

[Reposting, as it didn't federate properly last time]

This is a parker IM I've had in my collection a while. I don't usually go for Parker branded pens. I usually find them a bit boring/vanilla. But when I saw this one come up pristine on Ebay, I thought I'd give it a go.

It looks nice, but sadly it doesn't seal well. There's a hole under the clip that lets air in. Why? I guess I could try to cover it.

Bonus device in the background.

@vext01@lemmy.sdf.org and I are the new moderators of !fountainpens@lemmy.world

We were able to work with the lemmy.world admin team to replace the the prior moderator who has gone inactive and unresponsive to our attempts to contact them.

If you have any suggestions for the community please let us know.

We prefer handwritten notes.

My new Asvine V200 Titanium with a medium nib arrived yesterday. The vacuum filler is much smoother than any of my V126s, and on par with my TWSBI Vac 700R. I also picked up a 30 ml bottle of Diamine Earl Grey, but the number of fills I'll be able to get with this pen is limited by the section being too wide to fit in the mouth of the bottle. I need to get different ink? Oh no!

Calculator is a TI-nspire CX CAS, and was my first calculator with a built-in CAS.

My wife got me this Hongdian 1851 for Christmas last year, along with the astronaut pen holder. Since I keep it out on my desk, it is the pen that I reach for most often. It has the finest line of all of my pens and I keep it inked up with iroshizuku murasaki-shikibu, which is an incredibly close match to the body of the pen. It has a lot of feedback without being scratchy, and is great to write with.

The calculator is a Casio fx-260 Solar II, which Kristi also got me for Christmas some years ago. It's the calculator that I grab most often since it is the easiest to get to. It's my little Apocalypse Calculator since it has no battery and is solar powered only.

Salutations, squawkers and waddlers. I haven't done one of these in a while.

The reason for that is, well, boring old pragmatism. I like fountain pens, and I have a handful of them, but due to the majority of my work being digital by nature one way or the other I don't write a whole heck of a lot down on a daily basis anymore. I do a little, and because of it having a pen around is still essential. Obviously I prefer to use a fountain pen. But I don't write enough when all is said and done to justify having more than one fountain pen inked up at a time. I know how some of you do, but an ink fill for me can easily last a couple of months. If I kept multiple pens inked up I'd never get anything done in between all the time I'd spend unclogging and cleaning them out.

Therefore my pen rotation schedule is pretty slow. Lately I've been using this:

This is a Majohn A2 Press, and yes, it's that pen. You know the one.

The A2 is, let's call it... inspired by the Pilot Vanishing point to a significant degree. So much so that parts between the two are actually interchangeable.

The A2's a damn sight cheaper, though, and has several construction differences starting with a plastic body (in this variant, anyway; they make a metal one now) with a faceted look. The facets do in my opinion give it a very subtle Art Deco/1920's sort of vibe but it's understated, not totally in your face like so many things are these days that are trying hard to evoke whatever bygone era.

The A2 is, of course, retractable. No cap. You press the long plunger on the end like a regular ballpoint clicker pen and the point retracts into the body, with a little trap door closing behind it to keep it from drying out. Because of this the A2 is just as long "posted" as it is put away, minus the length of the point itself. That's about 5-1/2" in total when retracted. You can neither make it any shorter nor any longer.

The A2 is a fairly fat pen by the standards of my preference, but it's not as fat as any of the turned wood or trendy brass models I seem to see on display these days. The thickest point is at the silver band in the midsection where it unscrews, and it measures 12.33mm or 0.485" at that point. So strangely enough, that means it is a few thou thinner than an OG Vanishing Point, which is: 13.38mm or 0.526". It's slight, but enough to be noticeable.

I prefer a slim pen, and preferably one with a straight body, and the A2 is neither. The whole thing is tapered down at both ends like a very emaciated football. This carries on all the way down to where you grip it to write, which I found a trifle disconcerting at first (and the Vanishing Point is exactly the same way). You get used to it. Right along with getting used to the pocket clip being on the "wrong" end of the pen, up by the point rather than at the tail, and totally immobile. This is presumably a hedge against leakage since the pen'll always be pocketed with the tip up in this configuration.

The elephant in the room? What elephant? Oh, yeah. That elephant.

Apropos of nothing, you can get an entire replacement mechanical assembly for the A2 for about $19 online. The point and nib assembly, metal cap for behind the cartridge, a little cleaner bulb, a spare converter, the works. This enables the possibility of committing violence to your A2's nib that you would never in a million years consider inflicting on your Vanishing Point, and clicking undo on that if you fuck it up will cost you less than a single Jackson.

The problem, you see, is that the Majohn is one of those newfangled Asian pens whose maker assumes the sum total of your desire in life is to have the thinnest and sharpest needle point on your fountain pen in the history of the universe, and to hell with all other considerations. The A2 comes in "fine," which is extraordinarily fine, and "extra fine," which is so sharp as to be practically useless. At least by my standards. I understand this sort of thing is very popular in hemispheres where people write tiny in pictoglyphs and need to cram them into little boxes on forms, or something. But that's not what I do. I prefer an italic or, even better, an oblique nib. There's no sense in being anachronistic if when you hand someone a written page they can't immediately tell. Where's the fun in that?

So I took a whetsone and I hacked a spare A2 nib assembly into the widest oblique point I could manage before I started to destroy the plastic feed and nib support. The net result is 1.3mm and, well, I prefer even a little wider. But it'll do.

Mine is therefore probably the only A2 Press in the world that'll put down this.

My A2 is now a pretty wet writer (evidenced by the feathering on the cheap copy paper I just doodled that on) but kicks out a line approximately a zillion times bolder than it did when it was stock. The stainless steel nib the A2 comes with is pretty thick vertically at the root, which I had to cut into to accomplish this. So there isn't a ton of line width variation between horizontal and vertical strokes, but there is some and I'll take what I can get.

I currently have it loaded with some Diamine Shimmering Seas, which is one of their "shimmer" inks that's supposed to present a metallic sheen. It works best in a broad pointed pen, so it does pretty okay out of this one. The effect is pretty tough to photograph.

The above comparison is inescapable every time the topic comes up. Yes, I do own a genuine Pilot Vanishing Point and no, I generally don't leave the house with it. The Pilot has a lacquered brass body and is significantly heavier than the Majohn, has a nice soft and refined click, and generally feels more premium overall. As you'd bloody well expect it to, for what it costs. It's a very fine pen (both in terms of construction and line width) and while Pilot does make a "stub" nib for it, the widest and only size you can get is a poxy 1.0mm, and a replacement unit is north of $100. That is, just for the nib assembly.

So for daily use I'll stick to my hacked up clone, thanks.

Was quite impressed with this pocket pen.

All metal body, good clip, smooth steel nib, converter included. All for about £15.

1 and a quarter turn twist cap.

Farting cat finial.

Arguably competing with Kaweco AL sport IMHO.

Ferris Wheel Press – the Carousel in Fine (0,7, which should coubt as a medium), with J Herbin scented Bleu plénitude ink.

White oak, walnut, and Baltic birch ply. 3d printed pen dividers. It’s heavy and pen dividers are slick, so it doesn’t travel, but it’s held up really well.

Open pic.

Alright, kiddos. Play time is over. And by "over," I specifically mean the opposite of that, and it's time to play with pens and photography equipment.

So today I got out four things, if we're counting. Thing one is my illuminated photo box. That's right, this time y'all get to float in the Infinite Expanse. And two stacked macro focus shots. Luxury!

Thing two is the Platinum Curidas, with a medium point and in "Urban Green" which is really more of a translucent turquoise. The Curidas I think at the moment is my favorite retractable fountain pen -- admittedly, out of an available selection of not very many. Other contenders I can think of off the top of my head are the Pilot/Namiki Vanishing Point and Decimo, which I have; the Mahjohn A2 Press, which I also have; The Lamy Dialog, which I don't. Oh, and also these things, which are ubiquitous, but crap. Jury's out on the Oaso K016, which I haven't seen in person yet. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I have one of those coming in the mail already.

Where was I? Oh yeah.

Here's the Curidas' party trick:

It goes blep. It goes un-blep. Click the rather long plunger on the tail and the point retracts into the body. A trap door closes over it, obviating the need for a cap.

Platinum make a lot of noise about the Curidas being the successor to their "Knock" pen from the 1950's, which is now an utter hen's tooth. You're unlikely to get your hands on one of those.

If you're a habitual disassembler, the Curidas has you covered. It breaks down into this selection of components (and you can pull the spring out as well). The clip is removable and my pen came with a little tool in the box to assist with this, which wasn't immediately evident because all the instructions were in Japanese.

The engineers who designed this are surely showing off, because it has not one but two bolt action mechanisms inside, both of which are arguably unnecessary. The first is the bolt-and-twist to remove the metal sheath over the cartridge:

And the second is another bolt-and-twist to insert or remove the nib/cartridge/feed assembly into the nose of the pen:

Never mind the coin. I was just using it to keep the round parts from rolling away.

The nib is steel and it's pretty stiff. Very little of its length is not supported by the feed beneath. If you like a flexy bendy line-width-changy feel the Curidas is probably not for you. The "medium" nib is in fact the widest, and it's a little fine even for me. I like a nice bold in-your-face line, which is why I usually write with an italic nib anyhow. Available sizes are medium, fine, and extra fine. I would probably find the latter two nigh unusable.

The Curidas is not an expensive pen, at least compared to its other name brand retractable brethren. You can score one for a little over $40 from all the usual suspects. Compare to $160-ish for a Vanishing Point or over $300 for a Dialog and you can see how having a humdrum nib on it can be excused.

Thing the third.

Look, fancy inks are problematic for me. I almost exclusively use my writing tools in a professional environment, so I can't deviate too far from somber and stolid blacks, blues, and just barely maybe some greens. I got this Diamine Blue Lightning shimmer ink in the mail the other day and this is really about as far as I can go in the vibrancy department.

I like this stuff in theory, even though I've only been using it for a single day so far. Out of the Curidas and its little nib the effect is really more sparkly than "shimmer," but maybe it'll do better once I put some of it into one of my calligraphy pens.

Thing the fourth is today's Bonus Ballpoint, which is an OLight O'Pen Mini. This is a compact bolt action ballpoint writer with an aluminum body, here in anodized forest green. This is aimed squarely at the EDC crowd. It's pleasing to fiddle with, a diminutive 3-1/4" long, and if you hand it to a member of the unwashed masses they're unlikely to manage to fuck it up.

At work I always have two pens. I keep a ballpoint or rollerball or something handy because you should never, ever hand one of your fountain pens to a client, stranger, or layman because they're likely to do something to it you'd rather they didn't.