Handwriting/pens thread

[Anonymous No.19933970]

Fountain pen chads, get in here

[Anonymous No.19933981]

I'm a budget pen chad myself who writes a lot. Unfortunately I haven't found a good budget pen yet. Bic Cristal would be good if it wouldn't get messy after about half a cartridge.
I use ballpoints because they are cheap. Good gel pens are way too expensive.

[Anonymous No.19934019]

>>19933970
i prefer penicl

[Anonymous No.19934035]

mmMmmM cocks

[Anonymous No.19934074]

I used to make pens over a decade ago. I would order kits with all the pieces and i would order different kinds of wood blanks or synthetic material. Fountain pens were the only ones that were useful for a long period of time. As beautiful as the others would turn out it seemed the ink never flowed like it should. They were always going dry. Any idea why?

[Anonymous No.19934091]

>>19933970
I can't even read my own handwriting.

[Anonymous No.19934092]

>>19934074
You need to cap them and use them once a week.

I've been fountain pen using since 2011. Mostly cheap pilot and lamy, a hero, and a nicer one. I have about 20 inks.

I had to learn to read sutterlin, so I learned to write it

[Anonymous No.19934100]

>>19933970

[Anonymous No.19934104]

>>19934092
That's actually normal writing, my mistake,

But I have about 10 iroshizuku inks, some sailor inks, some jherbin, and lots of limited British inks like bloody Brexit and skulls and roses

[Anonymous No.19934124]

>>19934104
can you tell me any notable differences in the inks? Between each other, and between them and cheaper ones? I can't imagine what makes a 30 dollar ink so much better than a 5 dollar one.

[Anonymous No.19934125]

>>19934100
I bought most of my diamine inks in Germany, from a place in Schoenberg in Berlin, and in Erfurt

[Anonymous No.19934130]

>>19933970
My handwriting kinda sucks, then it starts changing and becomes mysterious, then it sucks again. Sometimes it's just okay. Either way I'm not sure I could mimmick the shit in the images of the thread to save my life

[Anonymous No.19934142]

>>19934125
I'm envious of your handwriting.
I bought my ink at an art shop in München. I'm planning on buying a fancy diamine ink next, but since I only have one fountain pen, I don't really need more than one ink at a time.

[Anonymous No.19934152]

>>19934124
They all used to be 15 to 20 at most, the diamond are only 9 in Europe, prices doubled in the last year.

I think the shimmering Binks, permanence, and lubrication.

Here are half my inks

[Anonymous No.19934157]

>>19933970
>>19934130
Relevant

[Anonymous No.19934160]

>>19934142
That's not mine, but a Prussian geheimestaatsministeriu or his secretary

[Anonymous No.19934164]

>>19934160
>>19934125
Bulow was the finance minister under Hardenberg, that's his signature, but some low level scribe wrote the documents

[Anonymous No.19934172]

Just type lol

[Anonymous No.19934257]

>>19934172
The delete button is my enemy. If I'm on a word processor I want every sentence to be perfect and will constantly rewrite it. On paper with a pen in hand my writing flows far easier.

[Anonymous No.19934329]

>>19934257
I open multiple docs, but yeah, delete is a great key,

Nothing like cozy writing be at the standing desk

[Anonymous No.19934364]

>>19933981
I used to write with a TUL gel pen, but now, I use a Pilot Metro fountain pen with Heart of Darkness. The ink and pen are $20 each, and I write on Oxford BlacknRed notebooks. There is a cost savings when it comes to the pen and ink over time. Plus, it makes writing much more effortless. The notebooks are more expensive, though they are also nice for pencils and other pens

[Anonymous No.19935644]

>>19933970
I use a Lamy Safari past 3 years

[Anonymous No.19935709]

>>19933981
I'm a FP fag and I don't know them a lot but I recommend Uni Jetstream, best ballpoint I have ever used and they sell cheap refills for it. There are nice gel pens but the refills are like $5 that's retarded.

[Anonymous No.19935736]

Been trying to get into fountain pens lately because I wanted a smooth, wet writing pen.

Tried a Platinum Plaisir first since it's cheap and came highly recommended. Found it too scratchy (but I got a fine and Japanese, fines are apparently "true fines" or European extra fines). My mom liked it a lot though.

Then I tried a Jinhao X750, since it's been getting rave reviews of "$100 pen for $10!" lately, it writes like shit for me and skips on the diagonal. Got another Jinhao too by accident, 165 I believe. It does write wetter but feels scratchy.

Figured I'd try different ink, so I've now tried Montblanc, Quink, and Waterman. None of them magically solved my problem of every pen feeling scratchy and not great to me, nor did they stop the Jinhao X750 from skipping on the diagonal (which really disappointed me). So I figured I'd try different paper, since fountain pen guys are obsessed with paper. I got Rhodia and Clairefontaine. Both suck. Maybe they're good for calligraphy people who want giant line variation but they feel too glossy to me.

So I bit the bullet and bought a vintage Parker 51 (not the new shit one), an aeromatic fine. Writes like a dream, smoothest writing pen I've had. So I bought another one for my mom, this time in medium, plus an extra fine to try it out. The extra fines are the scratchiest nibs I've ever used. The medium is a genuine 14k vintage Parker 51, but it writes like shit. Some skipping, scratchier than the fine. Going to try repairing it with a loop and some cheap tools but I have a feeling it's just crap. Bought another fine, it also writes well but needs some nib smoothing I think.

The weirdest thing is the vintage 51's both write beautifully on nearly any paper, while the newer ones are much more temperamental. I don't even like the Rhodia/Clairefontaine with the 51's.

So after my fountain pen voyage I am a couple hundred bucks in the hole, and the only one I enjoyed was the Parker 51 fine. I've always been curious about the fountain pen life so I suppose at least I learned it's not really for me. I learned a lot about disassembling, repairing, and maintaining Parker 51's so I think I'll just collect them slowly with good deals over the years so I can give them away to friends and family.

One last thing I might do is go to a real expert nibber and ask him what he thinks of my Jinhao. If he says it writes fine to him, and what I consider scratchy is not considered scratchy by average fountain pen enthusiasts, I'll know I'm the weird one and it's not the pen.

[Anonymous No.19935745]

>>19935736
Also I forgot to mention that after all this fountain pen adventuring, pic related is still the best pen I've ever found in my life aside from the Parker 51 (which admittedly I love more).

One of the cheapest at any stationery store. I tried the 5m (v5) but didn't like it. 7m is just the right amount of wetness, smoothness, no scratch.

[Anonymous No.19935774]

>>19935736
>I want to try fountain pens! I'll get a $20 pen!
>end up spending $200 in $20 pens
kek many such cases
I think one should get a flagship thing like a pilot falcon right away and ONE bottle of ink. Yes it's $200 on a pen but it's probably better in the long run to buying a bunch of Safaris. These cheap pens never last or they always come up with problems after a while and the 28 year old Youtube revioowers never say this because they don't write, they just revioow
>inb4 my Safari lasted me 10 years
it's because you don't write

[Anonymous No.19935799]

>>19935774
Get a lamy with 5 nibs, grind them down to your own specs.
Heros have best flexy cheap pens

[Anonymous No.19935843]

>>19935799
>Get a shit pen and pay for 5 shitty nibs, that'll make it less shit
LAMY are garbage pens popularized entirely by shills and nibs aren't free. You can get something decent and Japanese for the same money.

[Anonymous No.19935845]

>>19935774
Well, the Jinhao and the Plaisir are each $10, and are specifically recommended as being surprisingly good babby's first pens. The rest of the money I spent was on good ink, "good" paper, and vintage Parker 51s (which I like). I'd say the only money I wasted, aside from the $30~ on the Jinhaos and Plaisir, was on the extra fine and medium nib. But I can still give those away later, and I just swapped them out in the 51's for fines (which I like).

After my experience, I can't say I endorse immediately jumping into the $150-250 range for your first pen until you're really sure you like fountain pens. I have done a lot of research on this and almost bought both a $180~ Pilot and a Lamy 2000, thinking (like you are saying) that I should make one big leap into the high tier before making my final decision about fountain pens in general. But I looked up a lot of reviews and user descriptions of various pens, like the Lamy and a few Pilots, that are generally considered universally beloved pens, and I found a lot of people saying that even they are scratchy/have surprisingly high feedback, have other issues too.

I came to the conclusion that there is no one perfect pen and also that price doesn't 1-to-1 correlate with quality. I also watched a lot, a lot of materials on a few pens like the Montblanc 146, which is $900, and even with it, people report underwhelming experiences and problems.

I think my problem is that my absolutely central metric of quality was smoothness of writing. I wanted a pen that glides like silk, with just a tiny bit of feedback. And I am still surprised that the FP community has at best a vague dialogue on this sort of smoothness, and it's most people reporting highly subjective experiences and blending all their different criteria together - especially aesthetic criteria that are almost irrelevant to me, like how the pen looks. It's just plain difficult to get clear information on which pens write "the best" and why. So I consider it a small miracle that my Parker 51 fine did satisfy me at least.

>>19935799
I want to get into nib grinding next and see if I can't scientifically figure out my own nib autism preferences. How do you recommend getting into grinding/adjusting nibs?

[Anonymous No.19935868]

>>19933970
Anyone have any advice to make my writing less shitty?

[Anonymous No.19935929]

>>19935845
>are specifically recommended as being surprisingly good babby's first pens
This is just shill lingo. You need to remember that with these vintage things like fountain pens there are massive shills running the whole internet side of things. There's no such thing as "babby's first pen", you just get a pen and use it. This phenomenon doesn't happen in literally any serious craft, where instead you always get the best tools you can afford right away and work with those from day one and learn to use them and become aware of their shortcomings if any. This "beginner pen" shit is just marketing to introduce you to this collector's hobby where you blow endless money on various tiers of pens forever. Obviously there's no perfect pen but customer reviews are completely unreliable because they're made by people who "test" the pens with the expectation of finding the "perfect pen" instead of just writing with the stupid pen. The only one truth I know is that these $15, $20 pens last a year tops, then their plastics start to crack or warp and they don't write anymore, or the cap goes loose, the threading cracks, the comb gets loose, or the converter doesn't lodge in well anymore, and a million other problems because fundamentally, these pens are made with collectors in mind who do not use the fucking pens but just buy them and make a dumb test sheet with them writing nonsense like "I like this pen very much, the ink I used is Diamine Poison Fart #5" in chickenshit handwriting before the unboxing excitement wanes and they already need to buy another.
Shills are ruining everything, you need to be aware of them. Practically everything that can be bought and left to sit on a shelf to collect dust is run by shills now. And as a consequence, products are becoming lesser and lesser in quality and more and more like display objects with no functionality. I could lament this in at least 3 other hobbies.

[Anonymous No.19935937]

>>19935843
I pay like a dollar per nib and 10 for a pen at the kadewe in Berlin. I also lose pens to theft here and there, and I'd rather not lose a 200 dollar pen.

Can't be easy being such a huge gatekeeping fag, eh? Stop sucking on your parents tests and spend your own money to appreciate value.

[Anonymous No.19935945]

>>19935929
You sound like an idiot. No one buys the best woodworking tools at first, even my wealthy friends try to get cheaper bandsaws and drills. Who the fuck buys a festool drill except those fuckers on this old house?

You out get a cheap pen to see if you like it. Then buy a 100 dollar sailor.

[Anonymous No.19935951]

>>19935937
They're much more expensive outside of Germany I guess. I'm not gatekeeping, you are free to start playing the guitar and buy a toy for $100 because shills say it sounds just the same as the $1000 one, then buy yourself a better one for $200 when the head comes off until eventually you get a proper instrument while the other kid bought the $1000 thing right away and is still playing it today.

[Anonymous No.19935957]

>>19935945
I never said the best but the best you can afford.

[Anonymous No.19935966]

>>19935929
Great post, I hope you channel your disdain for huckstering and your eye for bullshit into something great some day

[Anonymous No.19935993]

>>19935951i still haven't had a problem with my lady pens and I've owned montblanc, pelikan, hero, sailor and pilot namiki pens.
The sailor broke, someone stole the montblanc out of my jacket at an academic event at a private elite institution (upper class have no honor), the namiki went to my best friend, the hero broke, the lamy endures.

Why is lamy great? Because no one wants to steal them.i just checked eBay, they're 6 bucks for a lamy out of China (where all but the expensive are made)

[Anonymous No.19936004]

>>19935957
I got books to buy and kids to feed, fuck expensive fountain pens. 30 Bucks tops for a pilot or lamy. Anything above that is silly (except pelikans, I would go to a hundred for one of those)

[Anonymous No.19936007]

>>19935993
>Why is lamy great? Because no one wants to steal them
I wouldn't want a gift LAMY because they're the only FPs that write worse than ballpoints, of course noone wants to steal them.
How did the two broken pens break?

[Anonymous No.19936060]

>>19935736
I have fountain pens that cover a decent price/style range. Both steel/gold nibbed, even one gold nib with a custom grind. My favorite pen is a TWSBI. Steel nib, but smoother than many gold nibbed pens. Diamond 580 ALR I think. Smooth because B, probably, but it writes perfectly and isn't so costly that it's a worry to carry around. I have another TWSBI with a medium nib and it's good, too.

If you're looking for something that doesn't break the bank, holds a lot of ink, and writes better than many more expensive pens, try something from TWSBI. Not sure if they're hard to get with the supply chain stuff and overall China-drama (they're made in Taiwan), I haven't shopped for any pens lately.

[Anonymous No.19936068]

>>19936060
How much have you written with it? There's a landslide of comments saying that the plastic cracks and they spill ink everywhere.

[Anonymous No.19936080]

This is like the shaving razor threads on /fa/. Wild. Enjoy your Funko pens.

[Anonymous No.19936085]

Gonna try a Pilot Prera. I have a couple of Safaris and I enjoy them.

[Anonymous No.19936108]

>>19936068
Probably a few thousand pages. Rough estimate from the order of magnitude of legal pads I've gone through with it.

I don't doubt the claims you've read. The other TWSBI I have does seem to have been molded at too low of a temperature, now that I think about it. It has a small but visible seam near one end where plastic met plastic and didn't fuse perfectly. It hasn't cracked, but I don't use that pen much at all. Could be luck of the draw, so probably best to buy in person. The 580 doesn't have the same flaw, as far as I can tell.

[Anonymous No.19936487]

>>19936007
Nib cracked on one, body cracked on the other, both cost a fortune for replacement parts. Fucking 150-300 nibs for montblanc

[Anonymous No.19936557]

>>19933970
can you fags just put all the lifestyle consumerism in one thread? bookshelves, book stacks, e-readers, fountain pens, non of this really belongs on /lit/.

[Anonymous No.19936564]

Is it just me, or is 90% of /lit/ German?

[Anonymous No.19936739]

>>19935929
Good post

[Anonymous No.19936760]

According to the "anti consumer" types here, if you buy literally anything or discuss what products work best you're a good goy shill consoomer. How dare someone who writes a lot want to find a pen that works the best, am I right?

[Anonymous No.19936817]

>>19935736
Have the pens tuned by a professional if they are having issues. Just about any nib can be fine tuned and customized.

[Anonymous No.19936830]

>>19935868
Practice writing. Look for workbooks online or buy a good one.

[Anonymous No.19936852]

>>19936760
They are right, there is currently a huge boom underway in fountain pen hobbyism and it's being pushed by all social media algorithms. This is part organic, part there are professionals who know when something like this is incipiently happening and they know how to shape it and encourage it so it becomes a thing. The whole thing is driven by hipster "artisanal" culture, people with just enough disposable income to squander it and such empty fucking lives that they get obsessively into some shit like tattoos or maintaining their faggot beard with six different kinds of "beard butter."

>After day 600, the social breakdown continued and the population declined toward extinction. During this period females ceased to reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, never engaging in courtship or fighting and only engaging in tasks that were essential to their health. They ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves – all solitary pursuits. Sleek, healthy coats and an absence of scars characterized these males. They were dubbed "the beautiful ones." Breeding never resumed and behavior patterns were permanently changed.

>The conclusions drawn from this experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles filled, competition and the stresses experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown in complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in the demise of the population.

Nothing wrong with your grandpa shaving with a straight razor. But when nigger AIDS trannies are open air shitting outside the restaurant where you're spending all your surplus income on Ethiopian tofu, and you are capable of launching into a 20 minute spiel about which type of diamondonium ebonite alloy is your "white whale" straight razor, or how you picked up a real nice vintage Sneedman at a thrift shop, you are a FAGGOT!

[Anonymous No.19936988]

>>19936852
Based.
>>19936760
Just buy an artline pen and a good razor. Thats it. As soon as you start using words and phrases like "replacement", "best for" and "Highly recommend" when it comes to shit you should just be doing everyday then you're just making excuses.

[Anonymous No.19937517]

Best calligraphy book ?

[Anonymous No.19937536]

Pilot Cavalier

[Anonymous No.19937563]

>>19936739
>>19936760
>>19936852


Alright, your posts make more sense to me now. I haven't bought ink since my last trip to Germany in 2019 when I picked up a few big bottles of Diamine for 9 Euros each and a few small bottles for 2 Euros each. My Lamy pens were about 9 and 18 Euros for a demonstrator and special edition color. They're going for 10-20 each on Amazon and the Jherbin was about 15 back in the day and now run $30.00 which is fucking insane.

[Anonymous No.19937570]

>>19937563
How much do you write per day?
How many books have you published?

[Anonymous No.19937622]

>>19937570
Halfway through one book process, making edits, fixing citations, and a few short things plus an article that may be published if the other players get their acts together sometime in the next decade.

I write a few hundred words a day, mostly thoughts, notes, and public speaking bits. With the pen, about half to a full folio sized page some days, some days just a few lines.

Why?

[Anonymous No.19937653]

>>19937622
Because you could be writing more and worrying about your pen less.

[Anonymous No.19937689]

I use Pilot Varsity pens at work mainly so that no one steals my pen. it's a $2 fountain pen that will last about 4 to 6 months of steady use. very smooth and quick drying ink.
for meetings I break out the TWSBI ECO fine nib with blue/black ink. very light weight pen with a "big" look to it. not bad for $33. the ink was $25, pic related. i highly recommend both pens as good introductions for people getting into fountain pens.

[Anonymous No.19937693]

>>19937653
Reading is what you meant. I could be reading more.

Kids brought home a head cold, so I've been just internet browsing and time wasting while in this state of congested indecision.

[Anonymous No.19937705]

>>19937689
I really like these inks, and the Shinryoku is one of my favorite colors of any ink.

Alas, the marketing hype did work wonders on a former colleague who fell deep into the fountain pen world during the late 2000s. He bought fifty bottles of ink and at least 5 high end Japanese pens. He used to jam a loupe into his eye to align the tines.

[Anonymous No.19937782]

>>19937705

I haven't any other color yet. it dries quickly and is very distinctive.
I ended up with fountain pens due to my disgust with pens that skip or stopped working if you drop them (I'm looking at you, Pilot G2 Limited.)

[Anonymous No.19938775]

Bump

[Anonymous No.19938970]

Sinistral gang, I call on thee!

[Anonymous No.19939015]

>>19936760
Sir, this is the literature board.

[Anonymous No.19940157]

>>19935945
In any case the concept of "beginner" pen is nonsense. A pen is a tool that writes, it has a price you pay for its materials snd quality, and it's supposed to write. A chisel is a chisel, there are no "advanced" chisels or "beginner" chisels, just expensive or inexpensive ones, and the more expensive ones are supposed to be better made. That's it.

[Anonymous No.19940264]

>>19940157
There are absolutely different skill level chisels in wood working. Your ignorance on the subject of woodworking shines through the silly analogies you've tried to make.

One needs a level of skill to operate different kinds of mortising chisels like those common in Japanese joinery as opposed to the traditional chisels used in the Anglo-French tradition.

The cost of chisels doesn't matter much, it's your ability to hone it.

Keep consuming.