Editing The Pen Addict 120/transcript (section)

== Piston Fillers ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Highly, highly recommend Sailor pens. I'm a huge fan. Yeah. Yeah. I can't say enough nice things about him. So, back into the Fountain Pen 101, the Sailor 1911 is a cartridge or converter filling mechanism. It uses, when you unscrew the barrel, you can fill this pen in two ways. It comes with... Actually, it ships with an ink cartridge, I believe, when the 1911 ships. Because the Sailor has a proprietary ink cartridge. So, you have to use Sailor cartridges for Sailor pens. And you'll find that with a lot of companies. Some do, some don't. Or, you can use a Sailor converter with this pen. So, the cartridge obviously comes with ink in it already. You just snap it into the pen, push it down, and you start writing. Cartridges are the easiest thing to work with on fountain pens, especially for beginners. That's where a lot of people start. That's where I started. They don't want to get into the fussiness of having a bottle of ink and learning how to fill a bottle of ink and making a mess and all those things. But, the bonus of having a converter, which you can use on your Sailor or any other pen. Or, not any other pen, but any cartridge converter pen. Is, you can use bottled ink. You pop in the converter into the barrel, into the nib unit. You stick the nib into the ink. And you twist the end of the converter. And it sucks up the ink. And you're ready to write. So, it's converters are really, really simple. It's probably the most popular filling system for fountain pens. It's very easy. Don't let it intimidate you at all. Anyone who's considering getting into fountain pens. Cartridges are great. I have a cartridge in this 1911 right now. Because I like this particular ink that Sailor makes. It's Sailor Nano Blue Black. It's a killer ink. I'm using those cartridges. But, it also comes in a bottle ink. So, if I have a converter for this, I can use it with a bottle as well. So, it's the ultimate inflexibility in pens.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' The next step up is probably a piston filler. Which is another extremely popular filling mechanism for a pen. This is what you're going to get on Twisbees, on Pelicans. It's where there's no inside of the barrel that you can easily access. The end of the pen basically screws off and allows for a plunger to go down in the barrel. So, you unscrew the back end of the barrel. That lowers the plunger. You dip the nib into your bottle. And then, you screw the back end of the barrel back in. And that plunger just pulls, sucks up the ink into the pen. It's kind of a built-in filling system, if you will. That's the best way to describe a piston filler. It's all built in. There's no extra parts like cartridges or converters. But, that's the kicker for someone who wants a cartridge. It's not an option for a piston filler. It's ink bottle only.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Piston fillers are my favorite. But, my main problem with the piston filler mechanism is typically in pens that have a piston filler, there's no sort of indication as to how much ink you have. Like, it's difficult to get an indication. Some pens have a window, but the window only shows you up to the point where the window is. Right. So, also, as well, like, you have to be kind of cautious of the way that you fill the pen. Now, I know I'm probably jumping ahead looking at the document. No. But, Mr. Thomas Hall gave me a really great tip about filling with a piston filler.

'''Myke Hurley:''' This is probably, you know, to you, Brad, you probably know this, but this is, I guess, good for the 101. So, what you should do is, you should have the pen just in standard. You don't unscrew it or anything. You put it into the bottle of ink, and then you kind of, you unscrew it, so it fills up. Then you screw it back the other way, so it empties, and then you fill it. Because what you're doing is pushing all the air out. So, when you bring it in, you're bringing in air bubbles originally. You push it all out, so you're pushing the air bubbles back into the ink. So, then when you draw the ink back up again, you've expelled all the ink from the mechanism.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, that's a great tip, and that gives you the maximum fill. And that's right about the piston fillers. You know, unless it's a demonstrator, you have a hard time managing the ink capacity or knowing exactly where you stand. Whereas a cartridge converter pen, you can just unscrew the barrel, see how much ink is left in the cartridge or converter. So, the eyedropper is kind of the next most popular. So, cartridge, converter, and piston fillings mechanisms, those are going to compromise the vast, vast majority of fountain pens. The eyedropper filling system, a bulb filling system, a vacuum filling system, a squeeze filler system, all those things are kind of not as popular as the rest, but some people swear by them. You know, something like an eyedropper fill is something that I've just got into recently. And what the eyedropper allows, that allows for maximum ink capacity in a pen barrel. But the barrel has to be made to handle that. And with the eyedropper, it takes a lot of extra maintenance because you have to, it can only be on a, like an acrylic pen, like a plastic type pen.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Because you have to seal off those seals with silicon grease and on a metal pen, it doesn't work as well.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I still haven't gone anywhere near this.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It works really well. The Franklin Kristoff pen. You want to read about a pen when you're purchasing that it's actually built to handle eyedropper fill. You can't, some people can, there's other pens that people have just converted that really aren't marketed as such. Marketed as an eyedropper fill. But really what people use it for is for the huge ink capacity that's available with them with an eyedropper fill. Like two to three times as much with an eyedropper fill as with a cartridge or converter. So that's why people enjoy them. But there are risks and maintenance issues involved with eyedroppers. I haven't have a problem yet, but I don't do it a lot either. I usually just carry like one pen with a, that's filled as an eyedropper. So now filling these fountain pens, we've kind of gone through. I did want to say, and it's not really a fountain pen 101 thing, but it's something I do frequently is with cartridges. Like the Kaweco AL Sport, it really only fits cartridges. Now they have a converter, but it's really bad. It's a squeeze converter. I've never gotten it past a half a fill on the squeeze converter. A squeeze converter is theoretically like a regular converter. You put the converter in the nib unit, dip the nib into the ink, and then you just kind of push it kind of like a button. And you know, that air moving in and out sucks in the ink. Well, the Kaweco one's so small, it doesn't really fill up very much. So what I do with a lot of cartridges is I have a syringe that you can buy from someone like Goulet Pens or Anderson Pens. And that way I can use a bottled ink, you know, like my favorite, you know, Pilot Orochizuku Shinkai and put it in a Kaweco AL Sport by cleaning out an old cartridge that I've used up and syringing in ink from the bottle into the cartridge and then popping the cartridge right into like the Kaweco AL Sport, for example. I do that all the time, just as an easy way to not have to go to a converter on pens that don't easily take them. So that's just a quick filling tip. It's not necessarily a 101 thing, but there are options for pens that take cartridges to fill with bottle ink. And that's one of the ways. Cleaning is a big deal and something I can get lots of emails about, how to clean a fountain pen. And I use some very, my method is very simple and very effective, I think. But it does require one extra thing. And you can also get this at Anderson Pens or Goulet Pens, and that's an aspirator. And if you don't know what an aspirator is, if you see a picture of one, you'll know exactly what it is. It's basically the snot sucker that people use for babies to suck snot out of their nose.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's a nasal aspirator.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I knew you were going to go there.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, that's what it is. It's the best fountain pen cleaning tool I own. So what I do, all I do to clean my fountain pens is I unscrew them. Usually, I run water through the cartridge or converter, usually the converter. I just run water through that, bring in the water in and out of the converter until it's clean, until it's showing clear. And then I take the nib unit, run that under the water. Then I fill up the aspirator, and I stick it on the feed, you know, where the cartridge or converter would normally go, and shoot that water through the nib and the feed, and it clears it out so quickly. It's much better than just running the pen underwater. It's much better than soaking it overnight. It's faster. It's definitely, definitely the way to go with the aspirators. And then after you've kind of cleared it out and got all the ink out, you can use it without water in it and push air through to help dry it out. It's a super, super handy tool. It costs you about two bucks, and it's totally the way to go when cleaning a fountain pen. It's not rocket science to clean a fountain pen. Don't let it intimidate you. It's just one of those things and one of those tools that really changed how I thought about cleaning fountain pens. So I highly, highly recommend that, getting an aspirator to shoot water through those, shoot through the nibs and help get them cleaner.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So there's kind of, we'll talk about it when I got a few Twitter questions about this, and there's kind of three things that are involved in your whole fountain pen experience. There's the pen itself, there's the ink you use, and then there's the paper you use. So we're not going to get totally into all those things. We're not going to get into paper today, but I did want to talk about ink and how it performs when using a fountain pen. So there's a few terms we use frequently when we're talking about ink and how it behaves. And like I said, all these things are determined, they're not in a vacuum, right? They're determined by what nib, what size nib you're using, what ink you're using, and what type of paper you're using. Everyone could have a different performance with these aspects, like the bleed. Bleed is when you're writing on a page and it looks like the ink's soaking into the page and going through to like the other side of the page and the ink starts getting on the page behind the one you're writing on. That's ink bleeding through the paper. Feathering is what we call when the ink, you're writing on the page and the ink spreads out horizontally. You can see like little spidering through the paper fibers and the ink just kind of soaks into the page. It may not necessarily bleed through to the backside of the page, but you can see it spreading on the top of the page. That's feathering. What I call show through is where the ink, you can see the ink through the backside of the page, not necessarily from bleed or feathering, but it's just like you can see, some people refer to it as ghosting. You can see like ghost writing on the backside of a page to where it might be so severe you couldn't use the backside of the page if you use both sides of the page to write on. Dry time is something that fountain pen users all take into consideration. They want to be sure that their ink and their paper choice and their nib choice is going to allow for a reasonable dry time. Some people look for a very, very fast dry time, like Myke's left-handed. He might want a very, very fast drying pen and ink and paper combination so as not to smudge when he's writing. It's very important. For me, being right-handed, it's not as important to me. I will use an ink and paper, especially like a rhodia, where the ink will stand up on the page a little bit more because it's smoother, because I don't necessarily have to worry about smudging as much. But dry time is very, very important to a lot of people. Ink saturation and ink shading are two properties of inks that people either love, hate, or deal with. Saturation is kind of how deep the color is. On the page, a saturated ink doesn't shade a lot. Shading is when there's a different range of colors in a single line of ink. Like, you'll find a lot of blues, like a lot of turquoise blues, have a range from a lighter shade into a darker shade. If that line was solid instead of shaded in those different colors, it would be a saturated line, like one solid color line. That's a saturation. Now, if the line has a wide range of colors, that's the shading of the ink. So, an ink's not usually saturated and a shading ink. They're usually separate, although I guess there could be cases where there is, I guess, kind of in conjunction there with the types of inks. But, you know, when I do ink reviews, you can get really, really deep in ink reviews. And that's not something I do because I don't, there's, you know, I'm trying to do kind of the most common use case scenario. Like, I don't do a lot of waterproof testing on my fountain pen inks just because that's not a huge consideration for me. And it's definitely a consideration for some people, and I'm not discounting that. But when I do an ink review, I think the majority of the people want to see what it looks like, how it performs, how it dries, what's the shading look like, what's the saturation look like, does it bleed, does it feather? I'm not getting into necessarily waterproofness, light fastness. There's some really extreme tests, and there's lots of places online you can go to find all these great tests. I mean, these people spend hours and hours testing inks and doing all these wonderful tests on it. I'm just kind of coming from more of a standard use case scenario when I do an ink review. So mine are generally more simpler, but that's how I use pens. That's how I use fountain pens. And I don't get bogged down in some of the other things like that. So, excuse me. That's kind of it on ink performance. There's a lot more we can get into. There's definitely a fountain pen 201 course where you can talk about iron gall inks and different permanents and things like that and different behaviors. And all of these topics, there's so much depth in these topics. We're just trying to cover the surface points here. And that's some of the basics. I got a couple more topics I want to get to, including one that I don't consider fountain pen 101, but some people very much are interested in this topic. And there was a great post made this week. So we're going to talk about that in just a minute. Right, Myke?

'''Myke Hurley:''' We sure are. Before we do that, we need to thank our second sponsor for this week's episode of the Pen Epic Podcast. And that is Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website, portfolio, and online store. For a free trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com and use the offer code INK at checkout. And better web starts with your website. If you are listening to this show and you think, hey, I wouldn't mind trying some of that pen reviewing stuff. Well, you too can be like Brad and have your very own pen blog. You don't have to worry about all the tricky parts. Just go to Squarespace and get started with one of the beautiful templates. You can very easily build your pages with the fantastic drag-and-drop page building system. It's all within your browser. And you can see the changes you're making update in real time. Squarespace take care of everything. Web hosting, image hosting, and even podcast hosting if you would like to have a show just like ours. And what if you want to run a store like Knock? Well, that's really easy to do too as our friends over at Knock Co. run their store on Squarespace. They run the whole site there. They run the store there. Every Squarespace website features Squarespace Commerce. So you can set up your own store and start selling physical and digital goods immediately. They integrate with Stripe for payments and loads of other awesome services like ShipStation to help you run a fantastic and efficient business. Squarespace take all of the pain away from building your own professional or business website. They have awesome templates that you can choose from that look good on all devices. They have great apps to allow you to manage your site and your stats on the go. They have 24-7 award-winning customer support over live chat and email with teams located in New York City, Dublin, and Portland. You can get started with Squarespace plans that start at just $8 a month. This also includes a free domain name if you sign up for a year. You can try a free trial right now with no credit card needed and start building your website today. When you do decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure that you use the offer code INK. That's I-N-K. That's going to get you 10% off your first purchase and show your support for The Pen Addict. We'd like to thank Squarespace for supporting this show and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, a better web starts with your website.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Can't recommend them enough, Myke. They're awesome and they continue to be awesome. It's been a couple years now since I've had my site on Squarespace and I really, really love it. And obviously, we use it in other places too. We use the RelayFM blog as a Squarespace site. Yes, sir. All right, so we've got a couple of quick points I wanted to mention from the chat room. And before we move on, one, Ethosophical made an excellent point, which I wanted to mention so I drive it home.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' But basically, and where'd it go? It vanished. Uh-oh. Hold off my screen.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right, so here it is. The best thing for a pen, as I understand it, is just to use it a lot. The more ink that goes through it, the cleaner, ultimately, it will be. So I think the takeaway is that you have to use, if you're using a fountain pen and you ink up a fountain pen, it needs to be used. You can't just let it sit for weeks and months on a time. It's going to start to clog up. The performance is not going to be as well. The nib's going to get dirty. The ink's not going to flow as well. And if your expectation is that you can fill a fountain pen with ink and let it sit for weeks and months without using them, you're going to have a bad time. It's not going to work well. So try not to have too many pens inked up unless you're a really, really heavy, dedicated fountain pen user. I have, I think I have eight inked up right now, and that's too many for me. I need to be like around three to five at the most. I have a hard time getting there. But that's kind of the right rotation for me to be able to use the pens enough and to ensure that they're staying clean and staying functional.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So use your fountain pens. If you're inking them up, it's made to be used. Use them. Don't let them sit too long. If they're sitting too long, just clean it out and file it away for next time. There's nothing wrong with doing that. Also, Mikey Reak wanted to know about why using, well, the pros and cons of using a bottled ink. And what I told him is that goes back to the general question, why fountain pens?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Cartridges are easier to use. They're more portable. They're less fussy. But the whole reason why I use fountain pens and why a lot of people use fountain pens is customization. I can pick an ink in a beautiful color that's not available in a cartridge. You're very limited on cartridge ink colors. And match it with a pen. Match it with a writing style that I want it to do. Match it with a notebook. I really have the ultimate choice in using a bottled ink. The ink's the same if you have, you know, if you're using pilot blue black ink cartridges or pilot blue black ink from a bottle. It's the same ink. So in that aspect, there's nothing different. If you want to use a cartridge, great. Use a cartridge. But you're not going to be able to get the huge range of colors like you can get in pilot or roshizuco inks or diamine inks or any ink out there. Roaring cleaner that I love so much to be able to really suit your personality, your style, your tastes. So that's why I get into bottled inks a lot. And that's how we talked about last episode, how, you know, I have enough to last me for all of eternity.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And Mikey also asked about a method of storage when you don't use them. Should it be emptied or filled with water? They should absolutely be empty. Store all your fountain pens dry, empty, in a cool, shaded climate. Just like with other possibly sensitive goods, you want to, you know, you want to keep track of them, take care of them, make sure they're stored away properly and laid flat, definitely dry. So one of the big questions I get, and Myke, you also mentioned this last episode, and you and I are experiencing this actually right now as we release this episode, flying with fountain pens. So you're scared of doing it. I'm scared of doing it. But our friend at Modern Stationer is not scared of doing it. And I think he's in the chat room. Yeah, he's in the chat room. Doug's in the chat room. Hey, Doug. Doug's pin, Doug's pin, Doug's post on flying with fountain pens from about a week ago was awesome. He gave like a current, Doug must be a big traveler. And he has a whole setup that he goes through. This is really more than fountain pen 101, but I get this question so much. It's definitely worth pointing out. You should go read this post. I don't know if it's going to change me yet, Myke.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Nothing will change me. I'm being serious about it. Nothing. Nothing anybody can ever tell me will make me a call of it.