Editing The Pen Addict 506/transcript (section)

== Pen Purchase Discussion ==


'''Brad:''' Such complainers, these two. These two. So let's talk about the $800 pin I bought, Myke.

'''Brad:''' Times are tough. Man, man, man. Oh, boy. I got my Elbwood Pocketmaster and I thought I would take a moment, even though I kind of talked about buying a celebratory pin, because this is my first official, what I call a celebratory pin. It's a topic that we have covered a lot of times previously from you kind of doing that and some listeners also asking about that type of topic. And the more I thought about it, I've never really specifically, like, tried to, like, mark an occasion with a pin. Like, I'll buy my first Nakaya, but it's a big deal because it was my first Nakaya. It's just, like, you know, part of what I do, you know, enjoying pins. But this one I bought to celebrate, obviously, our 500th episode in 10 years of The Pin Addict. So I bought an Elbwood Pocketmaster, Myke. And as we mentioned before, this is manufactured in Germany, a small maker out of Germany called Elbwood, made by Frank. They're at the Elbwood factory. You know, I think he's a pretty much solo operation. And I saw this pin on UK Fountain Pins for the first time, and it kind of checked all my boxes to look into further, right? This is a small, pocketable pin that is my style, my aesthetic. I like this kind of setup for a pin, so let me look into it more. So I was going to buy one model of pin that was pretty stock, just a full metal pin, you know, steel nib, you know, the same shape and style, until I kind of browsed around Elbwood more and got roped into talking myself into, well, let's just buy, like, the mega upgrade model and we'll celebrate 500 episodes. And it could be my first time celebration pin. So what I ended up with, Myke, was kind of like I went full send on this one. There he goes. So you only celebrate 500 episodes one time, right? So I went with an ebonite barrel, which is this great kind of teal polished ebonite. And the hardware is silver, like legit silver, like 935 silver, whatever it is.

'''Myke:''' Is that a new thing? Do you have any other pens that are silver, like actual silver?

'''Brad:''' So I have a Yardo Led, which is a full silver. I think it's sterling. This one's Argentium, I think. I'll tell you the difference in a minute. But it's a big bulky pen, the Yardo Led, and I'm probably going to end up selling it. It's really, really nice. But it's just a very, very, very big pen. It does what it does well, but it may just not be a fit for me in the end. Even though the few times I've used it, I really, really enjoyed it. So this one has silver hardware. So the grip section is silver. The barrel threads, the threading, the post on the back of the pen, because it's a small pen, you have to post the cap to actually use it as silver. Like the internal cap threads that you don't see on the outside, also silver. So there's a lot of silver in this pen, which is a neat thing for me. You know, I did the full upgrade. And I also went for the 18K nib. I mean, if I'm going that big, we have to round it out with the 18 karat gold rhodium plated nib. So this is completely tricked out for me, right? You could probably do something even more crazy. You could probably get a full silver pen from Frank. I haven't looked because that wouldn't be something I was looking for. But this one, this one is. But it's a small pen, right? But when you, like a, say, picture like a Kaweco Sport. It's small, pocketable when it's capped. But you can uncap it and post the cap on the back and makes it like a full length barrel, right? So when you're writing with it, it fits your hand properly. I would not enjoy using this pen if you didn't post the cap, right? It's designed to be used, posted. One of the other things you have to think about buying a pen this small, it's only going to fit short international cartridges or terrible short international converters, which I refuse to use. So I wanted to not use just kind of a stock cartridge I have for this yet. So I had an empty cartridge, right? Which you can just clean out with a syringe. You know, take like a Kaweco cartridge. In my case, I took a Diamine cartridge, right? They're just all these short international cartridges are very, very common. You get one, clean it out, flush it out with a syringe, and then syringe fill it. And I chose a Graffon Faber-Castell Deep Sea, which I did a whole kind of, I wanted to go matchy-matchy on this first fill. I'll probably, this is kind of made to be like a good blue-black pocket pen for me. Okay. So I'll probably just go to a stock cartridge later, like Waterman Mysterious Blue is probably going to be like the main cartridge for it.

'''Myke:''' Is it that like there are no converters or that any converters that exist to just be too small, you'd never get enough ink in them?

'''Brad:''' So we've talked about Kaweco making these, and they've gone through a couple of different designs. And you can fill those with a syringe, but like trying to fill them as their converter, like attached to the pen, is just an exercise in frustration, right? So the only good thing for those converters would be to syringe fill them also, right? And you're still going to get less capacity because of the converter mechanics having to take up a little bit more space in there. So there are converters, they're just generally poor or frustrating. So they're just, it's not a good experience, even though you're having to go through a couple of extra steps to, hey, get an empty cartridge, syringe fill it, you know, that's a couple extra steps as well. But it's, when you have a pen like this, that's like super special, I wanted to, like, I'm fine putting in that extra effort, right? Like to make it really, really nice for what I want to do.

'''Myke:''' But similarly, if you do have like a standard cartridge that works for you, then great too, right?