Editing The Pen Addict 363/transcript (section)

== Back to TPA Questions ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right, Myke. All right, Brad. Let's get back into what we do best, and that's answer. Ask TPA questions. I guess that's questionable whether it's the best aspect of the show, but I certainly enjoy it. So, Side Rose tried to get my fiancé into fountain pens. Instead, she fell in love with the J. Herban rollerball that uses fountain pen ink cartridges. You know that pen, Myke? Yeah, we spoke about it before.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I have one somewhere.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Okay. She's currently using Lamy Safari Green and Diamine Oxford Blue. So, I have questions about that. But regardless, are there any other non-fountain pen pens that can use fountain pen ink cartridges? And yeah, that's something we've discussed before, and the discussion has always been around, yes, but they're all terrible, right? Like, it's not the best performance because of the steel rollerball and properties of fountain pen ink don't always match up to a smooth writing experience. The best I have used is the cheapest and, one could argue, ugliest, but it's the Pilot High Tech Point.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' This is the, I don't know, stablemate of the famous Pilot Precise V5, V7 series, right? A lot of people with that. I think in the UK, what are they called? Pilot VTech?

'''Myke Hurley:''' VTech sounds right. Yeah. Something like that. But everybody knows this pen. It's the Pilot Needlepoint Pen.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So, about two or three years ago, they came up with one that uses Pilot's ink cartridges for ink, which means they come and just, they market them in just your basic black, blue, green, and red, you know, with the matching pen barrels and the matching ink cartridges. But you can use any Pilot ink cartridges in those. Like, they're proprietary ink cartridges. So, I think, and that's the one that actually works like a real pen should work, in my opinion. It's the best. Monteverdi makes a couple of pens that you can use. We've talked about the one-touch stylus tool before, Myke, as one that I keep saying, I keep threatening to buy that I never do because it uses the fountain pen ink cartridges. We both want that pen, but I never bought it. Yeah. Yeah. Then they also make one called the Engage, which is kind of the nicer, more traditional, higher scale product that also uses the same filling mechanism, you know, short international cartridges for that. And the last one I came up with was one that Susan just reviewed on the Pen Addict in the last couple of weeks. It's the Pen BBS 350, which offers a fountain pen nib.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I like BBS. I just think BBS boards. Yeah, totally.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Totally. I grew up on that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So the fountain pen nib is swappable with a separate rollerball nib. So you can swap those in and out however you like and use the cartridges with it. I don't know if they may be using their own model, but I know Schmidt makes just a rollerball tip that a lot of these companies use. And if you like people who really get into this can find, you know, like really nice fountain pens that these Schmidt mechanisms fit into. It's just like a twist on like a if you would twist out a nib unit in your fountain pen, the Schmidt rollerball tips can just swap right into like that size size nib. So those are the main ones. And you can actually do some some weird stuff if you really get into it and want to keep keep going down that path. So that's my those are my options.