Editing The Pen Addict 198/transcript (section)

== TWSBI Squeeze ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' This was a very frustrating review to do, not to just write it, but because the product itself was such a pain in the butt to use. I mean, there were no redeeming values. You know, I like to, I can generally find something good about a product. This one I couldn't just because it's just a royal pain to use. It's not intuitive, even though it's a very simple mechanism. It's not intuitive. It leads the way it's designed. It leads you to just like making a mess. Like no one would, no one who's new to fountain pens, they would be so frustrated if they went and tried this product as one of the first products they tried. They'd give up fountain pens like forever. So it's just a bad product. And this is their, obviously it took them a while to come up with that squeeze converter at first. They realized pretty quickly that it was a bad product. And so this only came out like, what, I guess it's been about a year, no more than two. So they wanted to, okay, let's do something different because that first one was junk. Well, this one's, this one's just bad. It just doesn't work well. It doesn't fit in the Lilliputs, which I was assumed it did. I don't know why I assumed that. I assumed a lot of things about this little, this little converter. But the one thing I'm not assuming, the one thing that's a fact is that it's just not good. I mean, I hated it because it, I mean, what drove me the most crazy is when you have that piston fully extended and then you screw it back in the barrel and then the back of the barrel bumps it and it pushes the ink right up through the nib. It's just, it's just a stupid product. Yeah. Yeah. So like on my AL Sport, which it's designed to fit the end of the piston, when it's fully expanded, gets pushed back in as you screw in.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That's just like outpour design.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So that's how my reviewing went. You know, maybe I didn't do it exactly as you're supposed to do, but it shouldn't be that frustrating of a product to use. So the solutions are several, you know, number one, you just buy short international cartridges, which are luckily starting to come in all kinds of different colors. Diamine, Cron Dash, do a wide range of colors. You can just snap them in. What I've always done is taken an empty one of those cartridges and syringe filled it with from an ink bottle, which isn't the easiest method to do. But God, it's certainly less annoying than this little piston filler. Um, I had a bunch of people in the comments that do all kinds of crazy things. Some people, the, the plastic classic, the, the, excuse me, the Kaweco classic, um, the plastic barrel ones, they can be eyedroppered. So people do that. Um, I had one commenter cut. I have actually a couple commenters modify the short international cartridges, cut off parts of them, epoxy in like part of a sack from like a, you know, like an Esterbrook sack. And that way they fill, they can still syringe fill, but they get a greater ink capacity in the barrel. So there's all kinds of crazy ways to do it. But, you know, I, I'm, there's enough options in short international cartridges now where I don't need the frustration of a product like this little mini converter. It's just too much of a pain.

'''Myke Hurley:''' They could make something else though, right? Like there is a product that could be made to fulfill this purpose.