Editing The Pen Addict 449/transcript (section)

== Purpose of Kickstarter ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Right. Because we can get the whole Kickstarter talk is like, why does Kickstarter exist? It's well for people to like, you know, start companies or, you know, build things and have a frictionless transaction with supporters. And there's like a huge amount of friction for, I don't know, the decade that they've been in service now. And there still is. There's no, I'm surprised that this hasn't come along sooner to where there's been more of that back end integration to other services. Like, why aren't they their own backer kit? Why can't I fulfill, why can't I hook in my shipping from the Kickstarter platform? Yeah. You know, so anyway. Hey, look at that. Good show. I did a thing, Myke.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Okay.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I know you're excited about this next topic, but I finally bought, acquired myself for my personal use, a platinum 3776 pen with an ultra extra fine nib. So we've talked about this nib many, many times over the years, just because it's a real outlier for fountain pen nibs, right? Ultra extra fine. It's designed to be around a 0.1 millimeter tip size, right? Your line width may vary, right? Obviously paper varies that, ink varies that, but the tip size should be around one millimeter. The finest of the fine stock fountain pen nibs. This gets into your needle tip sizes.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' What is like a typical fine in size?

'''Myke Hurley:''' So a Japanese fine is like around 0.2, or a Japanese extra fine, excuse me, Japanese extra fine is around 0.2. Japanese fine, I think it's around 0.3 to 4, and then on up from there. And then the European sizes, the extra fine, they probably start at like 0.5 would be my guess.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So we're looking at like needlepoint territory of an ultra extra fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, and the key is stock, right? This is a platinum off nib offering, right? Which is not a lot of, most of the companies stop at extra fine. And this is not, this is discounting specialty nibs, right? Pilot has a whole range of specialty nibs. Sailor has a whole range of specialty nibs. This is like your normal stock offerings. Like just like a, a TWSBI would offer a 1.5 millimeter stub, right? That would be a stock nib. So the ultra extra fine nib, I had one in my hands like seven years ago, I think is when I pulled up this review that I did from Thomas Hall loaning me his ultra extra fine. And of course I loved it at the time. And then just never acquired one for myself. That's when, you know, after that I was like, oh, I can get a nib modified into something like this, right? And that was also at the time seven years ago. So I think you were having to order ultra extra fines from Japan, right? These weren't normally in the U.S. distributor pipeline, right? So that's been a newer thing here in the past couple of years. So I finally broke down and got one. It's great. Like it's really what I, what I like in a pen from a writing perspective. It really is ultra extra fine. It's not too fine for me, which is interesting to say. Not that I expected it to be, but as soon as I inked it up, I started writing with it and I was like, yeah, perfect. I wasn't like, OMG, this is fine. I was like, yeah, this is right on the money from, for how I like to have a pen right. Now, this is not a nib that you go into purchasing blindly, right? This is the conversation around nibs like this. And like when I had the posting nib conversation, you don't just say, you like to write really tiny? Yeah, just go buy this nib. You don't do that with this nib or the posting nib, in my opinion. They're very, very particular. The paper like that you write with for this ultra extra fine, it matters, right? I'm on this bank paper kick, which I don't know that you've ever particularly used yourself, but it has a little bit of tooth to it, right? It's good for fountain pens. It shows color. It shows shading. It doesn't bleed. It doesn't feather, but it's toothy. Well, an ultra extra fine is not a great platform for that nib. Like it's fine. It's doable. But it is scratchy scratchy, if you will, on there. Like you want to use something like Rhodia, you know, for there where you get a little bit of smoothness on there. So you can't go into just like buying ultra extra fine nibs and posting nibs without testing them before. So I'm glad I have one now that I can carry around with me if we ever get to travel again, bring the people, let them test it. It takes a very, very light hand to use, which is good for me because I have a heavy hand. So I have to practice using it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You know, I wonder, like, I know you wouldn't like this nib, but I also wonder what the left-handed experience is with the more needly types of nibs, the way they angle into the page. I mean, I'm sure plenty of left-handers use needle point nibs, but I'm wondering, like, just seeing the scratchiness of this nib on some pages, I wonder if it would be even worse for left-handers. I don't know. So you're going to get this nib or no?