Editing The Pen Addict 128/transcript (section)

== Pen Chalet Deals ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right. So we got... We got a big topic that's actually not going to take too, too long to get into. But I want to talk about our friends at Pen Chalet first, Myke.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Sounds good to me. So you know our friends at the Pen Chalet by now, but let me tell you about them if they don't. And don't worry. We do have an incredible deal as always, and we'll get to that in just a moment. Penchalet.com. They are the people to go to if you're looking for incredible roller balls, fountain pens, ballpoints, mechanical pencils. Maybe you want pen holders, pen carrying cases, refills, fountain pen converters. Basically any pen or accessory you want, you should be going to Pen Chalet. Pen Chalet first. They have all of your favorite brands like Monteverde, Pelican, Lamy, Pilot, Namiki, Sailor and Kaweco. They're an authorized dealer of all of them. They have very fast and reliable customer service. They're always doing great discounts and deals, which you can find all the time, and they give special ones to pen addict listeners. They have free shipping on orders over $50 in the continental United States. And they also ship internationally with very reasonable shipping rates, and that conversion will work in your favor. Pen Chalet has low prices on high quality pens and offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you go to penchalet.com and use the code penaddict at checkout on anything that you buy, you're going to save 10% on your order. But what you really want to be doing first is clicking the podcast link at the top of the website, enter the code penaddict, and you will find some special savings just for penaddict listeners. Today, I have a fantastic offer for you, courtesy of the pen, shall I? They are offering a 35% discount on the Platinum 3776 Psy and Shoji fountain pens, Brad? Yeah, Shoji. These are limited edition demonstrator style pens. The Psy is clear and the Shoji is a tinted blue. And they have the slip and seal mechanism, which Brad can explain in a moment because I believe he owns one of these. The full retail for these pens is $270. But with the 35% discount and then the 10% discount you'll get if you use the penaddict coupon at checkout still. You'll be able to pick one of these up for $157.95. That is close to $100 off of one of these fantastic Platinum 3776s. Thank you so much to Pen Chalet for sponsoring Real AFM and the penaddict. Go to penchalet.com and use the code penaddict at the top of the page to get these great deals.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So this is ridiculous. I rave about penchalet's deals every week because there's always something awesome and then they end up topping themselves like every week it seems like. I own a Psy, the 3776 Psy.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It is an unbelievably good pen. This price is, you're not going to find a better price than this. I think I paid $180 for mine if not more. And this is what, like $157? Is that what you said?

'''Myke Hurley:''' $157.95.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So these, what I love about the Platinum pens are the gold nibs that they use. 14 karat gold nibs. These nibs are very similar to the nibs that you'll find in a Nakaya. Nakaya came from Platinum. They have the very similar feel and feedback and smoothness. It's some of my favorite nibs. I love everything about this pen. That slip and seal mechanism you're talking about, Myke, it's in the cap of the pen. And when you, it's got like a little spring in it, which you can see through the, through the demonstrator barrel. And you, when you cap the pen, it tightens up around the nib. So you can leave the pen capped and the ink doesn't dry out. So you can actually keep the ink in the pen for a longer period of time without it drying out in the nib. It'll start up immediately. There's no hard starts, no scribbling. So it's a, it's kind of an airtight seal when you cap the pen. So that's one of the features there. These are, the Psy and the Shoji are part of a line of limited editions that they do around different lakes in Japan. That's what these names are for. And that's why they're clear. They're meant to be like water, you know, like a clear water. Like one is clear, the other one's kind of got a blue tint, things like that. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful pen. I love using mine. I use mine all the time.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I can't rave about it enough. It's really one of the great pens from Platinum. And I enjoy it because it's one of the few 3776s that uses the silver furniture. Almost all of them are gold and they're hard to get otherwise. So this is how I was able to get a Platinum 3776 with silver furniture. So there you have it. And I'm going to get, I'm going to get killed if I get this wrong, Myke. But 3776 is the height and feet of Mount Fuji. That's where 3776 comes from.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Oh, how nice.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So if I got that wrong, I will know very quickly. But I'm going to go with that because that's what I think it is. Our pen blog of the week is a blog called Mirror Blather. And you probably haven't heard of this, but one of our readers and listeners, Glenn HK, on Twitter, writes this blog on occasion. And he made a really, really good post about knives that is 100% related to pens. And I'm not going to read this whole article, but it's titled The Escalation of Pointy Stabby Things. And you can imagine it's about the way that we purchase items and we have the mindset of how much we're going to spend and why things are worth a certain amount. And then how we break through those levels of pricing as we get further and deeper into our addictions, whether it's knives in the case of this article or pens. I mean, it relates directly. It's a really good article. I won't spoil it all. And it's not very long. Take you a couple, three minutes to read. But it's spot on. And just, you know, replace every knife word for a pen word. And you'll all be nodding your heads. Yes, yes, you're exactly right. So very good. Very good job, Dwayne, on doing this post. And I appreciate you sending that to me. So that was very good. Worth a read. I had a project this weekend, Myke, and it did not start off well. So I've had, ever since the Karis Custom ink, this turned into a Karis Custom episode. How did that happen?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Magic.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, they're just good. They're good peeps. But ever since the ink came out, people want to know what other nibs you can swap in. You can hear me. If you hear my noise, that's me fiddling with my ink. Um, so, people have been wanting to know what other nibs they can swap out with the Schmidt nib that shipped with the ink. And, um, you know, the Schmidt nib's perfectly fine. But it was limited to either a fine or a medium nib from Karis Customs.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And, but it's a pretty standard nib unit and nib that's used. It's standard number five nib, German number five nib. And people want to know what other nibs can I fit in there easily. So there's two parts to this nib that I want to talk about. One is the entire nib section. If you take your ink and just start twisting the nib, you get this whole nib unit that pulls out. It's this big black, it's a black plastic section with threading on the end. And that's what actually screws into the barrel. Now, there's no other manufacturer's nib unit that threads into the ink other than the Schmidt. So, it looks like, you know, the Kaweco nib unit or the Edison nib unit or the Franklin Kristoff nib unit. They all look the same. There's all something a little bit different to where they just don't thread in directly. But, with all of these nib units, you can pull the nib and feed straight out of those nib units. Okay? So it's actually in two parts. Well, three. The nib, the feed, and then that collar that goes around it. The cylindrical part. So what you have to do is I took the nib unit out and pulled the nib and the feed out from the collar. Except when I went to go do it, I couldn't get it out. It was like stuck. It took me a lot of frustration, about as much frustration I had with getting Skype started today, to get this nib out. I was like whining on Instagram. And, you know, my business partner, Jeff, he said, well, just, you know, heat up the nib unit. And Ed Jelly chimed in, just, yeah, heat up the nib unit. So, you know, I ran it under some hot, hot water. And I pulled and yanked and twisted. And I swear my thumb is just now recovering from all the effort that it took to get this nib and feed out of this collar. But it was worth it in the end. It's normally, any other pen that I've done this before, like Kaweco, it's not that difficult. And most other people that did this with their inks didn't have the difficulty that I have. It just takes a little work and finessing to get this out sometimes.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So I finally got the dang thing out.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And I had a whole, I took some pictures of the process as I was going through it on Instagram. I was all ready. I was all excited. I had my ink out. I had the nib unit out. And I had all these other nibs laying on the desk that I was going to try and swap in. And then it was probably a half an hour before I got to put in the first nib because I was so ticked off trying to get this nib out. So I finally got it out. And I pulled out the nibs on Kaweco nib units, Edison nib units, and Franklin Kristoff nib units, like I said before. All of the number five nibs, size number five nibs, which is the smaller size, like you would see in a Kaweco. And I slotted each of them into the collar.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And they all worked. So this should be really, really easy for anyone to do. I mean, even if the ink is your first fountain pen. I had difficulties getting the nib removed. But it really shouldn't be that tough. Mine, for some reason, was stuck more than normal. Dan probably superglued mine just to give me a hard time in my pen. And so I want to talk about the final product, Myke, and give some other tips because we had another listener and reader of the blog go into much, much more detail than I went into. But let's talk about our friends at Squarespace real quick, and then we'll get into that last little bit.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Our final sponsor for this week's episode of The Pen Addict is our friends at 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 enter the offer code INK at checkout. Squarespace. Start here. Go anywhere. When it comes to giving yourself a place online, there's nowhere better than Squarespace. They put all the power you need into your hands and take away the pain points like having to worry about hosting, scaling, or what to do if you get stuck with something. Squarespace's fantastic, clean, simple, and beautiful designs really allow you to craft a home for yourself online, and it's been totally redesigned and refined with Squarespace 7. Squarespace have applied to everything they've learned from powering millions of sites on the web to make an even better platform. They've made everything about Squarespace even more awesome than before. Squarespace 7 features even more stunning template designs, 15 new ones in total, that all feature responsive web design built right in. They've even partnered with some cool musicians, artists, architects, and chefs to develop brand new templates that cater to each profession. Squarespace now also features and embraces something called the cover page. This allows you to create really great looking single page websites with all of the power of a full Squarespace site. These are really cool for personal websites as a four page intro, or for standalone websites for an important announcement, and so much more. They've partnered with Getty Images to provide you with a great deal on awesome photography at just $10 an image, and have awesome Google Apps integration too, which helps you get email and collaboration tools on your custom domain. All of this awesome new stuff is still built on top of the core fantasticness of Squarespace. Like 24-7 support through live chat and email, they have teams located in New York, Dublin, and Ireland who are there to help you. Or like Squarespace's commerce platform, which allows anyone to add a store to their Squarespace site. That rock solid, fast hosting that I mentioned earlier, and so much more. And if you want to be able to stretch Squarespace that little bit further, the dev platform is now out of beta and is available to absolutely everyone. And they've added even more functionality to the platform, allowing you to take your Squarespace site further than you ever dreamt of before. If you sign up for a year with Squarespace, you'll also get yourself a free custom domain name, allowing you to choose exactly what you want your site to be called when Squarespace plans start at just $8 a month. Sign up for a free trial right now with no credit card required and start booting your website today by going to squarespace.com. When you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure that you use the offer code INK, I-N-K, to get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for The Pen Addict. Thank you so much to Squarespace for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, start here, go anywhere.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So Squarespace causes one of those problems like Hover does, where sometimes like I just buy domain names with Squarespace. Sometimes I just go create new templates for like new websites that I have some random idea to see if you have, they'll give you a 14-day trial on any new website you want to build. You can just build it under your own account, right? So I just go in and test things out and, you know, none of it ever goes live. But, you know, I get the bug sometimes and just go in and start playing around. Now, what if I made a website about this? And then they just all die, but they make it easy to go in there and test out all these other things. So I have fun playing around with it. And so maybe one of these days one of the other ones will stick. So who knows? We'll see.

'''Myke Hurley:''' The Squarespace Addict with Brad Dowdy.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So you have stuck with the Schmidt nib on yours, Myke?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, I really like it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' On your inks? Yeah. Yeah, no, I really like it too. I just wanted to see what other options were, and I had so many questions about it. And I ended up going with one of the Franklin Kristoff nibs that I had from the Model 40s that I bought some extra nibs on. So I ended up going with the Masuyama Needlepoint Extra Fine. And I finally, Myke, used the Fuyu Soyugun, the orange ink. That's your favorite ink?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Fuyugaki.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh, Fuyugaki. Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I always get those names mixed up. So it's the orange. It's a very bright orange. It goes with my orange-barreled ink. And in the extra, extra fine nib, it is really, really fantastic. So you don't just have to take my word for swapping out the stuff on the ink and listen to me talk about it. You can actually go to our friend Jeremiah, who blogs at Ionsomnia and is on Twitter at Ionsomnia. He did basically the sketchnotes version of what I just talked about. And he posted it yesterday. I was like, this is perfect because I've been fighting this all day and I want to talk about it on the podcast tomorrow. So I'll be sure to mention this and put this in the show notes. So if you are a visual person, Jeremiah has you covered. He illustrates the entire process of swapping out the nibs. I like the final step. The last step is excellent. So you'll have to check this out. But he has a good tip. The frustration that I was having getting the nib removed. He actually left the nib in the pen, left the nib unit in the pen and pulled it out from there. So he had more leverage in his right hand holding the full pen barrel and then wrapped like a rubber band around the nib for a little extra grip. And he, that's a much better way to do it than I did it. So it should be a lot easier for anyone trying to do that using his tip. And I will use that the next time when I need to swap this out, if I want to change it to anything else.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And then he goes even further. And having borrowed some of his pens and nibs before, he is a big fidgeter. He will not hesitate to like cut a man and if he needs to. And he talks about, you know, trimming down nibs with Dremels and making sure, you know, if they're too long, you know, you can mark them and cut them down and things like that. I didn't have to go through those steps with any of the nibs. They all fit size wise going through there. But yeah, Ionsomnia will cut a man if he needs to. So, and you got to go, you have to go check out his post just so you can get to step 11, which is enjoy and has a wonderful image of what I'm going to call Duke Nukem on a bender in his, in his post. So yeah, he swapped out. He put in a TWSBI nib in his. I don't know if he had to trim it up a little bit to get it in there. But it looks beautiful. The sketchnotes version of this is perfect. And thank you, Ionsomnia, for doing that. So we'll have that for everyone, everyone to see. So it's been quite a week, Myke. We had lots to talk about. And I think, I think I've got it covered. But as always, if I didn't get it covered or got it wrong, especially when I'm talking about 3,776 feet, you know, everyone should let me know. And how can they get in touch with us, Myke, to let me know how wrong I am about so many things?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Twitter's a great place. If you want to find us on Twitter, I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. And Brad is at dowdyism, D-O-W-D-Y-I-S-M. You can get the show notes for today's episode at relay.fm slash penaddict slash 128. That's where you're also going to find a link to go to our contact page. And you can send us a little email if you would like to. Brad blogs over at penaddict.com. And that's where you're going to want to go if you'd like to find the competition, is the word I'm looking for, to win the one-of-one edition of Fiend Notes.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' You guys, whoever wins this is going to be extremely lucky. This is legitimately awesome.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And don't forget, if you'd like to fill out our survey to help us with understanding a little bit more about you so we can continue to match the show with the great advertisers like we've had this week, go to podsurvey.com slash pen-addict. Take the survey and you could win. You could be in the chance of winning a $100 Amazon gift card. I want to talk about great sponsors. Thank you so much again to our sponsors this week. Karis Customs, Pen Chalet, and Squarespace. We could not do this show without you guys. Thank you so much for helping us out. We'll be back next week with another episode of the Pen Addict Podcast. Have I forgotten anything, Brad?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Nope, we're straight. Well then say goodbye, Brad. Goodbye, Brad.

[[Category:Podcast Transcripts]]
[[Category:The Pen Addict Podcast Transcript]]