I like fountain pens…
This is, perhaps, an understatement…
I’ve always been on the hunt for the perfect pen, all the way back to
the days of school, when most kids were using the closest Bic Biro and I was
saving up for Berol Handwriting pens, but as the years went on, I realised that
there was no such thing as the perfect pen.
This, of course, did not stop me from continuing to search for it…
As with all things, I enjoy variety, but most of the time I write with
the modified Pilot MR I made a short while back, it satisfies the need for
precise writing, and with the Heart of Darkness Ink I normally use, never jams
and a small amount of ink goes a long way. The drawback with that particular
pen is that it can’t use thicker inks, and any ink that doesn’t have a good
lubrication to it will quickly have me cursing while I’m resting the nibs in
cleaning fluids.
That said, a while ago I saw an ink that inspired me in a way that most
had not, this ink was deep black, but with tiny silver particles all the way
through it, so that when you made a line, it sparkled when it dried.
This is Diamine Night Sky…
The thing with inks that contain particles of any sort is that they’ll
gum up most fine nibs in no time at all, requiring that you clean through the
nib or force ink past it to get it flowing again, and having to unscrew a pen
five times a paragraph is a massive chore.
That’s where the TWSBI 580 comes into its own, by having a twist
mechanism that vacuum fills the pen in one direction, it can also be used to
reprime the pen and clear the mechanism when it starts to gum up, without having to dismantle it
completely.
That said…
I did a few lines after just loading the pen, and as will be evident
even from low-res images, the flow of the ink quickly becomes erratic and needs
repriming, and while it never completely stops, you do have to go over a lot of
your lines more than once in order to maintain the structure of the
letters.
After a paragraph or two, the nib looked like this…
And so I put the ink back in the bottle, reloaded with deep dark blue
and flushed it through a few times to make sure I’d got most of the residue
out, but found that even when the ink had been flushed, traces of the particles
remained.
And actually provided the quality that the original ink had promised…
The thing with this ink is that the particles within sink at a very
rapid rate of knots, so that when you put the pen down even for a half minute,
you get a buildup of silver occurring, and as a result, when you’re writing with it, the silver all builds
up in the nib, which quickly clogs the nib and requires that you wipe it off
before trying again.
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| A minute after shaking vigorously... |
With regards to Night Sky though, it’s beautiful, it truly is, when you
have to clean the stuff out of your nib, the tissue you use comes away streaked
with the black and silver of an Ocean of Stars, but until it finds a way to
flow, it’ll be staying in the bottle…
