I was at Expo last week when some of my fellow core team passed me an envelope and a box as a present for all the time's I'd helped them over the last six months, now it has to be said that I'd never considered I was helping, just talking to good friends, but they'd really appreciated it, and so they'd got me something as a thank you.
This is a TWSBI 580 Piston Filling Fountain Pen, and it's turning out to be one of the most overengineered pens I've ever had...
This is no bad thing :)
Every part of this pen can be dismantled by the user, and it even includes the relevant spanner and silicon grease required to keep the parts moving smoothly.
Hidden in the underneath of the box just in case no one else looks :)
With this in mind, I set about dismantling it to see what the score was, it's a piston filling mechanism, meaning that you just dip the whole of the nib in the ink and then twist the top of it to engage the piston within and draw the ink up into the pen. The added bonus of this is that it also primes the pen for immediate use.
Set of instructions within the box to confirm what everything is and what everything does.
The nib on the pen is what they call an EF (Extra Fine), but it's a european EF, not a Japanese EF, so it's broader than I normally use, but the flow on it is excellent, there's no give at all in the nib and it's got a nice wide barrel which is ideal for those of us like me with big fingers.
Overall, lovely pen, really nice to use, and it appeals to the tinkerer in me, but because of it's construction, it's also an ideal pen for those wanting to learn how fountain pens work and figure out how to better use them. There are a number of different TWSBI pens out there, but this one is perfect for me.
All I have to do now is resist the temptation to keep pulling it to bits...