Sunday, July 27, 2014

Further pen review...

My dragon pen's nib came apart at the wrong place.  I went to add ink to the reservoir, and had the nib come apart above the metal ring where it joins the pen, instead of having the metal ring unscrew.

Made a mess, it did.

It's a beautiful pen, and I have since completed repairs*, but it is not at all a practical piece. 

So, Odysseus got me a set of four Jinhao pens for practical, everyday carry and use.  These four (Jinhao model 250):



I have blue ink in the black pen and the silver pen, green ink in the pen with red marbling, and purple ink in the burgundy pen.

There was a minor problem with the pens, though: the ink wasn't flowing well in two of the four--the silver one and the burgundy one. 

So, I started searching online to see if I could figure out how to fix the pens.  They're quite comfortable to write with, considering that they're heavier than plastic, and a nice bit chunkier, making it less hard on my poor, sore knuckles to write with.  Nice pens.  I'd hate for something that could be fixed to cause me to set them up as display pieces only.

Turns out...the fix was simple.  The problem was that the ink wasn't feeding.  I searched that problem online, and found this site.  The metal part of the nib fit too tightly against the plastic part, which is what feeds the ink.  Easy fix: I just gently laid the metal part against a pad of paper, and pressed down to separate the nib from the feeder, just a bit. 

And now...all of the pens work.  And work well. 

And I am happy.

*The fix for the dragon pen was simple: I took a frozen bottle of water and held it against the metal ring the nib wasn't supposed to come off of,  and it came right off.  After I cleaned up the spilled ink, I applied a bit of super glue to the threads of the gold metal ring that the nib screwed onto, and put the pieces together.  That shouldn't happen again. 

2 comments:

  1. Interesting... I gave up on those a long time ago.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I love my fountain pens. And it makes a whole lot more sense to have refillable cartridges than disposable ones.

      Delete

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