I recently acquired a fantastic Platinum pocket pen with an all stainless barrel that's got black incised stripes.
The nib it came with is an 18k soft medium, it writes beautifully when used with a somewhat heavy hand, but starves for ink when written lightly... The nib is also *very* well seated on the feed, which has prevented me from doing any tine adjustments. As a temporary fix I bought a damaged plastic Plat with the same nib and feed configuration, this time a broad, with less flex, it has better writing characteristics, but in this more rigid form the extremely squared off profile of the tipping makes it very fussy about writing angle.
The original medium nib is also ground with a very squared off profile (side to side) and I'm thinking that may be a contributing issue to its writing "characteristics" as well.
I own quite a few Platinum pens, ranging from early cartridge "Honests" to current production, but these two nibs are the only ones to give me any trouble. I've also never noticed this square cross section on any other nib, it's almost like an italic, but thick enough top to bottom that it has no cross stroke to down stroke variation.
My intuition is that slightly widening the gap at the tipping with a wedge is going to fix the medium/soft, but the firm/broad may never be an easy writer unless the tipping is rounded off some, or I stub it (seems like an excellent candidate!). Another complication is the fact that these nibs are the type that slide on to the feed by a channel and ears on the underside of the nib (think Lamy Safari), which limits the ways you can manipulate the tine geometry, plus plastic feeds aren't easy to re-form to follow a new tine profile, so adjustments have to be tailored to keep good feed contact as well...
Has anyone else tangled with nibs like this and if so what solutions did you find?
Bookmarks