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Thread: Iron Gall Inks

  1. #21
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    Default Re: Iron Gall Inks

    Quote Originally Posted by silverlifter View Post
    Yep. I love KWZ's IG inks. I just wish he made one or two of them a little drier
    I have found them wet, but that's what I like. Great flow for my purposes with broads and stubs. I can say that ESSRI, Salix, and Scabiosa are drier, but I opened the tines on those JoWo and Schmidt eyedropper nibs and they now flow like the KWZ.

    Are you using fine nibs with the KWZ?

  2. #22
    Senior Member silverlifter's Avatar
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    Default Re: Iron Gall Inks

    Quote Originally Posted by sgphoto View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by silverlifter View Post
    Yep. I love KWZ's IG inks. I just wish he made one or two of them a little drier
    I have found them wet, but that's what I like. Great flow for my purposes with broads and stubs. I can say that ESSRI, Salix, and Scabiosa are drier, but I opened the tines on those JoWo and Schmidt eyedropper nibs and they now flow like the KWZ.

    Are you using fine nibs with the KWZ?
    Western fines to mediums. But some of my vintage pens, like a 1941 DuoVac with an ebonite feed, really are wet writers and I can only use older style IG inks in them. Konrad suggested adding a little gum arabic to make his inks write drier, but I'm no amateur chemist...
    Vintage. Cursive italic. Iron gall.

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  4. #23
    Senior Member Yazeh's Avatar
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    Default Re: Iron Gall Inks

    Quote Originally Posted by silverlifter View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by sgphoto View Post
    Thanks for the suggestions. Have I been misinformed about iron gall inks? It seems I've heard the horror stories about iron gall inks so are those just anecdotal or is their any basis in facts (other than not allowing ig inks to dry on feeds)?.
    It's FUD, in my opinion and experience. Mostly fuelled by Ken Crooker's (probably well meaning, but incredibly poorly conceived) blog post from years ago that is still referred to by alarmists like it is some sort of actual experiment....

    To be fair to Ken, he does make the same caveat. Sadly, most don't read that section it seems.

    There is an extensive list of IG inks maintained here: https://gdoc.pub/doc/e/2PACX-1vQohlC...S7kVTuH5M5BvPr
    Great to know. Now I can use Scabiosa in some of my vintage pens

  5. #24
    Senior Member welch's Avatar
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    Default Re: Iron Gall Inks

    Quote Originally Posted by silverlifter View Post
    IG's are terrific inks. If they are well made, and almost all are, you can treat them like, well, a pen with ink in it. Not some sort of biohazard that requires ritual cleaning, votives to the gods and the ocassional first born
    No particular opinion about IG inks, but Silverlifter's comment about ink that requires "ritual cleaning" caught my attention. For more than a few years, I have noticed, on FPN and here, "ritual" comments that assume it is necessary to tear a pen down to the smallest parts just to change inks. Even to pull a nib off of a P-45 or Pelikan nib unit. Usually includes a suggestion that people avoid the P-51 because it is "so hard" to flush.

    Where did this come from? Does someone say that an ink might explode?

  6. #25
    Senior Member silverlifter's Avatar
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    Default Re: Iron Gall Inks

    Quote Originally Posted by welch View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by silverlifter View Post
    IG's are terrific inks. If they are well made, and almost all are, you can treat them like, well, a pen with ink in it. Not some sort of biohazard that requires ritual cleaning, votives to the gods and the ocassional first born
    No particular opinion about IG inks, but Silverlifter's comment about ink that requires "ritual cleaning" caught my attention. For more than a few years, I have noticed, on FPN and here, "ritual" comments that assume it is necessary to tear a pen down to the smallest parts just to change inks. Even to pull a nib off of a P-45 or Pelikan nib unit. Usually includes a suggestion that people avoid the P-51 because it is "so hard" to flush.

    Where did this come from? Does someone say that an ink might explode?
    I have always assumed it comes from people who didn't grow up with fountain pens. They either assume, thanks to canards promulgated in places like reddit, that some inks are "troublesome", eg, iron galls, the one type of ink that has been happily inked in pens since BI (the dark times before the internets), or that "the hobby" exclusively involves buying pens and inks, field stripping them, photographing them, and using them solely to produce currently inked posts...
    Vintage. Cursive italic. Iron gall.

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    Senior Member Yazeh's Avatar
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    Default Re: Iron Gall Inks

    Quote Originally Posted by silverlifter View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by welch View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by silverlifter View Post
    IG's are terrific inks. If they are well made, and almost all are, you can treat them like, well, a pen with ink in it. Not some sort of biohazard that requires ritual cleaning, votives to the gods and the ocassional first born
    No particular opinion about IG inks, but Silverlifter's comment about ink that requires "ritual cleaning" caught my attention. For more than a few years, I have noticed, on FPN and here, "ritual" comments that assume it is necessary to tear a pen down to the smallest parts just to change inks. Even to pull a nib off of a P-45 or Pelikan nib unit. Usually includes a suggestion that people avoid the P-51 because it is "so hard" to flush.

    Where did this come from? Does someone say that an ink might explode?
    I have always assumed it comes from people who didn't grow up with fountain pens. They either assume, thanks to canards promulgated in places like reddit, that some inks are "troublesome", eg, iron galls, the one type of ink that has been happily inked in pens since BI (the dark times before the internets), or that "the hobby" exclusively involves buying pens and inks, field stripping them, photographing them, and using them solely to produce currently inked posts...
    So true.. those were the good old times, that you used any ink you pleased and there were no pundits, who preach this and that. After all we can use whatever ink we want in our pen and if something happen we learn. What's wrong with that?

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  10. #27
    Senior Member guyy's Avatar
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    Default Re: Iron Gall Inks

    In the old days, at least around these parts, there was Quink, Skrip, Waterman, Pelikan, & Montblanc ink, all of reasonable dye content, and formulated to be as little trouble as possible for repair departments. Japanese inks were not available.

    Inks today are made with different goals in mind: to please gel pen users with eye-searing colors and glitter or paranoid nerds concerned with the long term viability of their ink swatches, grocery lists and warranty cards. Being optimized for things other than low maintenance, not all modern inks are appropriate for all pens.

    For that reason, it’s reasonable that people talk more about fitting an ink to a pen. The problem is the people never want to take the obvious conclusion to heart: if you’re worried about what ink does to your pen, use a washable blue from Parker, Waterman, Pelikan, Lamy or MB and stick with it.

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  12. #28
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    Default Re: Iron Gall Inks

    Quote Originally Posted by guyy View Post

    For that reason, it’s reasonable that people talk more about fitting an ink to a pen. The problem is the people never want to take the obvious conclusion to heart: if you’re worried about what ink does to your pen, use a washable blue from Parker, Waterman, Pelikan, Lamy or MB and stick with it.
    Or use your favorite ink in a cheaper pen and don't forget to enjoy it most of all

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  14. #29
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    Default Re: Iron Gall Inks

    I'm using ESSRI in a Pelikan M1000 and KWZ IG Blue #5 in a Yard-O-Led Grand Victorian and a host of other IG inks in other pens. I'm enjoying it.

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    welch (May 30th, 2020)

  16. #30
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    Default Re: Iron Gall Inks

    Iron gall ink can mean everything from Pelikan 4001 Blue-Black, which reportedly has just "a touch" of iron gall to highly concentrated dip pen inks that oxidize to a rust color. Of course the former is a well-regarded fountain pen ink with a long and successful track record, and the latter is something you don't put in a fountain pen. Ask yourself what is the track record of a particular ink - is it an old, well-regarded color from a known manufacturer? Or is this a newly-created ink that doesn't have any track record? Certainly you can get bad ink from long-established makers and new inks can be fine, but I'd be a little more concerned if I'm using a novel, highly-concentrated boutique type of ink (whether IG or not), as opposed to something like a Waterman or Pelikan product. I guess the lesson is that just because it's "iron gall" doesn't mean it's necessarily good or bad. Though I will say, one thing the traditional "dry" IG inks do nicely is to work with cheap paper, and another they can do is capture that "classic" blue-black look and behavior.
    Last edited by Ray-VIgo; June 1st, 2020 at 02:02 PM.

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