People who don't post

[SlowMovingTarget]

I used to post my pens, but I've been cured of that.

I have a Waterman Expert that posts nicely, but it unbalances the pen during writing. But that wasn't enough to stop me from posting. I got a Cross ATX that posts and is still balanced, and it won't scratch the barrel. So my posting habit was encouraged. My Twsbi Eco posted just fine, and was still balanced reasonably well. No cure there.

My habits for attempting neatness, even while filling, led me to use syringes to fill converter pens. Like, for example, my Jinhao x750, which I posted, of course. The inkcident happened when filling the Jinhao with a sample of Noodler's Ink Liberty's Elysium. When you fill with a syringe, you're not dipping the nib into the ink, so it doesn't get wet and doesn't flow right away. The ink has to flow through the feed, and exchange air. This can be slow, and I didn't really know about priming by gently goosing the converter to push ink into the feed. Instead, my solution was to set the pen nib down in a pen cup and let gravity assist.

Assist it did. Gravity assisted most of the ink into the cap. The Jinhao x750 has an opaque metal cap, so I had no idea as to how amazingly effective gravity had been in this case. When I uncap a pen, the cap is in my left hand, angled down, and I flip the pen around and insert. Posted!

I tried to write. Yay! The ink is flowing. I rather liked the color. Let's write some pangrams... Why is my hand all wet? Where is this coming from? How? What?!?

There was ink slowly working its way into the crook of my hand from around the cap. I'd had my coffee already, so I didn't pull the cap off right there at my desk. I got over to a sink and discovered that at least two-thirds of the ink in the converter had taken up residence in the cap. I poured the ink out and began flushing the thing, lamenting the lost volume of Blue.

That, more than anything else, cured me of posting my pens. I began to notice small droplets of ink that migrated from the nib of my other pens, just regular nib creep or a careless bounce. Yep... no more posting for me.

I suppose I'll have to make an exception if I get a Kaweco Sport. But I'm now firmly, generally, in the no-posting camp. Ink belongs in the reservoir, on the paper, and only occasionally on my fingers. It doesn't belong on the pen barrel.