What I've Learned So Far - A Noobs Tale

[Wuddus]

Conclusions:

If your budget, or your principles, prevent you spending £50+ on a pen, there's still nothing to stop you enjoying using fountain pens. I‘ve had a lot of success exploring the ultra cheap pens. Yes, some of them needed a little refining, but over several months I got a good range of different pens for less than £30 total. Yes, I could have gotten one low end TWSBI instead, or maybe one half decent vintage pen, or even one cheap pen and then upgraded the nib, or I could have tripled that amount and just got one nice Platinum 3776.

I'm really glad I didn't.

Not only did I get 7 very different pens (plus a few duplicates) for less than £30, I now have a much better understanding of what I like and what I don't in a fountain pen. I have different options for different moods or different writing tasks. I have also learned to refine and swap out nibs, write with obliques, and fix a choked feed. If I had spent the same money on one lower-mid range pen, I wouldn't have learned any of this, and more importantly, I wouldn't have had as much fun.

Money. Well. Spent.

In another thread on this forum, I mentioned that I wanted to learn all these lessons £1 or £2 at a time, and not spend big money finding out what doesn’t work for me. I also said that by the time I’d spent £50, I wanted to have discovered at least one of my ideal pens. As it happens, I found one by the time I’d spent £30. That was the OHTO Tasche. Three pens is really what I wanted to achieve. A pocket pen for away from home, a general scribbler for grocery lists or phone notes, and a desk pen for writing letters. I thought I had found my ideal pens for all of these three categories, plus have others to play around with too. But I hadn't ...

Close, but no coconut!

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In theory, these three should have been it. Job done. Unfortunately, I was only really satisfied with one out of the three. I'm also going to bring inks back into the equation here too.

The OHTO Tasche is a perfect choice for pocket carry should I chose to leave the house armed with a fountain pen. I’m really chuffed with this purchase. For this pen I use what I consider to be fairly conservative ink colours. Good looking inks, but not too informal or off-piste. Being a blue bodied pen, it made sense to stay within the blue spectrum with inks. I already have Diamine’s Twilight, and Teal, and plan to add Sargasso Sea. All three should look great coming from this pen. I have now tried Teal, and it was flowing a little too dry, so I'll probably tweak this pen similar to what I did with the 250. If I can get the flow the same, I'll be as happy as I can get with this pen

Cheap as it is, the Dollar calligraphy pen is the nicest writing italic pen I have, and it has the good sized piston filled tank too. While it looks and feels cheap, as a desk pen, nobody else see that. It's comfortable, the ink flows freely (now) and the oblique nib adds a little extra character to my writing. However, I still wasn’t completely happy with it. It just feels TOO cheap, even for me - and that's saying something! One evening I sat staring at it, giving it the evil eye. Why couldn't it feel like the 3008? Those piston fillers cost even less, and yet felt like far superior pens. If only the 3008 had an italic nib ... and that's when the penny finally dropped. I shopped around on ebay, and for a couple of quid, I found a 1.5mm stub nib to fit to one of the Wing Sung 3008 Demonstrators. While even cheaper than the 717, the 3008 feels a much nicer pen to use on those long letters to penpals, and now I should be able do that with a nice italic nib. In fact I liked the 3008 so much, I ordered another couple of spares for £1.23 each in case I can’t get them in future, bringing the total to four 3008s – three with F/M nibs, and one with a 1.5mm stub. For writing with this, I can either use the conservative colours listed for the Tasche, or my slightly more adventurous yet still elegant inks, namely Chocolate Brown, Grape, and potentially Oxblood too, but I still haven't pulled the trigger on that one yet. All these inks stand proudly off the page, with just a hint of non-conformity. Stylish, elegant, different.

The Jinhao 250 is perfect for chucking any ink in, including the dregs in the bottom of a bottle (by using a syringe) that the piston fillers can’t access, and just being a general purpose scribbler about the house. It’s also smart enough to chuck in a pocket, irrespective of what I’m wearing, and I’d be less upset about losing that than the Tasche. Being of a bulkier size, it’s a lot less pocketable in summer when pockets are sparse, but it’s still another option if I don’t fancy carrying the Tasche for any reason. In fact, I would go as far to say that the 250 would be a perfect one pen solution for me, if only I could trust that cap. If I had to pick just one out of my entire array and ditch the lot, this £1.80 bargain would probably be the one so far, with the Tasche a close second. For inks, I can use any of those listed above in the 250, of either of my two “fun” inks, Diamine’s Burnt Sienna and Sherwood Green. Those eight inks should cover everything I ever want to do with a fountain pen. They give me a good working spectrum, with plenty of options to suit my mood, but without me hoarding more ink than I'll ever get through.

That leaves the Parker Vector set relegated to a drawer where it belongs, only seeing light of day for the occasional greetings card written with a broad italic nib. Unfortunately, it also leaves the spare 3008 Demonstrators, the 6359, and the X450 (all pens I really like using) relegated to the sidelines too. Time will tell if these all continue to get occasional use, or get gifted away, or just reside in a drawer waiting for one of the others to break or get lost. Out of everything I bought, only two were disappointments. These were the Parker Vector (the first, and most expensive acquisition), and to a lesser degree the Dollar 717 Calligraphy. However, these two pens account for about 40% of the total spend. With the other 60%, I got eight pens that I really like. That’s all part of the learning curve though. I’m just glad it was a cheap learning curve.

My concern about the cap on the 250, led me to try out one more uber cheapo pen, and on order with the italic nib for the 3008 is a Baoer 388. That again was ridiculously cheap, another stainless bodied pen, but with a cap that is renowned for being stubborn to remove. With the new nib for the 3008, and with this last pen, that SHOULD be me finished. If the new nib isn't great, I'll tweak it. If I'm still not happy, I'll risk regrinding the original nib on that pen. One way or another, I will get one of the 3008s up and running to replace the Dollar 717. As for the Baoer 388 and Jinhao 250, they'll do battle, and the best of the two will become the everyday scribbler. I am now confident that I've got what I want, and I will have gotten there without hitting £35, and with learning a lot in the process. As of right now, I am still waiting for the nail buffers, the italic nib, the extra 3008s, and the Baoer 388 (which altogether cost less than a tenner). However, I am still enjoying my array of new pens each and every day.

At the moment, I have no desire to "progress" to more expensive pens. If I do, one of two things will happen. I'll either buy something that'll make me disinterested in pens that I currently enjoy using, or I'll keep using the old stuff, and feel I've wasted my money on the more expensive buy. Either way, I'll not feel I'm getting full value from my purchases. However, as so many pens that I like using have already been demoted to "secondary" choices, this really is a good incentive for not buying any more pens. I got back into fountain pens to use them instead of ballpoints, not to fill drawers with them.

So this is my journey so far. Cheap, fun, and hopefully the start of many more years of fountain pen use. Enough choice to not get bored, but so much as to feel swamped, and owned by my own possessions.

Thanks for following along, and even if my choices and preferences differ from yours, I hope it was worth taking the time to read.