I Can't Seem To Fill My Vanishing Point Converter Correctly

[Karmachanic]

Con-50 $4.99 free shipping

[cellmatrix]

Con-50 $4.99 free shipping

Thats a great deal!

[Karmachanic]

Yeah, search and you'll find. It was a gruelling five minutes, but I've fully recovered

[essayfaire]

Yeah, search and you'll find. It was a gruelling five minutes, but I've fully recovered

Thank you. That was much faster than figuring out what the heck was going on with Amazon, which other tech-savvy members of my household could also not figure out. We could never see what Smug saw.

[Karmachanic]

Thank you. That was much faster than figuring out what the heck was going on with Amazon, which other tech-savvy members of my household could also not figure out. We could never see what Smug saw.

Happy to help. It's an FPN thang!

[essayfaire]

We're talking at cross purposes, I'm afraid.

 

 

 

You asked me (in text which you've since edited out) if I had a link to the product listing that shows it shipped from and sold by Amazon US. The answer to that is the link to Amazon Australia was there even before you asked the question; but, to see that it is shipped from and sold by Amazon US, the delivery location has to be set to somewhere in Australia. That won't allow you to acquire it and have it sent to the US, but merely validates my earlier claim.

 

You then claimed that you see the item as shipping from Japan (as opposed to just being a "Japan import"); but your own screenshot proves otherwise.

 

 

 

You also claimed that the same product isn't being listed on Amazon.com. That is also factually incorrect.

 

 

Hi Smug,

 

I appreciate you're looking at this in depth; it is now moot as I have ordered some at a good price through Ali Express. Nonetheless, I discovered a few things:

 

1. When I click on your hyperlink, I am not brought to a product I can purchase, as you can see in the attached screenshot.

 

2. Amazon US does not imply the product is necessarily coming from the U.S.; it is a subsidiary of Amazon. If you click on the hyperlink you'll see this description :

 

Amazon US

Amazon US storefront

Amazon US (Amazon Export Sales LLC), helps you easily find products from around the world, make purchases and deliver with tracking to your doorstep. Customs is cleared on your behalf, providing a seamless end-to-end shopping experience.

 

Purchases from Amazon Export Sales LLC are subject to separate Amazon Global Store Conditions of Sale. Please visit following link for Conditions of Sale:

 

//www.amazon.com.au/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=202045290

 

3. I have no idea how you get the product to show It doesn't from here. I certainly see that you are able to ship to the States, but on my end that doesn't show. I've shown this puzzle to some others, and the consensus seems to be there is some sort of odd coding over at Amazon. If I type in the product id that I see in your search panel on the top, I get sent to a Whoops! Sorry! page on the Amazon site.

 

Thank you for your patience with helping me try to figure this out; 'tis a puzzlement, but at least I now have Con-50s ordered!

[A Smug Dill]

1. When I click on your hyperlink, I am not brought to a product I can purchase, as you can see in the attached screenshot.

Yes, I know. Your since-deleted question was whether I have a link to where I saw the product offered and shipped by Amazon US, if I recall correctly, not how you could order the item and have it delivered to the US with a click on a link to take you to such a product listing. I wasn't purporting to have provided the later and you didn't ask for it.

 

2. Amazon US does not imply the product is necessarily coming from the U.S.;

That is true. However, I have never seen a "shipped from and sold by Amazon US" item, out of dozens upon dozens of past orders all these years that was not dispatched from somewhere in the US according to the tracking info, even though sometimes by Amazon's own arrangements with its delivery partners/agents the items may be repackaged for forwarding upon arrival in Australia and clearing customs, using Australia Post or a local courier service (e.g. Fastway) for the "last mile".

 

3. I have no idea how you get the product to show It doesn't from here. I certainly see that you are able to ship to the States, but on my end that doesn't show.

I was using a VPN with an exit point in California, so as far as Amazon.com was concerned I could be physically in the US, when I took that screenshot. I also tried a VPN exit point in Germany, and the results were the same, other than my having to manually change the delivery location on Amazon.com to somewhere in the United States.

 

If I type in the product id that I see in your search panel on the top, I get sent to a Whoops! Sorry! page on the Amazon site.

 

I didn't search on Amazon.com. The URL in the hyperlink I gave is https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B00N2J2UGS/, so to quickly get to the same product on Amazon.com (if it's listed there at all), I simply changed amazon.com.au to amazon.com in the address bar of my browser, i.e.

 

https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B00N2J2UGS/

 

once I'm already looking at the product listing on the Australia site. (You can see the Amazon.com product listing URL in my screenshot.)

[A Smug Dill]

I feel I should let y'all know how it turned out.

 

I finally received what I ordered from Amazon earlier this morning. The square shipping slip and the label on the clear zip-lock bag enclosing the three converters both say CON-50, but in fact the three pieces are CON-40 converters.

 

Amazon promptly gave me a full refund when I complained and showed the customer service representative photos, but no offer was made to see if it could "source" three Pilot CON-50 converters among its product listings to send me as replacement. So, now I have another three "free" CON-40 converters, not that I don't already have a whole tray of them.

[Intensity]

Thanks for the update, A Smug Dill, I was about to order a set but now will not.

. . .

 

I saw this video on reddit, showing how to fill a Con-40 completely to get around 0.9mm of ink:

https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/comments/inegh2/how_to_properly_fill_a_con40_by_pilot_measured/

 

Basically the person uses an empty converter taken out of a pen just to demonstrate what happens, but the point is that you do the same thing while the converter is attached to a nib. It looks like they fill the converter partially first until the bottom of the piston sealing disc is halfway up the converter. About 1/3rd of the converter is filled with ink that way. Then they flip the converter with nib pointing up and push the ink up and down until some air is pushed out of the converter, and the ink is moved closer to the piston. Then they dip the nib/converter back into ink and fill some more. Repeat pushing out air trapped between the ink and the piston by moving the piston up and down in upside-down position. Finally dip into ink again and fill completely. Someone recommends pushing out a couple drops so the ink doesn't burp due to overfilling.

Edited September 9, 2020 by Intensity

[cellmatrix]

Refilling a pilot cartridge with a pipette or syringe seems so much easier and less messy to me