A Review Of The Nemosine Singularity Demonstrator Fountain Pen

[LizEF]

I don't know where the bodies of my Nemosines ended up (I might have sold them or lost them when I moved last year) but if I find them again I will buy a couple new nibs to see if they work better. I really really liked that pen (besides the (bleep) nib).

 

I wonder if it was actually the feeds that were bad. IMO, nibs are easier to tune - you can widen the gap between the tines and smooth the tip. But the feed is something of a mystery to me - the only thing you can due to it is scrape away plastic and hope it's in the right spot and to the right degree (I've never tried this).

 

Here's my Nemosine story:

 

I had purchased a bunch of x750s (Amazon) to see what all the hoopla was, intending to give all but one or two away and to use Zebra G nibs on one that I kept. I decided I liked two colors well enough to keep, but didn't like the fat (to me) nib that came with it, so I looked on Amazon for a #6 EF nib and found the Nemosine ones, and ordered. When the Nemosine EF arrived, it went into the Jinhao and works beautifully there.

 

Later, the Singularity was getting a lot of hoopla (positive and cracky), and I was suspicious and curious about all the spontaneous cracking reports, and really curious about the .6 stub (I had a 1.1 stub for my Lamy and surprisingly liked it), so I ordered (not Amazon, but a FP retailer) a Singularity with a .6 stub and eyedroppered it with some Noodler's Apache Sunset. It was fabulous! One day I accidentally dropped it onto concrete and the lip of the cap cracked! I immediately ordered a replacement (same vendor, soon after the first). It arrived with the cap lip already cracked. A bit of back and forth and I soon had a third, uncracked beautiful Singularity. I inked it up and shortly thereafter, it burped! Arg! I inked up the second one - it burped too! I inked up the first one (using a converter, not eyedroppered) - it burped too! I had a bunch of burpers!

 

I tried a nib in a Jinhao, and it burped. I tried nib and feed in a Jinhao and it burped! I tried a Jinhao converter in a Nemosine pen and it burped. I ordered new converters of a different brand - nice tight fit (not like the Singularity converters which were kinda loose). Better, but still burped. I left the pen upright (I usually store horizontal) in a pen cup over night and tried it the next morning. Perfect! I wrote for about half an hour - beautiful.

 

I no longer ink my Nemosines through the nib and feed. I fill the converter directly, prime the feed, screw the piston back to suck back excess ink, and after that, all is well. This makes no logical sense to me, but it works. I suspect if I wrote with one for multiple hours, it might re-saturate the feed and burp again.

 

When I merge this with your story, I have to wonder: perhaps the feeds you were using were all from a bad lot which didn't let ink flow well. Perhaps all mine are from a lot at the other end of the spectrum - too much ink flow. Nemosine's guarantee (or whatever it is) does say they'll fix it if there's something wrong with the ink flow (for $5) - which makes me wonder if they don't have frequent ink flow problems...

[onetwothree]

LizEF,

Interesting. I presume that my experience could be in part due to the feed but i'm confident that the nibs I received (I believe 5 different nibs) were all of very bad quality. The feed might have exacerbated the problem (or perhaps the feeds are OK, i don't really know) but the nibs were definitely awful. I can say this for 2 reasons: 1. the space between the nibs was almost non existent, the brass sheets from goulet pen would not fit at all in between the tines. The nib that eventually I got to work (the stub nib) I had to open up considerably and even after opening up I could barely squeeze one of the brass sheets with considerable effort, and only then is that I got it to work but very dry. 2.- I got one pen/nib combination to work after working on the nib, so definitely the nib was a key variable.

Also, I tried 3 different pens with 3 different (2 lose nibs so 5 nibs total) nibs and feeds so this would mean 3x different feeds were defective, still a poor quality control.

Ha! Now I'm tearing apart my house (I'm usually organized with my pens but I loved last year and the Nemosines are missing) trying to find the bodies of those Nemosines to see if I can try them with recently produced nibs!

 

Edit: I actually just found 2x of my Nemosine bodies! so what I am thinking is I will grab one of them and circle through all the nibs I can find and post how they write.

Edited February 23, 2017 by onetwothree

[LizEF]

the brass sheets from goulet pen would not fit at all in between the tines. ..

 

Wow! OK, yes, that definitely sounds like a nib problem.

 

Ha! Now I'm tearing apart my house (I'm usually organized with my pens but I loved last year and the Nemosines are missing) trying to find the bodies of those Nemosines to see if I can try them with recently produced nibs!

 

Edit: I actually just found 2x of my Nemosine bodies! so what I am thinking is I will grab one of them and circle through all the nibs I can find and post how they write.

 

If you have a standard #6 nib in another pen, it should fit in your Nemosine

[onetwothree]

After thoroughly cleaning the pens (I stored them cleaned but apparently a tiny amount of residue remained and the nib had enough ink to stain fingers if touched and I figured it could end up clogging the slit/feed so I cleaned it with an ultrasound machine).

I tested the following nibs Extra fine, medium, broad, 0.6mm and 1.1mm stubs.

I had previously done some work on the broad and the 1.1mm to spread the tines considerably (as otherwise they would not write).

However, I need to "downgrade" my criticism as they are not quite as awful as I remembered. Three of them are actually usable and one of them is actually quite good.

The medium simply would not write so i am not including a writing sample.

The extra fine started writing VERY dry and after half a sentence started skipping. If I put more pressure starts writing a little bit more but quickly dries up again.

The 0.6mm stub writes consistently (at least for the 3 sentences that I wrote) but it writes on the dry side).

The 1.1mm stub writes OK and somehow wet (I spread the nibs considerably, when I got this nib it was useless).

The broad actually writes very wet, broad and fairly smooth (a bit of 'toothy' feeling since the tines are now quite spread but it is very acceptable and even pleasant if you like some feedback, I do).

 

I did notice something. When inking the pen, a lot of bubbles form in the converter. The ink bottle I used was 100% full and I dipped the pen all the way in, I also turned the converter's knob very slow and still got bubbles (with both feeds). So I think LizEF you are getting somewhere with the idea that the feeds might also be quite inconsistent (I feel as if i'm creating a small vacuum when turning the knob inside the ink bottle and get bubbles as a result.)

 

For this quick test I used Lamy Blue-black ink. Now, I know LAMY is not the most lubricated/wet ink out there, I could try it with a wetter ink but that would not be fair either so I settled with something in the middle. As for the paper I used Tomoe River paper (for photos) and copier paper. I did not take pictures of the copier paper because they were awful. What happens with copier paper is that the drier nibs (EF, Medium and the 0.6mm stub simply stopped working altogether) while the wetter nibs (the 1.1 and broad gulped a lot of ink in the paper.

 

I do think they are "less terrible" than the idea I had in my mind prior to this test. I suspect that the reason lies on the fact back in the days I never really tried higher quality, smooth paper (Tomoe river) simply because back then I did not used to buy better quality paper. That being said I still think my Nemosines (the nibs in particular) are Mediocre at best if not flat out bad. 3/5 nibs (the other 2 nibs do work but after I have to work on them and even so they suffer from the opposite problem in which they are too wet and soak the cheap paper) that don't work at all on the most common type of paper that I will work with is simply unacceptable on a pen that is meant to be affordable.

 

The good news is that now I have 5 nibs that I can use for experimentation/learning to tune my own nibs as the house were I live now has a very nice workshop set up with some interesting grinding tools. I would not mind messing these nibs (if that is even possible!? ha!). I think I will start using the broad nib on tomoe/rhodia paper though, it is quite good actually.

 

[onetwothree]

Quick update. Based on LizEF I ventured to test some of my #6 nibs on this pen. So I can fit very easily and tight (in a good sense) Edison's Pen and Franklin Christoph's nib and feed (without the unit casing) as well as Conklin feed + nib (Conklin has a very similar cheap plastic feed which I don't like, I assume Monteverde's nib would fit as well but I only have 1 monteverde pen and it is inked so I did not try it).

This is fantastic news because now I can do this:

That is a Franklin Christoph 1.9mm Music nib on a Nemosine pen! Inkflow is phenomenal and I even think this nib + feed fit better than the original (it is very easy to put inside but it is tight enough that it is harder to pull out than the original nemosine, I suspect because the ebonite provides more friction than the plastic of the original feed.

 

I am so happy that I found this thread because now I can revive 2 pens that I kind of liked but could not use because of (bleep) nibs and now I can virtually many of my favorite nibs, including a custom grind Mike Matsuyama 14k!

 

[LizEF]

Quick update. Based on LizEF I ventured to test some of my #6 nibs on this pen. So I can fit very easily and tight (in a good sense) Edison's Pen and Franklin Christoph's nib and feed ...

 

 

Interesting report! I'm glad all is not lost / wasted on your Nemosines. But I'm curious about fitting the "foreign" feeds into your pens - on mine, like on the Jinhao x750, the feed has a flat part on one side (rather than being completely round), and, of course, the hole in the section where you insert the feed has a corresponding flat part. As far as I can tell, my Jinhao and Nemosine feeds are identical (I suspect Nemosine buy them from the same source as Jinhao).

 

So, do your Edison and Franklin Christoph feeds also have flat sides? Or do your Nemosines not have the flat side?

[onetwothree]

 

Interesting report! I'm glad all is not lost / wasted on your Nemosines. But I'm curious about fitting the "foreign" feeds into your pens - on mine, like on the Jinhao x750, the feed has a flat part on one side (rather than being completely round), and, of course, the hole in the section where you insert the feed has a corresponding flat part. As far as I can tell, my Jinhao and Nemosine feeds are identical (I suspect Nemosine buy them from the same source as Jinhao).

 

So, do your Edison and Franklin Christoph feeds also have flat sides? Or do your Nemosines not have the flat side?

I'm glad as well.

Surprisingly I think because of the ebonite material, i think the edison/FC nibs/feed combination make a tighther seal (e.g. I don't think it will drip) and they fit nicely and easily, I would venture to say that they even fit better than the originals.

As far as dimentions they are roughly the same. I used my calipers and it seems that the Nemosine feed is a FRACTION of a mm longer (e.g. edison's feed fit easily within the span of the nemosine but not vise versa, however I only need to adjust the caliper less than 1mm to fix that issue. In terms of girth (which is ultimately what matters) the opposite seems to occur, the Nemosine plastic feed fits inside the measurements of the edison but not vise versa and this difference is also less than 1 mm, perhaps .5 or less).

The countours of both feeds are identical. The Edison nib has considerably more fins than the nemosine (and as result it feels heavier and looks considerably bulkier/bigger. However even though it looks a lot bulkier, the measurements corroborate that if a difference exist, it is really really tiny, less than 1mm for sure!).

The section countour is also the same (I made an ugly diagram). And the section contour for feed + nib is also the same for both. In any event I'm fairly confident that this pen using an edison/FC feed and nib would not leak (I will test this tonight by leaving a full barrel, not converter, full of colored water and leaving the pen upside down). I will report tomorrow. But like I said, the fit of the edison's nib feel much tighter (in a good way, I did not have to force it in or anything, it went in super easy) I think due to the ebonite having better friction against the walls of the section compared to the plastic feed.

[LizEF]

I'm glad as well.

Surprisingly I think because of the ebonite material, i think the edison/FC nibs/feed combination make a tighther seal (e.g. I don't think it will drip) and they fit nicely and easily, I would venture to say that they even fit better than the originals.

As far as dimentions they are roughly the same. I used my calipers and it seems that the Nemosine feed is a FRACTION of a mm longer (e.g. edison's feed fit easily within the span of the nemosine but not vise versa, however I only need to adjust the caliper less than 1mm to fix that issue. In terms of girth (which is ultimately what matters) the opposite seems to occur, the Nemosine plastic feed fits inside the measurements of the edison but not vise versa and this difference is also less than 1 mm, perhaps .5 or less).

The countours of both feeds are identical. The Edison nib has considerably more fins than the nemosine (and as result it feels heavier and looks considerably bulkier/bigger. However even though it looks a lot bulkier, the measurements corroborate that if a difference exist, it is really really tiny, less than 1mm for sure!).

The section countour is also the same (I made an ugly diagram). And the section contour for feed + nib is also the same for both. In any event I'm fairly confident that this pen using an edison/FC feed and nib would not leak (I will test this tonight by leaving a full barrel, not converter, full of colored water and leaving the pen upside down). I will report tomorrow. But like I said, the fit of the edison's nib feel much tighter (in a good way, I did not have to force it in or anything, it went in super easy) I think due to the ebonite having better friction against the walls of the section compared to the plastic feed.

IMG_0651.JPG

 

Fantastic! That is indeed what my feeds / sections look like, so they haven't changed that, and now I know that if I ever want to put an Edison or FC nib/feed into my Nemosine bodies, I have that option. I may get tempted. My brother wants a FC music nib, and was going to put one in a Jinhao x750, but I'm betting he'd prefer the lighter Nemosine... I may have to make it a Christmas gift this year...

 

Thanks!

[onetwothree]

Another update. I decided to play with one of the nibs. So I got the extra fine and started by spreading the tines somewhat. I started by protecting the metal with some touch up tape and using 2 pliers to pull away the tines, however the tape kept falling so I ended up putting metal to metal. The nib has a few metal marks now. However I managed to spread them far enough to see light through it and to squeeze a Goulet brass sheet in between. Then I ended up with an extremely scratchy nib which I ground up a little bit and then polished. Right now it seems decently smooth on Tomoe paper (will try other types of paper later), on par with my factory Edison/Frankling Christoph nibs. However it is no longer an extra fine, I would say perhaps a medium with a stubbish feel to it. Actually quite acceptable im happy with it. Here is a small writing sample on tomoe paper, I will try copier paper later.

I don't know if you can see in the picture well enough, but this is an extra fine (EF) nib. In fact it is the exact same nib, with the exact same ink and paper of the first writing sample that performed the worth. As you can see the difference is dramatic.

I'm having way too much fun today. Can you tell?

Edited February 23, 2017 by onetwothree

[yoshipen]

I just wanted to add, having owned this same pen for about two years now, that the body/cap is one of the most delicate of any modern pen I own. I screwed the cap down a little too hard about cracked the material on the cap under the band. It is a fun pen & definitely still a great value- just be very careful if you own one.

 

I'd also second eye dropper conversion for this pen- had mine that way with some silicone grease for a year... no major problems, just minor leakage.

[yoshipen]

I just wanted to add, having owned this same pen for about two years now, that the body/cap is one of the most delicate of any modern pen I own. I screwed the cap down a little too hard about cracked the material on the cap under the band. It is a fun pen & definitely still a great value- just be very careful if you own one.

 

I'd also second eye dropper conversion for this pen- had mine that way with some silicone grease for a year... no major problems, just minor leakage.

[LizEF]

I'd also second eye dropper conversion for this pen- had mine that way with some silicone grease for a year... no major problems, just minor leakage.

 

I got the o-rings Goulet Pens sells for Platinum Preppies and used that (and grease) when I eye-droppered my Nemosine - good fit, no problems, no leaks, no near leaks. (In case some future reader happens upon this.)

[onetwothree]

So I have been playing with my Nemosines nibs.

I took 2 of them and changed their color using the procedures listed here: http://www.finishing.com/287/54.shtml.

First I wanted a purple/blue nib but that finish takes a little bit of practice so the nib that I tried to turn into this color ended up being mediocre but still acceptable IMO. I think the second one (bronzed) actually ended up quite well, now looks like a gold plated/bronze nib haha!, the finish is quite even.

Their writing characteristic did not change either so thats good. I have 2 more nibs to experiment further maybe I'll try at some other point, I'm thinking of copper plating one of them haha.

Here are some pictures (using the pens as eye droppers, which make them look awesome!)

[LizEF]

That's pretty cool, onetwothree! Glad you're having fun with them.

[CDunkle]

I recently got my Nemosine Singularity demonstrator .8 stub fountain pen from Goulet. I cleaned it thoroughly before affixing one of the six cartridges. The next day, I pulled it out of my pocket to find that the cartridge was empty. Oh oh, yep. Huge black ink spot on my shirt. Good thing it washes out well. I checked the nib, and it was not pushed all the way on to the feed. It went right in with a firm push. I cleaned it and tried the converter, and it has been fine ever since.

The nib is fairly rounded, with soft corners; not flat and squared like the Aurora italics. I am liking the nib a lot, it has been my main pen to carry with me. Currently filled with Diamine Oxford Blue.

[CDunkle]

I had problems with a second cartridge, and decided to try the converter. It worked very well, no problems at all. I then converted the pen to an eyedropper. I have had a lot of trouble with the eyedropper set up on this pen (I have a Platinum Preppy F that I converted to an eyedropper and it works great). I have now converted it back to the converter, and that is once again working fine. All of this using J. Herbin Bleu Ocean ink, which is on the wet side.

[Charles Skinner]

This pen is a perfect example of why a really nice fountain pen does not need to cost $200.00 or more! Love it!

 

 

C. S.

[writerstephen]

Nemosine does in fact make a broad nib--not sure if they come on the Singularity or not, but definitely on their metal Fission pen. I own one. It's the same #6 size and fits the Singularity perfectly.

 

I love Nemosine nibs--but not so much their pens. My Singularity tended to dry out overnight and I can't stand that. Also my section would unscrew from the barrel instead of the cap (a complaint I've heard more than once).

 

But I couldn't let those excellent nibs go to waste, so I put my medium on a Monteverde Invincia, and my broad on a Monteverde Rodeo Drive. Perfect fit in both cases. I like Monteverde pens and their screw-in converters, but not so much their nibs. Problem solved!

[Misfit]

I have the aqua demonstrator with 0.8mm nib. The line variation it gives is fantastic. I would buy a Nemosine pen again.

[Eitan]

Great reviews and info! TY!