Kiwaguro Nano Carbon (Black) With A Nakaya Stub

[holgersson]

good morning everyone,

 

i have a nakaya portable (cigar) with a broad stub nib (customized by john mottishaw).

 

beside the yama-budo ink from pilot i also use the kiwaguro nano carbon black. but i have a few problems with it: as it is a thicker ink, it tends to stick in the back part of the converter and i therefore have to give it a shake before writing or even push the filling mechanism in order to get the ink to the feed. do some of you have the same problem? do you have a solution for this?

 

i also have a problem with the filling, especially with the ink bottle. as instructed i turn it upside down and back to get the ink into the mold, but i have to do this multiple times as the mold hardly gets filled enough in order to cover the whole nib (and a small part of the grip section). therefore not enough ink is sucked into the converter. do you use seringes to avoid this problem?

 

thank you in advance for your answers.

 

cheers,

nils

[jmccarty3]

I had a similar problem with nanoblack, which was solved with a few drops of dish soap added to the ink bottle. The ink flows much better, and I still get that marvelous matte black finish. You also can use properly diluted PhotoFlo, as described elsewhere on this forum. Do a search for PhotoFlo and you should be able to find it.

 

As for your filling problem, I would use a syringe. You can get ideally suited ink syringes from Goulet, Anderson, and other sources.

 

Enjoy your Nakaya!

[mhosea]

The syringe is a good solution, though you can just lift out the "wine glass" plastic insert with tweezers. Have a mat of paper towels set out for it when you get it out. It may come out with a load of ink in the cone, so be careful as you handle the cone and try to dump it back into the bottle without dumping it on your desk instead (or better yet, have more sense than I do and do the whole operation in the kitchen sink to begin with). There will also be some ink on the top of the base wine-glass plastic insert. Forget about that. Once the insert is out, you can insert a pen at an angle and tip the bottle sideways a bit to fill.

 

I have a lot fewer problems with ink staying at the top of my converters than most people, I think because I grease my converters with silicone grease, but if you're one of those several who won't grease a converter on principle or something, because it's supposed to be a disposable part (as well I as I understand their argument against it), I'd advise against adding anything directly to the bottle. Instead, transfer some ink to a sample vial and experiment there if you must. If you add too much surfactant to the ink, or if there is some incompatibility, you'll just end up dumping out the entire bottle. Better to dump just a sample vial instead.

[ethernautrix]

If you get a syringe, you can fill empty Platinum cartridges with your ink of choice. The little ball inside the cartridge ensures a steady flow of ink.

[Noihvo]

If you get a syringe, you can fill empty Platinum cartridges with your ink of choice. The little ball inside the cartridge ensures a steady flow of ink.

 

Or even better, take the little glass/plastic bearing from the cartridge (they also come in J. Herbin's and Pelikan's cartridges), disassemble the Nakaya converter, and put the bearing in there. And hope that the bearing is small enough not to fall out of the converter.

[mhosea]

And hope that the bearing is small enough not to fall out of the converter.[/font][/color]

It's a good bet, as the bearing is not something they actually put in the cartridge, rather it is the cartridge plug. Seems the only scenario in which it could fall out of the converter and not the cartridge is if the cartridges are very tight and the converter very loose. OTOH, there is one risk. This has to do with how far the piercing tube protrudes into the converter as compared to the cartridge. I don't have a Platinum converter to check this, but just generally speaking, in the cartridge, the ball shouldn't be able to interfere with ink flow because the piercing tube extends into the cavity of the cartridge. When the ball falls down to the front while writing, the piercing tube forces it to fall harmlessly to the side. But sometimes converters are "beefier" than cartridges at the end, and then the piercing tube doesn't protrude as much. Depending on how far, the bearing might or might not be able to impede ink flow while the nib is pointed downwards. I became aware of the differences in cartridge and converter geometry by using modern Parker and Sheaffer twist converters on certain 1960's c/c models. The older squeeze converters of the era did not have very thick plugs, nor did the earlier Parker twist converters, so piercing tubes would protrude into the ink supply, but in both the current (red seal) Parker converters and the current Sheaffer twist converters, the piercing tube has to make it quite a ways to get to the ink cavity, and in some cases the piercing tube just wasn't quite long enough. In that case you could force ink into the feed, but it wouldn't always flow in. I was scratching my head as to how I could have halting ink flow with the converter and flawless ink flow with the cartridge even though everything seemed to fit right and the ink was not "stuck" at the back.