Experiments With Flex

[InesF]

  On 8/6/2021 at 9:49 AM, txomsy said:

Shortly: I want to be optimistic and to believe that in the near future we'll seek durable, less-trash generating goods, which will justify a price premium for them, and induce makers to build on millenia-long expertise to provide what customers demand.

 

If I am right, that might place MB as foresighters at the vanguard of FP production well in advance of other makers. Or at least willing to experiment new strategies.

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+1 from me, I want to be optimistic as well!

MB for sure, but I have confidence in a couple other long-term active and quality oriented producers as well.

 

If you have searched for so long and found the solution - what should go wrong from here?

 

And you are right, in my circle of thoughts I totally forgot about the long tradition with natural materials, such as bamboo or bird quills, which have the excellent properties*, unfortunately not long lasting. Finally, modern fountain pen nibs are varieties of bionic design.

 

*remark: can it be that the way we are writing had been adapted to the possibilities and limits the early materials had provided? And now we are stuck with a certain way of writing and in search for replacement materials that mimic the properties of old?

[lianali007]

 

  On 8/1/2021 at 6:42 AM, duckbillclinton said:

From my previous post of feed modification, if one pays close attention to the widened grooves, he/she will notice I had made some very bad cuts due to slipping of my razor blade.  Front section of this feed (where nib sits on) had bad cuts that were so wide, the groove width actually ended up exceeding 0.22mm.  The result?  Broken capillary action, even just normal writing (not flex calligraphy), ink would skip on every 5 to 6 strokes.

 

So, I used an unconventional method to repair it.  Crazy glue was applied to fill the way-too-wide groove sections, once dried, I razor cut and redo the narrow groove, widen it again with 0.15mm and 0.2mm micro diamond cutting disks (dremel attachments, but I use my fingers to drive these disks to grind out/ widen the grooves).  Problem solved, functional wet noodle is back.

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Wait, rewind, I've been modding my plastic feeds by hand with an exacto knife. You take the channel all the way down to the end of the feed? 

 

Also, thank you for the crazy glue repair! I will have a bunch of feeds I can salvage from when I didn't understand the limits of capillary action.

[txomsy]

  On 8/6/2021 at 12:26 PM, InesF said:

in my circle of thoughts I totally forgot about the long tradition with natural materials, such as bamboo or bird quills, which have the excellent properties*, unfortunately not long lasting. Finally, modern fountain pen nibs are varieties of bionic design.

 

*remark: can it be that the way we are writing had been adapted to the possibilities and limits the early materials had provided? And now we are stuck with a certain way of writing and in search for replacement materials that mimic the properties of old?

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Most likely yes, we are trying to reproduce ancestral writing traits. It may then be possible that the trend ends with this generation. We strive to reproduce what we learned to appreciate as "good taste" in our formative period. As long as the education has continuously used the same kind of reference, the trend was self-sustaining: maybe you learned with a calamus but wanted to imitate the effects of a stiletto on mud tablets, or with a cane or feather but wanted to imitate the calamus, or with a steel nib but wanted to imitate the feather cut to imitate the calamus cut to imitate...

 

Nowadays a new generation is growing with only exposure to computer sans-serif, mono-line width fonts and  very little book reading (notice how book fonts like Times tend to maintain line variation giving a golden rule of reference), so maybe when they overtake, they will consider line variation as an ugly distraction and abandon it for good or bad.

 

Then again, maybe millenia of line variation have morphed our perception, or maybe it survived because it appealed to something deeper inside, and then it will return over and over no matter what.

 

And I fully agree with you: if we (humans) moved through as many writing devices and materials, maybe the best is still to come and, in this age of new materials every day, we'll not only get nano-particle inks but also nibs of unthinkable novel materials with interesting properties. Here. Me, dreaming aloud.

 

Perhaps the real the challenge is to keep the flame of interest alive.

[duckbillclinton]

  On 8/6/2021 at 8:08 AM, InesF said:

And among the precious metals the situation is comparable or even worse when comparing platinum, rhodium or palladium with gold, because the first three are more expensive, harder to shape and behave almost brittle. Silver is not precious enough to make a suitable nib material.

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Oh, nooooooooooo...  Ines...  I didn't know you are a chemist... Oh, nooooooo, how could you... How could you???  😢😓

 

Platinum, Rhodium, and Palladium in pure form are NEVER brittle... They are actually quite soft...

 

I have been trying hard to write a long long long reply (draft, not posted yet) trying to address all the misunderstanding among most of the forum readers regarding annealing, and the problem is, I can NOT write it so academically, common words/ non scientific terms are used as a compromise to help everyone understand better.

 

Oh, no... Though the 3 metal elements you mentioned are quite expensive, still there are tiny ammount of lab samples can be bought online and examined.  The 3 elements are very soft, even the not so accurate Wiki contain info about the physical properties...  Not to mention tons of science papers can be just googled to verify their characteristics...

Edited August 6, 2021 by duckbillclinton

[Pen Engineer]

  On 7/27/2021 at 7:24 AM, InesF said:

Hi @duckbillclinton

What a long and comprehensive reply - thank you!

Besides your highly interesting insights in metallurgy, the paragraph I quoted contains the essence of nib design: it always was and it still is somehow empiric approximation. And we all experience that a successful design is copied by many others with only marginal changes that do not matter for the properties.

 

What I meant with irregular annealing was the heat treatment coming with tipping. You know better than me, that iron becomes harder and stiffer when heated and cooled rapidly while the opposite is for gold and many other precious metals. After pressing, cutting, shaping etc. a gold nib has, most likely, the hardest and stiffest status reached. When customizing a nib, I'm always afraid of heating and softening it partly due to the grinding. So I always work with water cooling. However, I can imagine that any (unintentional?) heating may change the flex behavior of a gold nib - the final status is maybe not only caused by the new shape after grinding or cutting side slits, but also from partly softening the material.

Sure, this is different for steel nibs.

 

Same to me, a pleasure to have Amadeus W. (@Pen Engineer) here! Indeed, I studied your information several times. And by asking myself about what makes an ink wet, my measurements do point towards a hypothesis about what makes a fountain pen nib writing wet and another one writing dry. I'm looking forward to discuss this in autumn.

 

... and now I will continue to enjoy the last days of my summer vacation. See you at the pool!  😃

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grinding small bits on nibs is not a problem if you do it in small bursts, because thin metal also dissipates generated heat, ratio of volume to surface, that's why things that get hot but wanna be kept cooler have cooling ribs.  Blowing a (strong) stream of air on your workpiece also helps, cause water makes such a mess.

 

Why pens write wet or others dry?  Oooh, ahm, I would say, there are tons of parameters that contribute towards it... as I said before, somewhere, a fountain pen is a finely tuned instrument, believe it or not.

[Pen Engineer]

  On 8/6/2021 at 12:26 PM, InesF said:

can it be that the way we are writing had been adapted to the possibilities and limits the early materials had provided? And now we are stuck with a certain way of writing and in search for replacement materials that mimic the properties of old?

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years ago, in the distant past, those who could write used a nib and later a fountain pen (same thing for the point).  It took years to learn to write, neatly, and all nibs were, what we call flex-nibs, today.  Then the ball-pen came and took over.  You just took it in your hand and started writing, INSTANTLY.  To rescue a bit of their market share, fountain pen producers made fountain pens, which looked and wrote like ball-pens.  User behaviour caused the change of a product.

the forms of writing, curves or lines, or wedges made with chisels certainly have shaped, but it is also the shape of our hand, wrist and arm that make curved, flowing lines more condusive to us.

[Pen Engineer]

  On 8/6/2021 at 9:49 AM, txomsy said:

I fear that in modern business philosophy it makes more sense to make cheap dip-pen nibs and continue selling them one by one at 2$ apiece. You have a low entry point and secure a continued income, people is used to disposable goods and those interested in calligraphy may be coerced into buying them'.

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May I suggest another business proposal (philosophy)?  How many components are in a modern cartridge fountain pen?  Ten, maybe?  Injection moulded plastic components of that size cost 5-30cts, ... a steel nib (tipped) falling out of a robot, 10cts, ... add a metal clip, 5cts, ... what else... a cartridge, 5cts.  Let's be generous and say it's worth $5 out of the factory.  Every distributor doubles, so the buyer pays $40 for it or $80 for a product of $5 value.

[Pen Engineer]

  On 8/6/2021 at 8:08 AM, InesF said:

If you like to do it, do it! If other people like your results, be proud. But most important: be happy while doing it!

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my motto! thanks for saying it 😊

[Pen Engineer]

  On 8/6/2021 at 8:19 AM, InesF said:

From my own investigations I would guess ink surface tension and nib slit geometry to be the dominant (if not the only) criteria that determine how wide the nib can open and how broad a line can become.

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... and the wetability of the metal, the elasticity of the metal, the force/load/pressure of writing... and the ink supply from the feed and further up, cause if there is no ink what's the point of spreading the tines?

[bunnspecial]

  On 8/6/2021 at 5:07 PM, duckbillclinton said:

Platinum, Rhodium, and Palladium in pure form are NEVER brittle... They are actually quite soft...

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Not only that, but Sheaffer did actually make Pd-Ag nibs for the the Snorkels. They were less expensive than 14K gold nibs on those models, but are quite good.

 

If I'm not mistaken, the elusive Snorkel flex nibs were Pd-Ag.

 

That is all I have. I am a chemist and did a lot of precious metal chemistry in graduate school, but metallurgy as a whole is still sort of black magic to m. 

[Grayspoole]

I have been following this discussion with interest, and I would like to offer an observation from my point of view as a user of fountain and dip pens who is primarily focused on calligraphy.

 

I think most FP users expect pens to write well out of the box and to write consistently for a long time, if not forever.

 

Most calligraphers see their nibs differently, as tools that demand regular tweaking and/or adjustment.  For example, to achieve elegant thin and thicks with a broad edge nib, I restore the beveled edge on a stone, even daily if I am practicing for a long time. I regularly smooth and sharpen my pointed nibs to achieve very fine hairlines.  And I am not at all surprised when the point of a fine crow quill nib breaks off after about a week of practicing chancery cursive.

 

It seems inevitable to me that continuously flexing and writing with a very sharp point or a very fine edge will wear down a nib, so using inexpensive and replaceable nibs makes sense. Looking at examples of writing produced with many “flexy” fountain pens has  yet to persuade me that they will ever replace my calligraphy nibs. Perhaps there is some some new material that can flex or be honed to retain a fine point or edge indefinitely, and if someone can make a good calligraphy nib out of it, I will certainly be interested. Meanwhile, chefs and barbers are still sharpening their knives and razors, and I expect that I will be sharpening and smoothing my calligraphy nibs for the foreseeable future as well.

 

 

 

 

[duckbillclinton]

  On 8/7/2021 at 12:36 PM, bunnspecial said:

 

Not only that, but Sheaffer did actually make Pd-Ag nibs for the the Snorkels. They were less expensive than 14K gold nibs on those models, but are quite good.

 

If I'm not mistaken, the elusive Snorkel flex nibs were Pd-Ag.

 

That is all I have. I am a chemist and did a lot of precious metal chemistry in graduate school, but metallurgy as a whole is still sort of black magic to m. 

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Visconti used to make 23k palladium nib pens, they have quite a bit of flex, I was so in love with them, I have 4.  The silver palladium nib made by Sheaffer, is as hard as nail, I have 2 in collection.  As for platinum, funny enough, the Japanese pen maker Platinum had several special 3776 model made with 23k(?) platinum nibs.  I happen to have one, it's a 925 silver hand forged pen with platinum nib.  The sad thing is though, the nib is also hard as a nail.  Rhodium, however, is too expensive, I only get to play with a tiny piece of foil (cold rolled lab sample), a bit stiff, but certainly has a little flex.

[duckbillclinton]

What is science?  Science is about repeatable experiment in controlled environment with reproducible results, and it is not about tossing some assumption and speculation behind a keyboard.  Why I have the highest respect to Amadeus W's works?  Simple, he validates every assumption/ proposal with experiment.  Till this day, many forum members are still spreading false info of grinding the underside of a nib will make it hydrophobic, that's completely wrong.  If you have gone through Amadeus's fountain pen design website, you will notice he had the whole thing explained perfectly.  From my experiments with grinding the underside to thin a nib, surface will become hydrophilic if I use 600 grit and below abrasive attachment on a dremel, higher grit than that, it becomes hydrophobic. So, to all flex nib modders, feel free to thin your nib down from the underside as long as you use grits below 600.  Thinner nib, especially steel nib, will help you to achieve higher flex with less bending/ spring.

 

Now, as I am still writing my post regarding annealing, I can certainly show you in advance about my experiment on "quenching/ rapid cooling" of a red hot steel nib.  (FYI, I have already known the results since I have extensive knowledge of metallurgy and material science, the experiments are for others to understand the problem better.)  These 2 nibs I tested, one is made of 316 steel (austenite stainless steel), the other (Jinhao) is made of ferritic stainless steel, both can NEVER be quenched (harden via heat treatment)...  heating both to dark orange color (around 1150 to 1250 Celsius degrees) for 1 minute, grain structure is fully recrystallized (or say, fully annealed), I dipped both to cold water.  Results?  Both remain fully annealed status, soft as a thick aluminum foil, both are iron alloys, so does dipping red hot iron alloy to cold water (quenching?) will always make them hard???  Hmmmmm, interesting...

 

(Sorry I lost camera focus when I dip the red hot nib to a bowl of cold water)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 7, 2021 by duckbillclinton

[duckbillclinton]

Continued, Jinhao nib... I will explain in details in my annealing explanation post later on.  Both nibs after fully annealing and rapid water cooling, remained annealed, and are soft as thick aluminum foils, easily BEND and SPRING with little effort.  These 2 nibs are in trash bin now, the annealing has done irreversible damage, and no way to recover.  (You can test on your own.).😁😁

 

 

Edited August 7, 2021 by duckbillclinton

[InesF]

  On 8/7/2021 at 7:05 AM, Pen Engineer said:

grinding small bits on nibs is not a problem if you do it in small bursts, because thin metal also dissipates generated heat, ratio of volume to surface, that's why things that get hot but wanna be kept cooler have cooling ribs.  Blowing a (strong) stream of air on your workpiece also helps, cause water makes such a mess.

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Yes, thank you for saying it! I always have this in mind when grinding a gold nib - and that's the reason I do the grinding with water cooling.

 

  On 8/7/2021 at 7:18 AM, Pen Engineer said:

the forms of writing, curves or lines, or wedges made with chisels certainly have shaped, but it is also the shape of our hand, wrist and arm that make curved, flowing lines more condusive to us.

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Indeed, that's so true! And because the mussels moving the hand (and the fingers) can move so much more precisely than the mussels moving the arm, we do the small writing in a certain way.

 

  On 8/7/2021 at 7:54 AM, Pen Engineer said:

... and the wetability of the metal, the elasticity of the metal, the force/load/pressure of writing... and the ink supply from the feed and further up, cause if there is no ink what's the point of spreading the tines?

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Oh, yes - you opened a new (to me) can of worms here. I had already a look on surface wetability data tables ... that left me a bit dizzy.

The only thing I'm meanwhile confident about is: ink wetness is not dependent on ink viscosity (in the normal range of easy flowing liquids, as inks are). Currently I can't prove with data, but my hypothesis is a dependency of wetness on the relation of capillary forces of the ink in the ink channel vs. ink in the air channel. In other words: nib wetness depends on the relation of the diameters of these two channels.

[InesF]

  On 8/7/2021 at 12:54 PM, Grayspoole said:

Most calligraphers see their nibs differently, as tools that demand regular tweaking and/or adjustment.  For example, to achieve elegant thin and thicks with a broad edge nib, I restore the beveled edge on a stone, even daily if I am practicing for a long time. I regularly smooth and sharpen my pointed nibs to achieve very fine hairlines.  And I am not at all surprised when the point of a fine crow quill nib breaks off after about a week of practicing chancery cursive.

 

It seems inevitable to me that continuously flexing and writing with a very sharp point or a very fine edge will wear down a nib, so using inexpensive and replaceable nibs makes sense. Looking at examples of writing produced with many “flexy” fountain pens has  yet to persuade me that they will ever replace my calligraphy nibs. Perhaps there is some some new material that can flex or be honed to retain a fine point or edge indefinitely, and if someone can make a good calligraphy nib out of it, I will certainly be interested. Meanwhile, chefs and barbers are still sharpening their knives and razors, and I expect that I will be sharpening and smoothing my calligraphy nibs for the foreseeable future as well.

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Thank you for sharing your experiences.

You confirmed my observations and experiences!

[InesF]

  On 8/6/2021 at 5:07 PM, duckbillclinton said:

Oh, nooooooooooo...  Ines...  I didn't know you are a chemist... Oh, nooooooo, how could you... How could you???  😢😓

 

Platinum, Rhodium, and Palladium in pure form are NEVER brittle... They are actually quite soft...

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Hmm, I'm a bit surprised now.

In the lab I work with gold, iridium, platinum and platinum/iridium alloy wires since about 20 years now. The gold wires can be bent quite often and although they became harder, they do not suffer. Iridium and platinum wires can be bent two times, the third time they break.

My comment was based on these observations.

[Frank C]

This is another fascinating topic here on FPN. Calligraphers, chemists, metallurgists, and tinkerers share ideas of how to make fountain pens work better, or at least, differently. This is a very interesting and lively discussion. 

[duckbillclinton]

  On 8/8/2021 at 4:48 PM, InesF said:

Hmm, I'm a bit surprised now.

In the lab I work with gold, iridium, platinum and platinum/iridium alloy wires since about 20 years now. The gold wires can be bent quite often and although they became harder, they do not suffer. Iridium and platinum wires can be bent two times, the third time they break.

My comment was based on these observations.

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Hi Ines.  I think you got iridium and platinum mixed up.   In chemistry, they indeed belong to the same platinum group, but as for material science, they behave quite differently.  Iridium in fact is hard and brittle, and has a mohs hardness of 6.5 (close to glass), and it was used as the tipping material on a nib in the beginning of fountain pen making.  I suspect the small wire you tested is iridium platinum alloy, and due to the iridium content, the wire become hard and not so malleable, hence the brittleness you experienced.  Platinum in pure form is very malleable.  Though it's stiffer than gold, it's commonly used in jewelry due to its high value, it can be cold rolled and cold forge to shape.  On YouTube, there are a lot of platinum jewelry making videos.  Due to advancement in technology, laser welding is commonly used to weld platinum jewelries, and the solder wire is usually made of pure or high percentage of platinum, and it's quite soft.

 

Also, from the not so accurate Wiki, gold (used as reference), platinum, and iridium's properties (material science wise) are available.  Iridium has high (Young's modulus, Shear modulus, Bulk modulus), and low (Poisson ratio), pretty much indicate it's a hard and brittle metal.  Platinum compare with gold, it has higher (Young's modulus, Shear modulus, Bulk modulus), but similar (Poisson ratio, 0.4 vs 0.38), indicated platinum is a stronger material than gold, but softness wise, platinum is just a bit behind gold.  I won't go into the details as I wasn't major in material science nor metallurgy, let's leave it to others who are more qualified to explain.   

Edited August 9, 2021 by duckbillclinton

[InesF]

  On 8/9/2021 at 8:48 AM, duckbillclinton said:

 

Hi Ines.  I think you got iridium and platinum mixed up.   In chemistry, they indeed belong to the same platinum group, but as for material science, they behave quite differently.  Iridium in fact is hard and brittle, and has a mohs hardness of 6.5 (close to glass), and it was used as the tipping material on a nib in the beginning of fountain pen making.  I suspect the small wire you tested is iridium platinum alloy, and due to the iridium content, the wire become hard and not so malleable, hence the brittleness you experienced.  Platinum in pure form is very malleable.  Though it's stiffer than gold, it's commonly used in jewelry due to its high value, it can be cold rolled and cold forge to shape.  On YouTube, there are a lot of platinum jewelry making videos.  Due to advancement in technology, laser welding is commonly used to weld platinum jewelries, and the solder wire is usually made of pure or high percentage of platinum, and it's quite soft.

 

Also, from the not so accurate Wiki, gold (used as reference), platinum, and iridium's properties (material science wise) are available.  Iridium has high (Young's modulus, Shear modulus, Bulk modulus), and low (Poisson ratio), pretty much indicate it's a hard and brittle metal.  Platinum compare with gold, it has higher (Young's modulus, Shear modulus, Bulk modulus), but similar (Poisson ratio, 0.4 vs 0.38), indicated platinum is a stronger material than gold, but softness wise, platinum is just a bit behind gold.  I won't go into the details as I wasn't major in material science nor metallurgy, let's leave it to others who are more qualified to explain.   

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Hi @duckbillclinton.

 

I get the impression, we are talking about totally different things, here.

 

Maybe a recap:

If you heat up iron and shock cool it, it becomes hardened. If you heat up iron and slowly cool it, it becomes softer (annealed).

If you heat up gold, copper, silver, platinum, etc. and shock cool it, it becomes soft (annealed). If you mechanically stress these metals (squeezing, stretching, bending, etc.) they become hard. Annealed gold is flexible to a certain degree but hardened gold is more resistant and needs way more force to be bent.

 

A gold nib is, most probably, in a hardened status from all the steps during production. I never mentioned this for steel. If you heat a gold nib (maybe unintentionally) it may become partly annealed (=soft) and may loose some of its elastic properties. This loss may be critical or may be next to not recognizable - I can't tell in advance, so I'm better safe than sorry. That was the intention of my previous comments.

 

Believe me, I can differentiate between the mentioned precious metals - if not otherwise, at least by their price.

What you can find at Wikipedia ist the elemental properties in the annealed stage, which is not the stage of a squeezed, bent, embossed ... whatever ... fountain pen nib!