What Has Been Your Least Favorite Ink So Far?

[georges zaslavsky]

Noodlers Black and Pilot Fuyu Sugun that I had to mix with another ink because it was very dry.

[lovemy51]

 

Try putting it in a wetter or broader-nibbed pen. I have an IM nib unit from a Pelikan M 200, and even after I had some nib work done on it, it was very wet (before the work it was a gusher even with an iron gall ink in the pen). But I now have it on a different M200 and used 4001 Brilliant Black to do some calligraphy for a project a year ago January, and it was very well-behaved in that pen.

I don't use black ink a lot, but I'm glad I have that as one of my go-to blacks.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

thanx for the suggestion, but i do not have that any more... i got rid of it over 10 years ago.

[airstairesc]

On 4/21/2019 at 6:34 PM, DrDebG said:

 

Oyster Grey is a bit light. And so is Swan Illusion, except that in a wider nib, it shades beautifully. Hope you like it.

 

H i R!

 

On 4/21/2019 at 8:47 PM, NeverTapOut said:

 

Deborah,

What can be done to darken MB Oyster Grey?

Any Ideas?

Thanks,

David

 

I love both Oyster Grey and Swan Illusion, so I mixed them together. Right now I'm using a 5ml vial of about 80% Oyster and 20% Swan, which results in a really nice taupe-grey with just a tinge of steely light purple. I'm using it on Clairefontaine right now, which could be why I'm seeing the purple tinge. When I use it on cream/ivory, it really brings out a nice taupe and warms it up. For me, it appears neither warm nor cool, but neutral.

 

This mix is nice and versatile; good for letters and journaling, but also works for work. It's much easier to read since these two inks darken each other, but there's a nice depth and character to the mix that makes it nice to use.

 

Next mix I will try more Swan, maybe 40%. I also have a bottle of Fuyu-Syogun on the way, so I want to see what happens if I mix it with Oyster Grey. I'm hoping it will bring out a pearly, mica quality to Oyster.

 

On 4/9/2020 at 4:02 PM, DrDebG said:

Also I do not care for Noodler's inks. While Noodler's has some great colors, I just had issues with them. I have tried close to 30 different colors over the years, and I don't care for the formulation and most of all the smell (fragrance?). It gives me a migraine.

 

Unfortunately, I have much the same problem with KWZI inks. The formulation is o.k. and I love the colors but I get a migraine every time I use them. Just opening the ink to fill the pen is enough to cause a screaming migraine.

 

I have the same issue with KWZ. Open windows don't help, but I'll try seeing if being in open air helps at all.

[tde44x]

LAMY Mango

[Barkingpig]

Montblanc Elixir Parfumeur, Leather Scent, Orange Brown

 

Having loved Montblanc's former issued orange inks such as Ink of Joy & Mahatma Gandhi, I had great expectation that this would be an ink that surpassed my experience of them, sadly this is the most insipid orange ink I have ever tried & it's fragrance is as unlike leather as imaginable.   Because I shared the bottle with another Member, whose love for orange inks was as keen, if not greater than mine & he was as underwhelmed as I was, I remain saddened that I fell prey to trusting that a company who had previously made such wonderful orange inks could send this ink to market.

[Vladpu]

Waterman black.  Might as well put glue into your pen.

[Mark Meske]

My biggest disappointment in the last couple of years has been J. Herbin Corail des Tropiques. It's a beautiful coral when you swab it but too pale to read easily when put through a pen, even a broad nib.

[arellano81366]

I wanted to love it but I hate Diamine Silver Fox: hard to read! 

[VivaTerlingua]

Nitrogen for smearing and getting everywhere

[Dip n Scratch]

Modern Parker Blue/Black.

Thankfully I have never done anything like buy a bottle of it.

Parker BB was the first ink in the first fountain pen I ever used when I was at school at around the age of 8.

Back then it was the real thing & the Solv-X made Parker ink distinctive.

I don't remember what pen I had for sure, except that it had aerometric filling.

I don't think my parents would have given me a Parker 51 in the 1970's. It must have been a knock-off.

 

Modern Parker blue-black is a problem. I have not had a large enough quantity of it to allow me to load a P51  or an eyedropper pen. But I did manage to get a Conway Stewart 475 to inhale some. It went on as bl/blk. 'Fine' I thought. Until it turned green.

What the hell is going on?Is it a matter of ink flow. Do I need a pen that's very wet for the ink to stay a dark blue?

[Carguy]

Diamine Vermillon - a faded brownish orange, simply not my style. Anybody interested in a trade?

[Dip n Scratch]

Tried the ink in a Wing Sung 601A (a copy of a vac P51). I used Tomoe River, Rhodia and Silvine papers.

After about 15 minutes the Parker ink is a Teal shade with a Red sheen where the ink has laid heaviest.

Even Shaeffer blue/black is not the dark-blue we should expect, but it is nowhere near as bad as the Parker product. 

I haven't seen Shaeffer ink for sale in my locale, but I have not searched places like York or Leeds for better-class stationary shops.

 

[gmax]

5 hours ago, Dip n Scratch said:

Modern Parker blue-black is a problem ... It went on as bl/blk. 'Fine' I thought. Until it turned green.

The latest production of Parker BB no longer turns green. It goes on as a rich blue-black and stays that colour 🙂

[inkstainedruth]

3 minutes ago, gmax said:

The latest production of Parker BB no longer turns green. It goes on as a rich blue-black and stays that colour 🙂

Good to know.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Dip n Scratch]

Do the Parker boxes have any batch-code marks so I avoid buying the other garbage.

Even the Shaeffer blue/black isn't really to my taste, but it is way behind the Parker stuff.

The ink I was using came from 2ml samples that have been poured away.

The Wing-Sung 601A is not stained.

 

My second in the rogues gallery of inks has to be Noodlers Baystate Blue. At the time I was looking for an intensely saturated blue BSB filled that requirement perfectly.

So... Why is it a bad ink?  It stains like you wouldn't believe. Everything it touched. The sac of my aerometric P51 is still blue as a result.

It was an import from the US and ferociously expensive.

I met an American in Scarborough who was not having a good introduction to fountain pens. It was leaking like the Exxon Valdez. I correctly identified the colour from the state of his fingers: Baystate Blue.

I advised the poor man to buy some cheap bleach and see if a dilute solution might remove the stain from his hands. I think the pen was a Noodlers one.

It was piston fill or vacumatic. I told him to get something like a Jinhao which would be no loss if it got stained or clogged.

I don't think he was a fan of BSB at that time. I do hope he got his hands clean.

[gmax]

On 8/29/2021 at 2:12 PM, Dip n Scratch said:

Do the Parker boxes have any batch-code marks so I avoid buying the other?

There was some discussion on this older thread about identifying the new ink...

The new packaging is easy to identify, though I haven't taken note of any bar code.

 

It's a lovely ink, and well worth searching out  

 

[JulieParadise]

It has been mentioned before:

 

Organics Studio Nitrogen

 

This ink is really beautiful, but what a mess to use!!! I thought that, with some good care and attention, I could handle it, the smearing, the crumbs that seem to go everywhere even when you put something underneath the bottle on the table, but no, this ink is a pretty nightmare, so, in the end, I gave it away.

[Sharad Pratap]

1.Diamine Scribble purple - so saturated and thick that it just refuses to flow out of the nib.

2. Diamine Eclipse - excellent colour and behaves really good on cheaper paper....but after writing a page or two it just stops to flow .

3. Camlin Royal blue - too wet.

4. Camlin Scarlet red - very bright orangy red....hurts my eyes. And it develops into glue-ish gunk inside the bottle quite fast .

5. Waterman Inspired blue - very bright greenish turquoise....hurts my eyes while reading.

6. Many Indian brand ink colours from Daytone,Bril,Parker[india]- a few perfom satisfactorily....but most are awful.

 

[Dip n Scratch]

I have been quite pleased by the Camlin Royal Blue. Yes. It is on the wet side.

Then again many pens lean towards 'dry'. Try the same ink in your other pens.

It also depends on what standard of paper you can buy. It does make some difference.

It also forces a choice of ink onto you that controls undesirable problems papers can have.

[Sharad Pratap]

Yeah....camlin royal blue works on thicker paper somewhat well. But it has another problem....on even the slightest smooth paper it starts skipping a lot.

Also all my fountain pens are super wet.

About the paper....I am not going to pay ridiculous amount of money for a 100 page "fountain pen friendly" notebook. As a student I have very limited budget. And the kind of paper that I get in the wild forces to use dry inks which will perform atleast decent on those kind of paper.