What inks are best for Wet noodles?

[Bo Bo Olson]

What inks are best for  Wet noodles?

I'm going to have to start learning to write.

My wife got given a pen that 'didn't work' in the guy couldn't get the nib out....it was a pre'24 MB Safety Pen with a Weak Kneed Wet Noodle.....that is being sent to Francis for re-corking and cosmetic repair.

 

A Wet Noodle looks uncooked when compared to  dip pens. The Weak Kneed Wet Noodle is middle of the range for dip pens, like a Soennecken 6 or a Hunt Drawing................

So thoughts on what ink to use in a Weak Kneed Wet Noodle would also be of help.

[A Smug Dill]

Can't go wrong with a dry ink such as Diamine Registrar's Ink that performs well (as in not producing feathering or bleed-through) even on poor-quality paper, but is easily legible and permanent enough even when not laid on thick (or wetly) on the page.

[IlikeInksandIcannotlie]

If you plan on maxing the line width, you had better go with the more watery, higher surface tension inks (MB ink, and some watery Indian ink worked best at getting maximum line width out of my Kanwrite flex nib). I had railroading issues at less than the limit with Pilot blue.

[Bo Bo Olson]

5 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

Diamine Registrar

I had liked ESSR a lot; back when that ink was hot, most liked it better than Diamine Register....but thanks, in I'd not thought of either Diamine Register or ESSR.

 

Maximum expansion is not what I'm looking for......I strive to stay a width under max because of Richard Binder's great article on metal fatigue. I'd worry about quick snapback if I could....but that is down the road.

 

First off learning to draw more letters than my fancy Capitol L.

I've two 7 X Wet Noodles and a 6 X....that I'll be using.....

 

My Hand is a touch Heavy in superflex. I sweat trying to get my couple of Wet Noodles that do XXF, think when writing EF, so scribble along in F.

 

So I would think going from EF to B or max BB as enough....

 

With practice perhaps I can lighten my hand enough to use XXF. Then a B becomes a Fat Letter. Get pretty letters and narrow lines, worry about making pretty letters fatter later.  Or not at all.

I'll have to go hang out with the guys who can write.

[Noihvo]

[gyasko]

Make it iron gall, and you’ll be golden.

[Bo Bo Olson]

Salex....great, have that.

 

4001 inks are also very dry....4001 Brilliant Brown or Violet might well do...the brown is a tad redder than I normally like, why I don't use the violet is beyond me. I liked it the one time I tried it.

 

I do have good to better papers so don't worry about feathering.

I was just over looking at Spencerian....and finding out there was someone who wrote it better than he did and published five years before him.

 

But will see what Gaskell's Compendium of Forms, does for the writing in it was the second book the murderous Mexican heroine in my western saga read....in it had book keeping in it....and she wished some day to have enough money to keep book on. Her first book she read was Tom Sawyer at age 14 as woman decided to teach more than her son; teaching her and her younger brothers to read and write.  (I had needed a 'bit' to make my character different from others, and wishing to bookkeep seemed  just the thing. )

Ten years ago, Gaskell's wasn't on online....is now. I had gotten it from the 1902 Sears and Robuck replica.

I thought it just business forms for everything, and hadn't paid attention to his writing collage school business that he pushed like Spenser's sons.

 

Benjamin Franklin Foster was before Spenser  and "Dunton accused Spencer of stealing his script because his published specimens in The Duntonian System of Penmanship appeared in 1843, five years before Spencer’s copy slip collaboration with Victor Rice."

 

Well, the Spenser brothers refused to let their sister publish her book which was better than theirs because it would put them out of business. That I knew before taking my first look at Spenserian vs Copperplate. 

A very nice poster let me know it was the other Spenser daughter/sister that had the first Women's law school in 1896 in Washington DC. (I had the wrong sister and the year before in my saga.) Business Collage was 16 weeks, if you got done sooner you didn't have to pay as much. So that was a Turbo Law School win 1896.

 

I'd always stayed away from Copperplate and Spenserian, because it was work.........15 minutes every day......

Which free book is best?

[Bo Bo Olson]

How's IG in sac pens? I'm sure it use to be good....back in the day.

I have two '52 sac pens and a Soennecken nib in a piston pen.

[DvdRiet]

7 minutes ago, Bo Bo Olson said:

How's IG in sac pens?

 

Was just wondering the same thing. I have a French 50s accordion sac pen that is a wet noodle and I've been having trouble getting it working (although I am admittedly very much a novice with flex nibs). I have a sample of KWZ IG blue-black I thought I might try after reading the above, but can I use it with a sac, and especially an accordion?

[gyasko]

Iron gall is just fine in sac pens.  Back in the day, they may have had nothing but iron gall in them.

[DvdRiet]

1 hour ago, gyasko said:

Make it iron gall, and you’ll be golden

 

Thank you so much for this tip!! I've just written an entire page with my 1950s super flexy French pen and, despite a few very minor hiccups which were nothing compared to what normally happens, I did not once feel the temptation to just throw it across the room in frustration!! 

[Bo Bo Olson]

"""FP addict thanks to #Penpalooza. Currently can't stop collecting Diplomats."""

 

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Top wood grain looking pen a '90's regular flex 18 K Diplomat.I like that nib a lot more than the Diplomat that follows.

 

 

Is 20/u silver plated, the flash of light made it look golden.  There is a tennis one also. Diplomat two colored fake gold semi-nail nib.  Don't know when it was made, expect more towards 2000.

 

 

I had as noobie thicker, lighter ever so well balanced nail metal Diplomat I sold, that often I wish I hadn't but had at that time not thought about getting different nib put on it.

But because of that nail and the semi-nail on the horsey pen, I never chased Diplomat. That very nice regular flex on the woody pen was such a pleasant surprise.

[DvdRiet]

10 hours ago, Bo Bo Olson said:

That very nice regular flex on the woody pen was such a pleasant surprise.

 

Yes! I completely agree. I purchased this same Bruyere (fun to discover it is pipe wood!) about a month ago from a seller on the Penexchange and I was quite surprised at how much natural flex the 18k nib had. Most of my more recent Diplomat acquisitions have been the hooded and semi-hooded pens from the 60s that were made to compete with the ballpoints and basically hard as nails (both steel and gold), so it was quite a stark difference. But I also have a modern Excellence A2 with a big 14k nib that I bought new last year and it also has a decent bit of flexibility to it. That was my first time ordering a gold nib, my first Diplomat and also what got my real interest in collecting Diplomats started.  🙂

[Bo Bo Olson]

That Diplomat is woody looking, in it is plastic....

 

I chased Pelikan, Geha, Osmia and MB snuck in there with a pen every few years bought at a live auction; outside of one bought on sale at at my B&M.

I didn't chase Kaweco, Diplomat, Lamy (have 2, had 4, gave two away to hook someone into fountain pens)

Enough lesser names ended up in my collection. I use to collect affordable fountain pens.................now it looks like I end up buying pens I should have bought when they were cheap.....but they weren't cheap back then either.

 

If I'm not mistaken Diplomat is still owned by the Original Family. Considering how the pen market has be since 1922, that's pretty good.

[DvdRiet]

34 minutes ago, Bo Bo Olson said:

That Diplomat is woody looking, in it is plastic..

 

I think you may be pleasantly surprised to learn that it is wood, at least in a thin layer on the outside. Mine came in the original box with this original documentation. I had also assumed it was made of plastic until I found the booklet in the box.

 

But as to ownership, unfortunately Diplomat reportedly changed through a lot of hands in the late 90s and early 2000s, I believe. And in that time a lot of the company records were apparently lost, so the story is that no one really knows much about past models. It's been a huge puzzle (part of the challenge of course) for me to figure out which models are which and sometimes it seems like I find new ones on a daily basis. The company is still a small manufacturing operation in Germany, but the owners are now a French consortium of entrepreneurs, from what I understand, who bought it in 2016.

 

 

[DvdRiet]

53 minutes ago, Bo Bo Olson said:

but they weren't cheap back then either.

 

The original price tag was also still in the box - 495,- (DM presumably) 🙂

[Bo Bo Olson]

I wasn't thinking 'that far' back....nor new.....

My '65-72 Geha rolled gold trimmed 725 cost DM 390 or $90, when my brand new silver Parker 75 cost 22 silver backed dollars. Dollar was 4DM to 1$ then....'only' DM 88.

That was the piston pen Geha beat MB with. With permission of Penboard.de

 

My second best balanced pen, a sleek, thin, medium-long semi-flex F. A very classy pen.

I got lucky instead of the then out of reach E-100 I got it for E-50 from England in everyone had lost their money or had flown to SA for the World Cup.

The very next week I saw two go for E-25 on German Ebay.

 

Had I bought new pens, I'd probably have 5 instead of 90.

[fountainpen51]

For me, the inks with the best flow are those of Pilot Iroshizuko. I would stay away from brown inks.

[DvdRiet]

57 minutes ago, Bo Bo Olson said:

That was the piston pen Geha beat MB with.

 

Very handsome pen!!

[Bo Bo Olson]

4 hours ago, fountainpen51 said:

Pilot Iroshizuko

Is a very wet ink (at least to me who's basically a Euro ink user.), exactly opposite of being told to use a dry ink.

Well I can dip and see.