wettest fountain pen

[amberleadavis]

So, if you are going back to school or going to school, do your self a favor and get decent paper.  I went though many notebooks and couldn't stand that most of the papers would bleed through with gel pens and I would push to hard when using ball points.  Also, I learn the best in color. Here are some of my notes from law school.  

 

So, my advice, buy the Miquel Ruis notebooks, they are not overly expensive and have great paper.  Then purchase a handful of preppy pens in different nib sizes and a few of the ones that you can use as highlighters. You will want the extra fine for writing notes in textbooks that have terrible paper. Then use the the other preppies with different colors for notes and review.  Once you know what style works for you, then a spend a bit more money on pens that you like.

[james3paris]

On 2/13/2022 at 4:46 PM, Wolverine1 said:

Of course pens can be made wetter depending on how you tune a nib ( in my case, I get my nibs tuned by experienced nib-meisters). But, in my experience, both my Pelikan M1000 fountain pens were by far the wettest writers right out of the box.

+1

[jchch1950]

I used a Parker 75 ,with black ink cartridges, when I went to university ( seven years)  in the 70's .The Parker pen with medium nib was wet enough for quick notes and it never misbehave with different papers. I still have the pen and it brings back good memories. I paid 25 dollars for the 75 pen that was a huge amount at the time but it has never fail.I will recommend to any student that ,if are careful enough ,to buy not an expensive pen but one that is good enough to be with you for the whole university years.

[patrik.nusszer]

On 2/14/2022 at 3:25 PM, amberleadavis said:

 

 

I just wrote a review about the osprey pen that I purchased recently. For $18 you can get a wonderful pen with a quality steel nib. When I'm back in front of my computer and not using text to speech, I will send you the link.

Thank you!

[maclink]

Sounds like the OP is looking for a fountain pen that will not dry out when writing quickly.  The assumption seems to be that the way to achieve this is through a very wet writer.  I don't think this is true and furthermore, a wet writer isn't the easiest to deal with, especially when ink drying time may be important or paper quality may not be that great.  A wet writer is a sort of hit and miss depending on nib-tuning variations, as well as recommendations based on subjective experiences based on taste, as well as inks and papers used.

 

A well-tuned nib with a well-behaved ink will work great and this doesn't have to cost much.  Opus 88 offer great pens with great ink capacity.  I'd go for the medium nib to get decent ink flow.  I haven't had a single bad experience after using 5 different pens from them.  TWSBI is another brand that I've had good experience, my favourite being the Eco, followed closely by the Diamond 580.  I agree that a Pelikan M200/5 is a fabulous option if you can afford one, being again, highly likely to work well and with good ink capacity.

[inkstainedruth]

The wettest pen I have is the TWSBI 580-ALR with a 1.1 mm stub.  That pen is a complete firehose.  Second wettest is a Pelikan M200, with an IM nib (but was well-behaved with Pelikan 4001 Brilliant Black in the pen).

I agree with maclink about getting a pen with a well tuned nib (anywhere between EF and MF in width, depending on the brand and availability).  While I don't (mostly) care for EF nibs, I like the one on my Pelikan M405 Blue Black (modern European nibs tend to run wider than their Japanese counterparts, and also wider than for some vintage pens).  I don't think I would care for a Japanese EF, but the MF nib on my Sailor 1911S Loch Ness Monster pen is quite nice, and relatively fine (I have old version Sailor Jentle Sky High in it at the moment).  But I also have a couple of vintage Parker 51s with VERY nicely tuned EF nibs.  And if I have to do research and take lots of notes?  The Cedar Blue 51 Vac with the EF nib is my first choice.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Honeybadgers]

For paper: most university bookstores have a surprisingly huge variety of good paper. My uni bookstore has rhodia, clairefontaine, leuchtturm, fabriano, and many others.

 

It's just a shame because my university's "classroom experience" has just decided to give up on teaching altogether, either resorting to mental torture "teach yourself and we'll give you clicker questions about it after to test how well you taught yourself" or powerpoint slides with huge diagrams that move so fast there isn't a snowball's chance in hell of actually writing things down.

 

For my final Biochemistry series, I had to buy a color laser printer to print off the hundreds of pages of powerpoint slides, and I have to pause her recorded lectures so much to write what she says ON TOP of the slides that a 35 minute lecture video takes me two hours to finish. And then I have to re-watch it just to help absorb the material.

 

I miss community college. There, the professor wrote the damn calculus on the board. When he was writing, I was writing, and we could actually keep up.

 

[inkstainedruth]

Back when I was in college (late 1970s-early 1980s), the General Psychology class I took as a freshman was basically, "read the chapter, go to the library to one of their computer stations, take the quiz.  I never actually went to class after the first day (it was just a tick mark on the 30 hours of non-major classes I had to take; and if I went directly to the library after reading the chapter, I retained the information long enough to pretty much ace all the multiple choice quizzes....)

As opposed to three of the art history classes I took as part of my major, all from the same professor (who spent half the lectures yelling at the assistant du jour about the slides being half on the ceiling, and -- (according to a guy who hung out in the campus coffee house but who might or might not have actually been a student) holding her hands behind her back in a death grip because she wasn't allowed to smoke in the lecture hall.  I might still have my class notes, which included little line sketches of the slides, and asterisks next to the ones she went over in more detail in the small group classes as to the ones that were more likely to come up on exams.  (Of course, one of the finals for one of the three classes I took from Dr. Lord completely freaked me out because it was "open book"...).

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Honeybadgers]

On 2/18/2022 at 2:02 PM, inkstainedruth said:

Back when I was in college (late 1970s-early 1980s), the General Psychology class I took as a freshman was basically, "read the chapter, go to the library to one of their computer stations, take the quiz.  I never actually went to class after the first day (it was just a tick mark on the 30 hours of non-major classes I had to take; and if I went directly to the library after reading the chapter, I retained the information long enough to pretty much ace all the multiple choice quizzes....)

As opposed to three of the art history classes I took as part of my major, all from the same professor (who spent half the lectures yelling at the assistant du jour about the slides being half on the ceiling, and -- (according to a guy who hung out in the campus coffee house but who might or might not have actually been a student) holding her hands behind her back in a death grip because she wasn't allowed to smoke in the lecture hall.  I might still have my class notes, which included little line sketches of the slides, and asterisks next to the ones she went over in more detail in the small group classes as to the ones that were more likely to come up on exams.  (Of course, one of the finals for one of the three classes I took from Dr. Lord completely freaked me out because it was "open book"...).

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

Better than these cynical "brand-deal education" systems like pearson uses for physics, or my biochemistry professor who says her tests are bad "because I've never found an exam challenging in my entire life, so I don't know what a difficult question looks like"

[bunnspecial]

On 2/18/2022 at 1:21 PM, Honeybadgers said:

It's just a shame because my university's "classroom experience" has just decided to give up on teaching altogether, either resorting to mental torture "teach yourself and we'll give you clicker questions about it after to test how well you taught yourself" or powerpoint slides with huge diagrams that move so fast there isn't a snowball's chance in hell of actually writing things down.

 

For my final Biochemistry series, I had to buy a color laser printer to print off the hundreds of pages of powerpoint slides, and I have to pause her recorded lectures so much to write what she says ON TOP of the slides that a 35 minute lecture video takes me two hours to finish. And then I have to re-watch it just to help absorb the material.

 

I miss community college. There, the professor wrote the damn calculus on the board. When he was writing, I was writing, and we could actually keep up.

 

I AM a professor, and funny enough at a community college(although I went to undergrad at a small private school and did graduate school at a big state R1).

 

There are two of us in the Chemistry department, and we're both big on "chalk talks" at least is the term in Chemistry(I've used that term to other faculty and they don't seem to know what I'm talking about). We don't have any chalkboards I'm aware of here, but I typically do an entire lecture on the whiteboard.

 

There are times where that's not the BEST solution, so when that's the case I use a document camera, which is extra fun since I get to use 3 or 4 different fountain pens as appropriate. I don't feel like I'm as "energetic" so to speak when I'm sitting in front of the document cam as opposed to walking around at the board, but I do(mostly) write material as I go along. The times I use that-in one class we're doing a lot of periodic table work and I'll print one(typically on Rhodia and not the awful copy paper we have) and I can mark it up under the camera. I am sorry I'm not in a dedicated Chemistry classroom as there's not a periodic table on the wall or a pull-down one. Also, in one of my other classes, we've been doing kinetics, and I need rate data to work problems in class(and have the students work them with me) that I show on the camera.

 

Oh, there's also the hybrid model they've been pushing us to use, where you teach to both the classroom and Zoom at the same time. As had as I tried, I couldn't get the board visible by the front camera, so when I do that I have to use the document camera.

 

Still, though, teaching from Powerpoint CAN be done well but it can also be terrible. I know I'm not an effective Powerpoint teacher. It has an occasional place for me to show diagrams or other things that are too complicated or detailed for me to attempt to recreate drawing myself, or other things of that sort. Putting together a powerpoint presentation, in general, is easy. Putting together a good Powerpoint presentation, IMO, is both an art and also a lot of work. The "Art" part of it is something I don't know if I will ever have, and I respect the people who do.

 

To the OP's question, though-

 

I wrote a lot of notes in graduate school(didn't use FPs in undergrad) with a Lamy Studio Palladium with Private Reserve Fast Dry American Blue. It was a pen I settled on after trying a couple of others, and unfortunately is also the only FP I've ever lost...This is what I'd call a middle of the road wet pen, and the ink is fairly wet. At the time, the hot "cheap" paper on here was Sugarcane paper at Staples, which I don't think is as easy to get anymore(wouldn't know since the closest Staples is now ~200 miles from me), but it always worked fine for me even though I do remember it ghosting some. My notebooks now are almost entirely 80gsm Rhodia or 90gsm Oxford Optik, and I do have to say that I'd LOVE a notebook now of that weight and paper quality since walking around the front of the room with a Rhodia dotpad held by the side in my left hand can tire my hand quite a bit. That's the price we pay for good paper, though, and Tomoe River is TOO light and fragile for my liking in this particular task.