Lamy Woes

[OregonJim]

This seems to be a yearly thing with me.  I dig out my Lamy collection and try to like them.  This year is no different than the last five - no dice.

 

I have 4 Lamy Safaris, 2 AL-Stars, and a Studio.  All seven pens have feed issues.  All seven pens skip.  All seven are hard starters, no matter what ink I try.  Nibs range from extra-fine to broad.  Have tried cleaning and flushing 'till I'm blue in the face.

 

I have yet to touch a Lamy pen that actually works well.  What is wrong?  Surely there are many people who love their Lamys - have I gotten seven duds in a row?

 

I think this will be the last time I mess with them.  Any tips would be appreciated, but I feel I've tried everything.  I *really* want to like them, but I'm getting old enough that it's not worth the hassle, and I'm most CERTAINLY not going to buy an eighth one!

[DaveQuail]

I have 11 Lamy's (Safari, AL-Star and Lx), and apart from a nib being replaced on one of the Safari's when new, I have had no trouble with any or them at all. This is really strange, as Lamy is a high-quality product, with each being tested prior to boxing and shipping from the factory in Heidelberg, Germany. None that fail QC will leave the factory.

What is the age range of your pens?

Ask your local dealer to send one or two back to the official distributor in your country and ask them for a full report.

Good luck!

I really love my Lamy's!

[carlos.q]

4 hours ago, OregonJim said:

This seems to be a yearly thing with me.  I dig out my Lamy collection and try to like them.  This year is no different than the last five - no dice.

Did you flush your pens after their year old hibernation?

[Sailor Kenshin]

6 hours ago, OregonJim said:

This seems to be a yearly thing with me.  I dig out my Lamy collection and try to like them.  This year is no different than the last five - no dice.

 

I have 4 Lamy Safaris, 2 AL-Stars, and a Studio.  All seven pens have feed issues.  All seven pens skip.  All seven are hard starters, no matter what ink I try.  Nibs range from extra-fine to broad.  Have tried cleaning and flushing 'till I'm blue in the face.

 

I have yet to touch a Lamy pen that actually works well.  What is wrong?  Surely there are many people who love their Lamys - have I gotten seven duds in a row?

 

I think this will be the last time I mess with them.  Any tips would be appreciated, but I feel I've tried everything.  I *really* want to like them, but I'm getting old enough that it's not worth the hassle, and I'm most CERTAINLY not going to buy an eighth one!

Send them to me.

[Lithium466]

Sometimes their QC is a bit dubious on the nibs (Z58 nib I just received), but the pens themselves are usually fine.
All my Lamy were fine straight out of the box, minus some minor nib tweaking (or replacement).

[jchch1950]

seven bad pens out of seven. That must be a record.Maybe I'm lucky but my Lamy pens work quite well for me.

[A Smug Dill]

7 hours ago, OregonJim said:

I have 4 Lamy Safaris, 2 AL-Stars, and a Studio.  All seven pens …

 

… are fitted with Z50 nibs, I guess?

 

7 hours ago, OregonJim said:

have I gotten seven duds in a row?

 

I think this will be the last time I mess with them.  Any tips would be appreciated, but I feel I've tried everything.

 

Try a pen model with a Z52, Z53, Z55, Z56, or Z57 nib instead — any slide-on nib other than a Z50. All my Z50 EF nibs write scratchily and/or noisily out of the box. Not so any of the other nibs.

 

Or you could just order one of those nibs as a standalone or replacement nib that you can easily fit onto a Safari or AL-Star yourself, if you're really so keen on the pen's design and/or ergonomics.

 

29 minutes ago, Lithium466 said:

(Z58 nib I just received)

 

That looks like a Z56 nib to me.

 

[Aysedasi]

1 hour ago, jchch1950 said:

seven bad pens out of seven. That must be a record.Maybe I'm lucky but my Lamy pens work quite well for me.

 Exactly the same for me.  

[senzen]

They dry out rather quickly, you need to do a thorough cleaning to get any caked in ink out (diluted Rapido Eze and the like) then keep them in air tight cases or boxes; I went through the radical step of applying clear tape on my 7 Vistas to get some peace of mind; Lamy Studios don't dry out as quickly.

[OregonJim]

7 hours ago, carlos.q said:

Did you flush your pens after their year old hibernation?

 

They are always flushed before being stored away (and when changing inks).  I've used water with a drop of dish soap, Rapido-Eze, even ultrasonic cleaning.  I've flushed with both gravity and a syringe.

 

Note that this isn't a new development - all the pens have been this way since I received them from the factory.  They've never worked properly.  They range in age from 2 years old to nearly 20.

 

I have dozens of other FPs that I'm more than happy with, and they all get used/inked/cleaned the exact same way.  It's just an enigma to me why ALL my Lamys seem to be duds...

[OregonJim]

8 hours ago, DaveQuail said:

I have 11 Lamy's (Safari, AL-Star and Lx), and apart from a nib being replaced on one of the Safari's when new, I have had no trouble with any or them at all. This is really strange, as Lamy is a high-quality product, with each being tested prior to boxing and shipping from the factory in Heidelberg, Germany. None that fail QC will leave the factory.

What is the age range of your pens?

Ask your local dealer to send one or two back to the official distributor in your country and ask them for a full report.

Good luck!

I really love my Lamy's!

That's what I would expect to be a normal experience.

 

Unfortunately, there are no local dealers left around here.  The last shop closed nearly a decade ago.  I forgot to mention that I have two spare nibs - one silver and one black - and neither has given any improvement (nor have they been any worse).

[Sailor Kenshin]

2 hours ago, OregonJim said:

That's what I would expect to be a normal experience.

 

Unfortunately, there are no local dealers left around here.  The last shop closed nearly a decade ago.  I forgot to mention that I have two spare nibs - one silver and one black - and neither has given any improvement (nor have they been any worse).

 

I have more Lamys than you (including an Aion and a 2000) and had maybe three of those Lamys with not-so-great nibs.  The first Safari was one of my first fountain pens.  I did not yet know how to fix them.  Of the rest, one got smoothed.  Fine now.

 

Send them to me.  I meant it.  If I can get them writing, I'll send them back.  If I can't , ditto, but at least I'd have an idea why.

[Lithium466]

6 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

 

That looks like a Z56 nib to me.

 

Nope, that's a Z58, the rose gold version of the Z56. I admit the picture is crappy.

[OregonJim]

4 minutes ago, Sailor Kenshin said:

 

I have more Lamys than you (including an Aion and a 2000) and had maybe three of those Lamys with not-so-great nibs.  The first Safari was one of my first fountain pens.  I did not yet know how to fix them.  Of the rest, one got smoothed.  Fine now.

 

Send them to me.  I meant it.  If I can get them writing, I'll send them back.  If I can't , ditto, but at least I'd have an idea why.

 

Thanks for the offer.  If it were one or two pens, that might make sense - but seven?  There has to be something else going on that we (or I) don't yet understand.

[inkstainedruth]

Where are you located?  I'm starting to wonder if you are in a dry climate (I live in western PA, and have never had a problem with any of mine (I have five Safaris, two al-Stars and an LX).  I also have a metal-bodied Jinhao 599 (a Safari/al-Star knockoff) and do have to play with the converter from time to time because of flow issues.

I'm also wondering if you're using cartridges or converters in them (and if the latter, whether the converters are bad...).  Beyond that?  Sounds as if you've just been really unlucky -- even the used French Blue I got on eBay works well.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Mercian]

⬆️ What @inkstainedruth said!

 

I live in damp-&-humid, rainy old England, at an altitude of only 140m, and so have never had any dry-out problems with my 3 Safaris & 1 Vista.

 

Given that the Safari, Al-star etc have open slots that serve as ‘ink windows’, I suspect that they may be more susceptible to evaporative dry-out than other pens - if, that is, you live in a high/dry climate.

Although I will confess that I thought that OR had a cool maritime climate, so would not expect evaporative dry-out to be a problem there - unlike in, say, NM.

That said, if you often leave your inked pens untouched for, say, a couple of weeks, I would imagine that evaporative dry-out of the feed/nib might occur.

 

I will say that, even here, I do often experience the ‘surface tension’ issue when using my Z24/Z28 converters.

The internal diameter of the converter is narrow enough for the surface tension of the ink to be enough to overcome the gravitational force that is trying to attract it to the bottom of the converter, where the feed nipple is.

The result is that ink often ‘sticks’ at the top of the converter, meaning that it stops flowing in to the feed, & so the nib gets ‘starved’ of ink. My first Lamy was my Vista - & its barrel’s transparency enabled me to identify the problem, so I was ‘forewarned’ about it when buying my Safaris.

 

If your Lamys are not Vistas, you will need to unscrew their barrels to check if this - the surface-tension issue - is what is causing your ink-flow woes.
 

When it happens I find that I have to flick the end of the converter with my finger with a fair amount of force in order to get the ink to flow down to the feed-nipple.
I don’t use my wrist to flick the whole pen - doing that will cause ink to flick out of the nib, either on to my table/desk/writing, or in to the pen’s cap. Each of those outcomes is messy.

 

I have experienced the same problem with Parker’s ‘deluxe’ twist-converters (that it ships with its ‘high-end’ pens).
And I have heard of people suffering this problem with Waterman’s converters too.

It doesn’t happen with Parker’s cheap ‘slide’-converters though, because those contain a ball-bearing ‘agitator’ that can slide around inside the converter & break the surface tension, which makes the ink flow down towards the feed.

The best Parker converters were their 1990s slide-converters. The agitator in those was a piece of stainless-steel tube, which therefore never blocked the feed-nipple. The ball-bearing agitators are cheaper for Parker to make than the tubing agitators were, but they do sometimes block the feed-nipple.

Parker’s cartridges do not suffer from this effect, because they have internal longitudinal strakes that break the surface tension, and make ink flow.
Iirc, Lamy cartridges don’t have such strakes. And it is, of course, not possible to make converters that have those strakes.

[dipper]

Here is an interesting mathematical diversion looking into the question of ...

 

7 hours ago, OregonJim said:

It's just an enigma to me why ALL my Lamys seem to be duds...

And...

4 hours ago, OregonJim said:

If it were one or two pens, that might make sense - but seven?

 

Imagine that a pen manufacturer ships tens of thousands of pens worldwide, and randomly scattered amongst all those pens, about 2% of the pens have some performance fault such as a scratchy nib, or skipping.

 

( 2% faulty, or 1 pen in 50, is just a number I plucked from the air. Intentionally chosen to be rather high. As we shall see, even at that high fault rate the chance of collecting seven pens and finding that all seven are bad turns out to be highly unlikely. )

 

In this imaginary scenario, if one pen collector purchases seven of these pens, selected at random, the probability that all seven pens will be free of any faults is given by (49÷50)^7 = 0.868 or about 87%.

If many buyers each purchase their own individual collections of seven pens then around 87% of those buyers would be able to report on FPNetwork that they have seven of the pens, and that all seven work perfectly.

 

What about the other "Unlucky 13%"?

(Oooh... spooky numbers!)

Some of those buyers will find they have one faulty pen in their collection of seven. Some may have two faulty pens, some three, etc...

 

There is a small chance that some particularly unlucky purchaser will have all seven faulty pens, just as a result of random chance. (AKA "bad luck").

For one purchaser, the probability of that occuring is given by (1÷50)^7 = 0.00000000000128 or about "one in a billion".

From the point of view of one purchaser, that probability is so ridiculously small that the "bad luck" explanation can confidently be rejected. Some other cause, something specific to that purchaser, becomes a more likely explanation.

 

The above results were calculated from a rather high (?) arbitrary pen fault rate of 2%. Any lower fault rate would make the "bad luck" explanation even more implausible.

 

There are situations where events having very low probability for each individual person become reasonably expected to occur. That happens when the number of individuals involved is very large.

In the UK there have been past imprisonments of innocent persons due to a failure by a so called "expert witness" to understand that fact.

 

In the more mundane case of the Seven Bad Lamys, at 2% fault rate such a case becomes a reasonable expectation - for one unlucky collector - if the world contained about One Billion pen collectors, and every collector purchased seven of those pens.

Not in this universe...😄😄😄.

 

 

[OregonJim]

20 hours ago, inkstainedruth said:

Where are you located?  I'm starting to wonder if you are in a dry climate (I live in western PA, and have never had a problem with any of mine (I have five Safaris, two al-Stars and an LX).  I also have a metal-bodied Jinhao 599 (a Safari/al-Star knockoff) and do have to play with the converter from time to time because of flow issues.

I'm also wondering if you're using cartridges or converters in them (and if the latter, whether the converters are bad...).  Beyond that?  Sounds as if you've just been really unlucky -- even the used French Blue I got on eBay works well.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

Quite the opposite of a dry climate.  I live in a rainforest.

 

I've tried converters and cartridges (both also made by Lamy) with no appreciable difference in performance.  In answer to several replies, it is not a matter of the pens "drying out".  The issues with skipping and hard starting appear immediately once I fill them with ink (or attach a cartridge).  It's not like the pens have been sitting for days, or even hours.  The nibs are not scratchy (except perhaps for the EF).  I've looked at the tines under a microscope and can see nothing out of the ordinary - no misalignment, gaps, or splaying.

 

This is why I even brought up the issue:  I have dozens of other FPs from Parker, Pelican, Pilot, Visconti, Cross, Osmiroid, Esterbrook, Sheaffer - you name it.  From pre-war vintage to recently manufactured.  They all write well without problems (of course with the expected performance limitations from certain paper and ink combinations - no pen is perfect).  But I have never gotten a Lamy to write more than a word or two without skipping or becoming starved for ink.  There is SOMETHING about me or my environment that is antithetical to the operation of a Lamy pen, yet all others seem to be unaffected.  I'd love to find out what that difference is!

 

 

[Sailor Kenshin]

22 minutes ago, OregonJim said:

 

Quite the opposite of a dry climate.  I live in a rainforest.

 

I've tried converters and cartridges (both also made by Lamy) with no appreciable difference in performance.  In answer to several replies, it is not a matter of the pens "drying out".  The issues with skipping and hard starting appear immediately once I fill them with ink (or attach a cartridge).  It's not like the pens have been sitting for days, or even hours.  The nibs are not scratchy (except perhaps for the EF).  I've looked at the tines under a microscope and can see nothing out of the ordinary - no misalignment, gaps, or splaying.

 

This is why I even brought up the issue:  I have dozens of other FPs from Parker, Pelican, Pilot, Visconti, Cross, Osmiroid, Esterbrook, Sheaffer - you name it.  From pre-war vintage to recently manufactured.  They all write well without problems (of course with the expected performance limitations from certain paper and ink combinations - no pen is perfect).  But I have never gotten a Lamy to write more than a word or two without skipping or becoming starved for ink.  There is SOMETHING about me or my environment that is antithetical to the operation of a Lamy pen, yet all others seem to be unaffected.  I'd love to find out what that difference is!

 

 

Offer still open.

 

If I can get them to write for me, I can't even imagine why they would not write for you.  While we don't live in a rain forest, it is normally humid here.

[dipper]

I have been pondering two questions.....

 

1 ) What design feature, relevant to ink flow, is fundamentally different in Lamy pens? Some quirk that is not present in other pen designs?

 

2) What can we suggest as an investigation method to allow @OregonJim to focus in on where the problem is being caused? At present we know only that each Lamy pen as a complete system is failing to deliver.

 

... and I have ideas ....

 

1) There is perhaps something unusual in the region where the top face of a Safari feed meets the underside of the nib. I see two ink channels, and possibly a shallow enclosed space or void that may fill with a shallow puddle of ink running to the single central nib slit?

Image above was captured from this video by Goulet Pens..

 

 

Suggested action:

 

Fill one of the problem Lamys with ink.

Slide off the nib, as video above.

With the pen feed pointing downwards, touch a paper kitchen towel onto the exposed ink fissures.

Result should be a rapidly spreading patch of wet ink, gushing into the towel.

 

If that does not happen then the problem is happining somewhere up in the ink cartridge / converter / feed rear end. The nib and feed "front end" are probably perfectly OK.

 

If you do get a satisfying rich wet flow into the towel then the problem must be happening in the flow linkage between the feed fissures and the nib slit (the region where I think there may be an unusual design).

.... remove cartridge / converter

Flush the section & feed

Gently degrease the upper face of the feed and the underside of the nib - perhaps using a soft toothbrush and non-abrasive toothpaste!

Flush the feed/grip section again, and rinse the nib, to remove all detergent traces.

Towel-dry the feed and nib.

 

Reassemble.

 

See if the pen now "magically" works well...🤞.