"Breaking-in" a new nib?

[ashbridg]

Pens, shoes, and guitars should never need "breaking in." Anyone who thinks they do is just trying to make up for a defect in manufacturing.

[ac12]

No break in for me.

I flush the pen, then check the tip for alignment (and fix if needed).

Then I ink up with Waterman ink and test for flow. If it is too wet, I switch to Cross ink.

Once I figure out which ink works best, then off I go.

 

If the pen does not write smoothly, I do not expect it to smooth out in any reasonable period of time, as the tip material is HARD.

That calls for smoothening/polishing of the tip, which I do not consider "breaking in."

 

As was mentioned, usually it is ME that needs to adjust to the pen, as not all pens are the same.

• Adjusting to the feel of the pen in the hand (size, weight, balance, etc.)
• Figuring out how to write with it (based on how it feels in the hand)
• Finding the sweet spot of the nib (on some pens it is small)
• etc.

[mhphoto]

The only real breaking in of modern fountain pens that's still relevant would be the gradual loosening up a gold nib in terms of its flexibility (and steel nibs that are meant to flex). That's not to say you should go around mashing on nibs willy nilly, but for pens like Noodler's and some modern soft-nibbed gold points that can take the stress, the more you utilize whatever variation it yields, generally the easier it will render line variation unto you. Keep in mind though, regular steel nibs and gold nibs with metallurgic recipes and thickness meant for stiffness just don't mix with the idea of offering line variation, and shouldn't be stressed with a heavy hand.

[Lyander0012]

When breaking in a nib, it goes without saying that this normally happens over the course of your using the pen, kinda like how the mechanisms in a newly bought car need a few months of regular use before you can push the parts to their limits.

 

With nail nibs, this amounts to nothing more than smoothening out the tipping material to suit your writing angle, pressure, etc. This'll depend on how soft the tipping material is, though. The downside of soft tipping materials is that, although they're faster to break in, they also develop flat spots a lot sooner, making for some scratchiness in writing; my Prelude became a bit uncomfortable to write with after about 8 months of daily use.

 

Flexible/springy nibs benefit more from breaking in. Apart from the tipping getting smoothed off, the nib itself becomes more flexible/soft to increase flex, making for a better cushioning while writing. This also helps with ink flow. Case in point: my Lamy 2000 was a rather dry writer when I first got it. After playing around with the nib for a few weeks, though, it became one of my wetter writers. The feed was perfectly clean from the get-go, since I flushed it thoroughly right after getting the pen, but the tines were just a bit too tightly pressed together.

 

Now, there's a bit of a risk to hastening the breaking-in process with nibs. For one thing, you could accidentally spring the nib, which would make for too great a distance between the tines. That'd lead to hard starts and heavy skipping.

 

Hope that helped. Oh, and you could always check out Mr. Richard Binder's site for more info. He has a large repository of fountain pen-related knowledge and tips on his site (no aff, just another fan, etc ).

 

 

Cheers!

 

Kevin

[Bo Bo Olson]

First one needs to hold a fountain pen like a fountain pen behind the big indeex finger and not before it like a ball point.

Second scratchy..."need to be broken in"...is tine misalignment. One needs a good once in a life time buy of a loupe with good glass and coating. Is good for reading hallmarks on gold/silver, grading coins and stamps....and needed for fountain pens. A small bump can misalign the nib.

Push down from the breathing hole area on the up tine and up the down tine....gently, hold for a couple of seconds... check with loupe.

 

****It's a fountain pen, it takes months to break it into my exact hand. I can't lend it to you; even the couple of seconds to write your name, or I'll have to do all that work again.""

Wouldn't want a Ball Point Barbarian, trashing your nib now do you. It's a "white lie", that saves anger and heart break....yours.

 

Basically, if the tines are aligned, there is no break in necessary....nor have I noticed it if it happened, but I've only bought 4-5 new pens. Never noticed much problem with old used pens either being 'broken in' to some one else's hand.

It took at least 7 years of constant use back when pens were it; one man one pen,, to wear a nib. Today with everyone having multiple pens, there will be no nib wear.

[Bo Bo Olson]

First one needs to hold a fountain pen like a fountain pen behind the big indeex finger and not before it like a ball point.

Second scratchy..."need to be broken in"...is tine misalignment. One needs a good once in a life time buy of a loupe with good glass and coating. Is good for reading hallmarks on gold/silver, grading coins and stamps....and needed for fountain pens. A small bump can misalign the nib.

Push down from the breathing hole area on the up tine and up the down tine....gently, hold for a couple of seconds... check with loupe.

 

****It's a fountain pen, it takes months to break it into my exact hand. I can't lend it to you; even the couple of seconds to write your name, or I'll have to do all that work again.""

Wouldn't want a Ball Point Barbarian, trashing your nib now do you. It's a "white lie", that saves anger and heart break....yours.

 

Basically, if the tines are aligned, there is no break in necessary....nor have I noticed it if it happened, but I've only bought 4-5 new pens. Never noticed much problem with old used pens either being 'broken in' to some one else's hand.

It took at least 7 years of constant use back when pens were it; one man one pen,, to wear a nib. Today with everyone having multiple pens, there will be no nib wear.

%

[Paddler]

Another + for OldGriz.

 

If anything gets broken in with a properly made pen, it is the pen breaking you in.

[recluse]

It still seems something is going on with the nib during the initial period. It's not that the nib was scratchy and then in a week became smooth like glass. That'd be alarming. Whenever a nib has performance issues: scratchy, prone to skip, too dry/wet - this requires fixing, not breaking in.

 

But even when the nib is problem free, it looks like there are some changes during first few fills. Maybe, indeed, these are some manufacturing residues that survived cleaning and go away with time. Maybe some micro-adjustment of tines or final fine polishing of the tip. Maybe ever so slight changes in mechanical properties of the nib.

 

I have this Knox Medium nib in Ahab. It was smooth from the start and had the wetness I prefer, so I don't think I did anything to it. It, however, sometimes had hard starts. Not so often that it would qualify for a problem but once in a while it would skip the initial part of the first stroke. By the end of tenth milliliter of that same Waterman Blue-Black, however, I've realized that it doesn't do this anymore. Of course, it can be said that I subconsciously press a tiny bit harder with this pen when I start a stroke. It cannot be disproved but it looks improbable. So, this sort of slight transformation I call breaking in.

[cbaytan]

Ok if the pen is no problematic breaking in takes not less than a week, but not more than 3 weeks.

 

First of all I flush my pens with a like 15 drops of dishwasher detergent added o a 1/3 glass of water coupla times.

Then I flush it with tap water until bubbles are not seen anymore in the converter, not less than 10 times.

Then I rinse it with pure water like 5 times.

Then I ink the pen, ink flow first, I adjust AHAB's feeds and all other pens nibs for increasing flow because I like ink smell when writing.

 

When ink flow is ok, I start smoothing the nibs out as the way I like, 90% of the effort and time goes into this.

I smooth the pens with micro- mesh mylar papers, nail polish pads and even with a honing stone (works great with AHABs).

I scribble/write like almost 1 hour a day with the pen for at least 1 week, I wmooth them out again and again if necessary for (mostly final adjustments for corner sharpness).

My all pens work like charm now except one (A Pilot 742 with FA nib (and it's going back soon, because I can't touch this scratchy and bery skippy expensive pen in 14 days return period).

 

And thats about it.

[Pterodactylus]

http://imageshack.us/a/img811/7977/dbdj.jpg

 

(Mont Blanc 146 - B ..... P.W. Akkerman Hofkwartier Groen)

[recluse]

There are many testimonies on the board about microadjustments. But in comments usually the discussion starts to go about how it's impossible to wear off the tip in short amount of time, or how inhumane should be writing in order to overload the nib so that tines get permanently sprung. How it's much more probable that the hand remembers tiny details about dozens pens even months later, but not any sort of microadjustment. Some people try to go back to their initial points, that no, these are not drastic changes, that maybe some final polishing occurs, maybe some cyclic hardening happens, maybe something else, something subtle. But to no avail.

 

Let's talk a bit about wearing off the tip. Let's take the tip to be 0.3 mm in diameter and let's say that it takes 50 km of writing to wear it off. Let's take it as the whole tip gets spread along the line of 50 km. The question is, how much material is worn off during 5 m of writing. This is all realistic data.

 

V = 4 pi (3 10^{-4}/2)^3/3 = 1^{-11} m^3 this is the volume of the tip, which lasts 50 km of writing

 

The volume worn during 5 m of writing is v = V/(5 10^4) 5 = 10^{-15} m^3

 

This corresponds to a particle of size

 

r = (3 v/(4 pi))^{1/3} = 7 10^{-6} m, that is 7 micron radius or 14 micron diameter.

 

So it follows from here that it's not impossible that 5 m of writing will remove several irregularities of the size of 1 micron (actually pushing this argument that's going to be more than million of them but that's of lesser importance).

 

How much is this. People often say, that they feel the difference between the nib smoothed using Mylar paper with the grain size 0.3 micron comparing against Mylar paper with 1 micron grain. Thus irregularities of 1 micron are firmly established to impact writing sensation.

 

How much is 5 m of writing. The total length of lines on college ruled (6 mm) piece of paper of the letter format is more than 6 m. So one page of writing on such page is definitely more than 5 m long.

 

Such kind of reasoning makes me think that, indeed, it's possible that there are some changes that can be felt after a dozen pages of writing. This is, again, about microadjustment. Not the transition from scratchy to smooth, but from smooth to smoother, from hard starts occurring once every ten minutes of writing to no hard starts at all and so on. I've experienced such things more than once in order to believe that my hand prefers to remember all these very tiny details about each my pen and how to adjust to every one of them than to remember how to write capital S. And I've spent quite some time practicing it.

 

EDIT Oh, I forgot to add that from this same argument follows that borrowing your pen to someone who uses fountain pens and knows how to write with them is not going to "spoil" the nib. In order to produce irregularities in short amount of time some special efforts are needed, say, writing on a brick.

Edited October 28, 2013 by recluse

[cbaytan]

V = 4 pi (3 10^{-4}/2)^3/3 = 1^{-11} m^3 this is the volume of the tip, which lasts 50 km of writing

The volume worn during 5 m of writing is v = V/(5 10^4) 5 = 10^{-15} m^3

This corresponds to a particle of size

r = (3 v/(4 pi))^{1/3} = 7 10^{-6} m, that is 7 micron radius or 14 micron diameter.

 

 

Wow, good to know, advance rocket science, I knew this was happening because I could feel it all the time. BUT!

 

If this is true wouldn't average iridium (or other) nib tips should be wear out, practically melt, say in years, especially in the hard pressing owners? But we see 100'rds years old nibs perfectly working around, and I've never heard of a spontaneous nib wear off. What do you say about this dilemma?

Edited October 28, 2013 by cbaytan

[Pterodactylus]

http://imageshack.us/a/img59/4999/b55d.jpg

 

(Pelikan Signum P5xx - EF ..... ESS Registrars Blue/Black)

[Paddler]

Many pens write a little differently after the first couple of fills. This is true for most pens that have been dry for a long time, whether they are new or vintage. Such changes are not due to the nib breaking in. They are caused by the feed and underside of the nib finally becoming completely wetted by ink.

 

A coarse abrasive used on a properly adjusted nib won't make it scratchy or toothy. It just increases drag.

[recluse]

 

Wow, good to know, advance rocket science, I knew this was happening because I could feel it all the time. BUT!

 

If this is true wouldn't average iridium (or other) nib tips should be wear out, practically melt, say in years, especially in the hard pressing owners? But we see 100'rds years old nibs perfectly working around, and I've never heard of a spontaneous nib wear off. What do you say about this dilemma?

 

There's no dilemma. I've seen back in the days a few pens worn out for several years of very intensive writing by people who didn't look like pressing too hard.

 

There are industrial standards for how long a nib should write. 50 km is not the best, not the worst. This equates to 10 000 pages of writing. Sounds about right. Nakaya claims 60-70 km with their Irodismine tipping. They illustrate it "Even if you write 1000 characters per day it will last for 10 years."