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The only notable problem with this pen is that if you apply pressure and write fast, the ink flow doesn’t always keep up and as a result the line splits – instead of a fat line, you get two extra-fine lines separated by an empty space where ink should be. In my experience this hardly ever happens with vintage flex nibs (and only when you push the nib to close to its limits). At the Philadelphia pen show this year I asked Richard Binder if he could do something about this. He said yes, took my Custom 743/FA back to NH and finally sent it back last week. I don’t know exactly what he does, but (so far, anyway) his fix seems to work well; I can still get the nib to do the splits, but it does so far less than before, and I don’t think it’s happened at all while doing “normal” writing (rather than testing it with challenging doodles, etc.). Perhaps if Richard’s reading this and wants to divulge trade secrets he’ll chime in….
Of course, this raises the question “why bother?” when, for no more money (often far less, though occasionally more), you can buy a vintage pen that needs no such fix in the first place and, in fact, performs better overall; or can get Richard (or John Mottishaw) to make you a custom flex nib from a pen you already own. I’ll leave that to you, and move on to other matters….
Someone (I think it was Splicer) expressed skepticism concerning whether nibs in vintage fountain pens really flex more or otherwise perform better than Pilot FA nibs. Having said that they sometimes did, I thought I would put my money where my mouth is, take out some of my pens which are at least what I would call semi-flex, and see how they compare. (To give you a sense of scale, the sheets are from a Rhodia No. 19 pad; there are 5 squares to the inch.)
There’s nothing scientific about what I did; there are no measurements, and I didn’t try to do exactly the same thing with each pen (e.g. I probably didn’t apply the same amount of pressure in each case; rather, I went as far I could within what I subjectively felt was the nib’s comfort zone). A few pens were already filled (where I could remember what they are, I identified the inks), the rest I dipped in Diamine Imperial Blue. (In my experience, fountain pens are more likely to do the splits when dipped, but fortunately that hardly ever happened here.) To show a nib’s flex performance (extent of spread and return), I wrote a couple of large slightly fussy L shapes, followed by a thick and a thin vertical line, plus a vertical line made by bouncing the nib (to show return; though I seem to have forgotten to do this for a few of them; oh well…). Next to that, I have identified the pen/nib using ordinary fast handwriting of a type that doesn’t show off flex, with as close as I can get to no pressure at all, in part so you can see how the nib writes without flex, in part so that there’s no distraction from the flex demonstration on the left. For easy comparison, each scan begins with the Pilot FA. (Had I taken more care the whole thing would look better, but I hope you get the idea.)
Of course, you can’t tell by looking at the scans how a nib will feel to write with, how much pressure it takes to get any of these results, how quickly/easily the nib flexed, and how “soft” (as opposed to flexible) it is. But you can see for yourself which nibs provide the most contrast from thin to thick, which provide the best “hairlines,” and which have the best “return.”
As you can see, in addition to the Pilot FA nib, I added a few other modern nibs – a Pilot Custom 74 with a soft medium (SM) nib, and two Namiki Falcons (medium and broad). I wish I had a 74 with a soft fine or soft fine-medium nib and a Namiki Falcon with a fine nib to see just how close they come to the FA. Neither provides as much variation, but I can’t tell whether that’s because they’re less flexible or start off less fine…. (Anyone know?) I also tossed in a few flexible obliques just for fun (you obviously don’t use these for classic flex purposes – copperplate and Spencerian – but they’re marvelous to write with if, like me, you like line variation/writing styles of rather different types.) Note that the vintage pens include an elderly Sheaffer, if only to show that they didn’t make just nails…. Oh, and the Swans (I guess I should call them Mabie Todd Swans) I identified by nib size are all English (the other two Swans are American, and older).
I could say a lot more, but I’ve already gone on too long; so two final quick comments. First, does size matter? It may be that nib-maker can conjure up more flex from a bigger nib than a small one (this seems intuitively true, at any rate), but in practice I’ve noticed no correlation at all – at least, not in the pens I used this afternoon; my pretty little Osmia Faber-Castell probably has the smallest nib I used (it would probably qualify as a #1 or smaller) but it may be the most responsive – both very soft and very flexible – of the lot; it’s all but impossible to prevent it from flexing. Second, a word of warning to anyone hoping to track down some of the vintage nibs I used: with many of them there’s no way of knowing for sure how flexible they’re going to be, if at all, until you try them (or can rely on the seller to describe them in some way that’s half-useful – flex descriptions are hopelessly subjective; what you may call a wet noodle I might consider semi-flex, etc. – but with luck you can figure out what s/he uses the words to mean). Some are fairly consistent (Waterman 100 year and colour-coded nibs, and Wahls marked “flexible,” for instance), and shape can be a clue (but isn’t reliably), but the rest are up for grabs – oblique Pelikan nibs could be rigid, and nibs marked with just size numbers are all over the map (compare the two Swan #4 nibs, for instance).
Simon
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