As promised :bunny1: :bunny1: :bunny1:, here follows the review of FPN's own ink, FPN Galileo Manuscript Brown, in this case the low bandwidth version. A high bandwidth version is provided in another post.
In order to create this review, I had to be rather frugal with the ink, as I only had a single KCat vial available to me. This meant sharing converters between pens, if appropriate or possible. This is one of the reasons why this review took a lot of time, as many pens were used for testing this ink, and in each instance if a converter was reused, ink was still drawn in through the feed, and the pens were left for a day, sometimes two, to soak the feed fully.
A record number of pens and nibs has been used for this review, namely 39 all in all... I couldn't use more than this number, just in case you're wondering, because I finished all of the ink by that time....
As usual, the images are clickable, and provide you with an enlarged page in a separate browser window, which shows a lot more detail than the thumbnails provided in this message. Furthermore, at the end a link is provided to the complete review, all pages one after the other.
The limited amount of ink available meant that I could only do these pages once, so I do hope you forgive me all for the mistakes I made here and there. The scribbling I did with pen #11 has to do with the fact that I noticed that if I used the 52 degree Stipula nib, I could get some line thickness variation, when drawing a vertical line while changing the angle the nib made to the paper. It is supposed to do that. Unfortunately I didn't manage to do that in the writing sample here, and just didn't dare doing that again...
As page 4 starts out with a bunch of dip nibs, I also scanned the backside of the page, to show the bleed-through of the ink. This is actually very impressive, as this only shows with the wettest, most difficult dip nibs.
Also, what is clearly visible, is that the colour coming through is the rusty brown, which also shows in the Galileo manuscript photograph that led to this ink. If you do look very carefully at the writing, you'll find that, occasionally, this also shows at the edges of letters here and there.
In order to show the performance on different types of papers, I have included some samples on FPN Notepad paper, and a few cream-coloured papers, where a brown ink really gets into its own. All of these are high quality papers, while the lined college block paper is of much lower quality, even though it is fountain pen friendly. The ink works well on all of these papers.
Anyway, here are the clickable thumnails:
And here is the link to the full review, all pages readable in a single browser window:
FPN Galileo Manuscript Brown, the full review
BTW, this is the first time that all 10 different large Stipula nibs have been used in a single ink review!
9 The final conclusion, especially after writing not only with a lot of different pens and nibs, but also with a lot of different browns (see other topic), is that this is a very beautfiful, pleasant, easy-going ink, which exemplifies all that is great in Noodler's inks. I reckon this is, when you take everything into account, the best ink I have ever encountered so far.
Yes, some inks have better characteristics for specific details, like a slightly better lubrication, or better shading, but no other inks are consistently as good as this ink, and on top of all this, FPN Galileo Manuscript Brown is bulletproof, too! And there is no other ink I have ever encountered, that is so problemless with such a large variety of nibs. Somehow the flow seems to adapt to the actual nib/feed combination, so that it always writes well, from the driest to the wettest writers.
This is absolutely impressive, and this ink, with all its other great characteristics, can only be very highly recommended as a result!
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did! (with the exception of rinsing and flushing all of the pens used in this review
).Warm regards, Wim
the maddest Dutchman of them all
.