Good Morning!

My nib smoothing/grinding skills have improved to the point that I can actually get some use out of a bunch of pens I had given up hope on. It's been a fun journey!

I do have a question, though...

At the nib factory, after the iridium tip is slit, how are the inside edges of the tip finished so they are not sharp? I'm finding that I can easily grind/smooth away the tiny 'radius' present on the inner tip edges. Of course, that makes for problems with 'toothiness' of the nib.

Any insights would be appreciated.

Have a joyous Holiday Season!

Thomas Connell

From what I understand, the process is called "nib flossing". There are some products out there for this purpose, if I recall correctly, on sites such as tryphon.it

Nib flossing is done to improve ink flow by increasing the gap or removing surface burrs between the tines or reducing excessive stress betwen the tines. Smoothing the tip eges at the center is a more delicate matter (experts please!) but I have pretty good luck by running a sheet of fine mylar backed abrasive between the tine and curling it to hit the sharp edge.

Yes, that is the only method I've found (so far) that works. Surely the factory doesn't have people who do that to all the nibs, though. Not consistent enough for a production environment..

I suspect some sort of wheel is used. The bottom line is if I can find out the proper way to smooth these inner edges, I can work on designing a tool to do the job.

Thanks for the input.

Tom Connell

I had one pen that I had everything on the nib perfect except for the sharp edges in the inside of the tines. On cheap paper after writing a while I would have a little ink filled mass on top of the nib where the paper fibers were being scraped up by these sharp inner edges. I took my nib smoothing stick and carefully with a fingernail raised one tine and ran the smoothing stick across the inside edge of the other one. Reversed the process and voilà problem solved.