Took my dog for a walk on the beach this afternoon & picked up a nice seagull feather about 14 inches 350 mm long.

This is the result after a little botching around with cutting & paring

Looks like I'm getting to be a lost cause ... & I have no intention of trying out clay tablets...... (yet)

I measured the Diameters of some pens with a digital caliper I have ... just to compare

The Seagull Feather is 5.5mm diam
The Thinnest Fountain pen I have is the Lamy Linea with a 9.5mm barrel & 8.5mm grip

If I recall correctly the dip pens we used in my early school days would have had about the same diameter as the Lamy Linea

Oh, come on-- modern cuticle tools are almost exactly the right shape for cuneiform!

How does he know that, I wonder?

All he needs is a squid climbing up it with ruby eyes for the bling factor.

this is how i got started with fountain pens, back in fifth grade. i used a duck feather id found. thought itd be cool

The Pilot Birdie is pretty slim at about 8mm.

Looks good too very similar the Linea ~ wish I heard of this before buying the Linea .. less than half the price.

I'f we're going to talk slim, don't forget the Sailor Chalana! I don't know what the current models are like, but my stainless steel one measures 6.5mm at the thickest part of the barrel, and just under 5mm in the area of the section where I grip it. Actually, I've never measured it before and am quite shocked!

I seriously thought about the Chalana but didn't realise it was that slim .. in fact I reserved one but didn't receive a reply from the vendor so bought the Linea (which I am very pleased with btw).

Both the Pilot Birdie & Chalana are discontinued & the Lamy Linea offers more & cheaper choices in nib changes

I've heard that to correctly make a quill, the tip end must be heated submerged in sand in the oven after boiling the tip in water. Something like that. Might have it backwards. This should make it stiffer and harder for it to flex too much.

I understand that some guys back in the day made a living out of quill making so the selection & processing must have been quite a craft
I've also read that Crows feathers were rated (plenty of them around in my woods) & that feathers were often stripped completely .. the conception of the feathered quill thus being a bit of a modern myth .. In my case I like the feathers to remain in situ, & next time I will pay more attention to the orientation of the nib point & plume .. I have a bit of misalignment at the moment..... All done in haste, as you will no doubt understand.
I don't see myself tackling Copperplate just yet .. each character & stroke is formed individually & makes writing a slower & less fluid process. ~ This has its advantages with my handwriting.

Thanks for the tip I shall read up a bit more.

I'm laughing as I read this post and I will tell you why. A couple good friends at work always give me that "here we go again" look when I talk about pens but they listen because, well, they are my friends. If I show them this post they will probably give me that "dude, your just nuts now" look. Anyway Have Fun, good post. Thanks.

Laughing - What a fun review! I don't like dip pens generally, but I like how the quill writes. Nice one!

Very Cool! Thank you for doing that for us. I've often wondered what it would be like, but being afraid to open that can of worms, I haven't. Now I've seen that it can be done, so I think I'll......

No! I'm not! I tell you, I won't do it!!!!

Thanks again.

HF, I'm wondering (in a more serious tone) whether you used any sort of an insert inside the shaft of the feather to act as a reservoir. The schematic I've seen was a little s-shaped object inserted so it would touch the top and bottom walls of the shaft-- I think it was to be made of some of of the discarded material from the shaping of the point.

No just cut the Quill no other fiddling other than shaping the nib. The ink holds inside the tube sticking to the sides. Parker Black Quink BTW


Now when on holiday in Crete a few years ago we drove past (& called in) a restaurant taverna on the road out of Agios Nikolias & had the surprise of our life when a free range Pelikan waddled around the corner and came up to the table .... I never knew they were so big
I'll be out there again in May & the thought of having my first original Pelikan Pen is likely too strong to resist.

Now I'm bummed. I've spent thousands of dollars on pens, when all I really needed to do was go for a walk on the beach.

I picked up a couple of what I believe to be pelican primary feathers when I was walking on the beach in Oregon (there were scads of brown pelicans all over the beach - though if I were approached by the department of wildlife, then I thought they were goose feathers). I plan to scrape and cure them for writing. Somewhere I have a long how-to about how it was done in the 1800s and some modern variations on it. Generally they were heat-cured and the outer coating of the feather stripped off with a knife. If I recall, how you cured them depended on what effect you wanted - dry heat for a stiffer quill, boiling for a more flexible one. I can't remember if you were supposed to strip out the pith or not.

The fletching of the feathers was often stripped off, except for the very end. Since quills needed regular sharpening and shaping, you wanted to have a fair amount of shaft to trim down until it got too short. However, I also seem to recall seeing portraits done with large showy plumes in hand or on desks, so I think that feathers with lots of fletching were sometimes used as show-pieces. If so then it would not be a purely modern affectation.

(as a side note, and a pen-spotting item, the Patrick Stewart version of a Christmas Carol played this contrast well, with Scrooge using a big, flashy, fully-fletched goose quill and Bob Cratchet using crow-quills with all but the top fletching trimmed off. Not sure if it was historically accurate, but it seemed a nice touch).

Also, if you look at a quill, you can see the size progression of pens to the modern-day monsters. First you had narrow little quills, then the long slender handled gold and steel dip-pens (the better-quality dip-pens remained very slender, like a quill, up until the early 1900s). Then slender ed-filled fountain pens like the Waterman 12. Then self-fillers tried to keep the same ink capacity as the ED pens and added girth for the filling system (e.g. Waterman 52, Parker Duofold), and finally pens started advertising "Oversize" pens as their top-end models and ink-capacity was a big selling point, leading to larger pens. The progression from quill to slender dip-pen to slender ED pen makes a lot of sense.

John

PS - as another side-note, be aware that collecting feathers is restricted and in some cases illegal under the Migratory Bird Act and a couple of other laws. The intent of the laws comes from the days when many birds, especially big white birds like seagulls and terns, were hunted and nearly wiped out for their feathers for making hats. The laws prohibit collecting feathers or bird parts from many protected birds, including nearly all non-game birds - in an effort to thwart feather-hunters from claiming that they "found" the feathers (just ignore the shot-gun, bird net, and pile of carcasses). In most cases, you won't get in trouble for collecting a few on the beach, but I wouldn't try to set up shop selling seagull quills. Goose, duck, and game-birds like pheasants are all safe to collect, and goose quills are pretty easy to get ahold of. Also, Bald Eagle feathers have additional protections and possession of one without a permit can land you a heafty fine, despite the fact that you can find scads of them lying on the beaches here in Washington state (and have I been tempted. . .).

So, what do they use for tipping on those quills?

First guess: guano?

You don't tip a quill, you just keep sharpening it with a knife.

I'd be tempted to try to notch a "collector" into the underside of the nib so that a little christmas-tree pattern emerged which would have skinny crevices that would suck up and hold extra ink by capillary action.

Hmm ... now I'm getting into it ... one of those skills I might need some day ... hmm ...