I remember about a year ago I was browsing the IAMPETH website and came across one of the old instruction books; as I was reading through it I came across an illustration of a rather fascinating ink reservoir. In this link you will see an illustration marked Fig.61 http://www.iampeth.com/lessons/flourishing...dium_page0.html , that illustration is what immediately caught my attention and intrigued me! The problem is I was distracted and it went out of my mind until about a two days ago... Upon remembering the reservoir I also remembered that a few years earlier I had bought some wire for a purpose I can no longer remember, I searched for it, found it, and then was so annoyed to find it was too thick and stiff . So today I went and got some fine wire that I could coil! I sat down and coiled up some wire, fiddled with it, and then stuck it in to the end of a dip pen holder with a Brause Rose nib. It worked, the pen actually retained more ink which is ideal for flourishing! Then I thought hmmmm how much will this increase the capacity of my general purpose italic/stub dip pen which already has a reservoir underneath? I wound up another of these reservoirs and placed that above the nib just touching the nib split and slightly angled... that worked also! I have found that I can dramatically increase the pens ink capacity, I wrote 160 words before having to dip again and it feels just like a fountain pen!
So what do you think (pictures below)? Has anyone else tried this neat trick from 1879 (though probably much older)?





I definitely recommend trying this if you are in to dip pens!

Outstanding!
Nice job on the tapered coil as well.

Wow! It's great to see a new generation of innovators remembering the "old stuff". I haven't seen the wire coil reservoir, that's a new one on me.

Edward Johnston's signature book, Writing & Illuminating & Lettering, has a chapter on making a quill pen from a turkey or goose feather. He shows how to bend a slip of brass or steel into a reservoir for the quill as well as how to select a quill and sharpen it into a pen. Gives a different feel to the whole writing experience.

I hope you have as much fun learning a new technique as I have had over the years. I feel that's the essence of making writing into an art rather than a science.

Luck to you,
Randal Carter

Thank you for the replies . It seems there is a wealth of "old stuff" out there, sometimes I think it is all gone and then I see something like this. I have seen a book talking about one of those quill reservoirs, I think they used the excess cut quill to make a curled reservoir as well, it is all quite interesting.
I will post more detail about how I did it later on when I have enough spare time.

Btw I love your avatar The Doodler

Wow! Thank you for posting this Lozzic. It looks like the coil is just slipped into the pen holder and not attached towards the tip, is that correct?

Hey!

Those coils look exactly like the springs from old crystal set catwhiskers!

Thanks for posting the idea.

Paddler

What's an old crystal set catwhisker?

I have made a tutorial video about these reservoirs and put it on youtube!
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=PlujaxCaeG4



That is correct



What are old crystal set catwhiskers?

Thanks for the video

That's so cool!

What gauge wire did you use?

I am not exactly sure of the gauge, I got this lot of wire wire from my grandfather, he has a whole load of it. In fact it is a wire with a history since apparently it belonged to my grandmothers father... hehe yeah a random heirloom I know! Anyway it seems that if I put it against a rule the diameter is almost spot on 0.5mm which I am guessing is gauge 23 or 24? I would have used some other wire I have that is even narrower that I bought from a florist, unfortunately it is that paper coated stuff and I did not think that ink would like that very much so I resorted to this slightly larger wire. I would not recommend anything thicker as I stated in my original post, smaller gauges however may be even better so long at they are not too narrow as they will become impossible to keep in shape.

How essential is the shape? Could you design something more effective at holding ink perhaps, with a less conventional design?

That is a very interesting idea, I am sure there must be other ways of doing it, maybe there are even some more old books with ideas lurking in them. I know of other reservoir designs that are not wire based for example the William Mitchell reservoir design that fits underneath a broad pen, that holds a good amount of ink. I also know of another (in my avatar) that I think is made by Leonhardt, it fits in the holder under the nib and looks like a pointed metal plate, that is suitable for the pointed pen and italic nibs. There are others such as the metal plate that Brause put on their broad "Bandzug" nibs.
In terms of wire reservoirs there must be other ways of designing them to hold more ink. The main factors you must keep in mind though are capillary action and surface tension, you don't want a reservoir that leaks or dumps the ink on the page and you don't want a reservoir that simply fails to hold anything when you dip it. With the conical design I find that the pointedness of it feeds the ink from it at just the right pace in to the split of the nib and the cone holds ink like a cup. Obviously the most simple variation on this design would be the size of the cone but that does not really change the way it works, rather it just changes the capacity. Radically different designs using wire, or whatever else you can think of are definitely something worth thinking about

The most basic radio receiver consists of an antenna, a tuning coil, a diode and headphones. It doesn't even need a battery as the signal itself powers it.

In the early 1900s the diode (the "detector") was a piece of crystal (usually galena) in a holder. To get a signal you had place a piece of very fine tapered wire in delicate contact with the right spot on the crystal.

The wire was known as a "cat's whisker". The whole thing was called a "crystal set"

And, no, I'm not old enough to remember them in use!

Thank you Sapphire!

The successor to the coherer, and the predecessor of the 1N34 germanium diode ...

-- Brian

Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Craft and hobby stores can be a source of wire, as can Art supply stores. The wire I found came in steel, copper and brass so you have a range of metals to choose from in your design experiments. Gold and silver plated wire can also be had from jewelery craft websites:

http://wire-sculpture.com/wire.php?gclid=C...CFQ7Wsgods2ppjg

http://jewelrymaking.about.com/cs/wire/a/083003.htm

The cone is the most obvious design, resembling a funnel, but since we are not using the factor of gravity here, I wonder if a different system could cover a larger area. Also there are other reservoirs that, like that in your avatar, go under the nib. This obviously may be used in addition.

A free flow by capillary action will guarantee a good wetness of nib, so we must overcome gravity in a well balanced way. To design a best possible reservoir, we must find the best orientation for wire, and the best wire to ink space ratio, to allow good capillary action (wire wool would obviously fail here) and stop gravity for taking command (here a single wire fails)

My school ends on Friday 13th (I have a dentist appointment on Friday 13th!) and I shall begin to experiment with different designs then.

It looks just like those reservoirs. It is a conical spring. Only it has the straight part (the catwhisker) extending from the narrow end. This was used in radio receivers from about the turn of the 20th Century until the advent of the vacuum tube. The conical spring screwed on the end of a rod which was used to move the catwhisker around on the surface of a galena crystal (other crystalline substances were sometimes used). When the end of the catwhisker touched a sensitive place on the crystal, the combination (catwhisker and crystal) became a diode that could "detect" an AM radio signal. This was the first solid state electronic device.

Paddler

It makes me wonder what else I don't know... Everything else I know about crystals came from watching old "Charmed" episodes.

How about taking the spring from a "click" type ball-point pen, hook the ends together and then attach to your nib-holder as you did with the ones you made? I would think this would work pretty well, would be able, possibly, to hold more ink. You might even be able to just loop it around the nib so that it crosses the breather hole and/or slit.

I would try it myself, but I don't have a dip pen handy right now.

I remember when almost every bright young boy built one. Now their parents give them a ipod. >groan<

I never built one, but I used to own a commercially-made crystal radio.

The earpiece was a high-impedence one that wouldn't load the circuit too much, while the crystal and cat's whisker were encased in a tiny glass tube about 5mm long. You could just see the whisker wire, which had an S-shape to give it some spring, and a tiny, tiny crystal, probably galena.

That actually sounds like the 1N34 diode I mentioned above. Rather than a cat's whisker and mineral crystal, it's a semiconductor diode utilizing germanium rather than silicon (the little "whisker" is just an internal lead). Still often referred to as a 'crystal" set, though.

Just wondering -- how would it work to pull the cotton off a Q-Tip and wire it (by wrapping, that is) to the underside of a dip nib, in contact with or very near the slit?

-- Brian

And the days when it takes skill to build a PC have gone too, I did so a couple of years back, and its only then when you realise how important a skill putting lego together really is... makes you wonder why no emphasis is placed on it in the curriculum.

I have found coils of wire in home-improvement stores. The wire is steel and is wrapped in green, white or black plastic usually for tying up stuff.

All I had to do was strip the plastic coat.