Hi everyone

In my mind, tinkering with a fountain pen's nib, be it smoothing, adjusting inkflow or...whatever, is probably the most risky and tempermental things that we do when we try and repair fountain pens.

My experiments with smoothing fountain pen nibs have been hit-and-miss in the past few months, but I believe that I'm slowly getting better at this skill and my success-rate is gradually climbing. However, I have a question to ask...

Not wanting to possibly destroy an already bungled nib on a practice-pen, is smoothing the nibs of dip-pens a good method of practice for learning the finer details of nib-smoothing? Or are fountain pen nibs and dip-pen nibs too different to really practice smoothing the former by practicing first the latter?

Me, it's levers that are my nemesis... I've never messed up a nib to be worse than I started with {fingers crossed}, other than the time I had a piece of iridium go flying.

I don't think that dip pen nibs would be very useful to practice on. Maybe boxes of eBay junkers by the lot?

Dip pen nibs tend to be standard steel or stainless steel, much softer than tipped fountain pen nibs. Also the nib tips are generally much smaller than with FP nibs, so it is very easy to remove too much nib, and turn your copperplate-flourish nib into a broad italic.

Yes, smooth your dip pen nibs, but use a very gentle touch and your finest abrasives.

You can smooth dip pen nibs using the same techniques used for FPs. The spoon shaped dip nibs are probably the closest you can find to FP nibs. You can smooth these and take the edge off the baby bottom, etc. The pointed nibs can be smoothed too, the only problem being: any metal you take off of the writing surface will broaden the line. The metal comes off really quickly. If you want to make the line narrower again, you have to grind the sides of the point and then round the edges once more. Also, the more you shorten the tip, the juicier the nib will write. It is a can of worms, but you can sort it out.

Paddler