Hello, I just bought 5 Aurora blue carts for $3.95 plus tax. I imagine buying ink this way is more costly than bottles. Anybody hazard a guess at what price convenience?

regards

Hello Fountainhead,

Reading "$" and "plus tax," I assume those are US dollars you paid for only five cartridges. Ouch!

Calculating the cost of cartridge convenience requires the capacity except the air bubble (I tried to alliterate the whole sentence, I really tried ). Dillon?

For brands with proprietary and almost-proprietary cartridge designs (Aurora's only cross-compatibility is with Parker), cost should be a big issue in marketing. Although some purchases are motivated by extravagance (which isn't always bad), other purchases are restrained by frugality (which is kept by love from becoming stinginess).

I keep only a few cartridges, and they live in my briefcase/bag, in case I'm away from home when a pen I really want to use runs out of ink.

Steve, what I am really getting at is how much ink is in those 5 carts that cost me $4? IOW, I wonder if it is 20ml 15ml? Thanks....

regards

I don't know the measurement exactly (sorry I went pendantic on you), but it's less than my Pelikan M200 reservoir which, I'm told, is about 1.3 ml. My guess is that you got less than 10 ml in the whole package.

I think they run about 1ml per, so you paid $4 for 5mL. (1.25 mL/$)

Aurora bottles are about $10 for 45mL. (4.5 mL/$)

It would appear that carts are usually 3-4 times more expensive than bottle for the amount of ink you get.

Thanks gents...makes sense...
These carts are going in an old vector. Guess
I better look into finding a convertor for this guy.

regards

FWIW, the Black Aurora ink is much better than the Parker stuff. When I owned a Sonnet I used Aurora carts, and still used them in my Ispilon until I got rid of that as well. Aurora may only be black and blue, but it is better than the Parker carts in that color.

Anyone tried to refill cartridges with a syringe? Just thinking....

I refill cartridges all the time using disposable insulin syringes. I get very good results doing this, the syringes are easy to clean, and I can use them several times before the wire-thin needles wear out. These cost me 20 cents each at my local pharmacy.

Laura

Pendemonium and Tryphon sell disposable pipettes with extremely narrow ends. Tryphon also sells syringes without needles.

From those numbers, I deduce:

$4 / 5mL = $0.80 each mL

$0.80 * 45mL = is like paying $36 for a bottle of Aurora ink That's a scary number! Get a converter!

So there is a reason they make us take math in school...

I never thought I'd refill carts with a syringe. Got a syringe anyway(which cost 50 cents) and months later I'm still having a blast with it. It's easy, cheap, and alot of fun. It's pretty easy to experiment with mixing inks this way too.

You betcha! That's the way I get ink into almost all of my fountain pens.

I use 3 mL industrial syringes and blunt needles. This allows me to take ink out of a bottle with a syringe dedicated to that ink alone and mix various inks. Then I can take the mixture and put that into the cartridge with another syringe/needle. Of course for the rare ink that I use neat it's just bottle to cartridge.

When I was a kid and saw Snorkel ads on TV and in magazines I always thought that they were the best and most obvious way to fill a fountain pen. But when I first got cartridges I had the idea that the new best way would be to use something to refill those cartridges with bottled ink. It took me decades to get around to it but once I did refilling became my primary means of using cartridges.

Oh, I should point out that there aren't any 3 mL cartridges but the 3 mL is the cheapest graduated syringe I could find. I've looked around and can't find any luer lock 1 mL industrial syringes that don't sell exclusively in lots so large that the minimum cost is $500. But I get along.