Pilot 78G Question

[Tom Traubert]

Apologies if this has been asked elsewhere. If it has, I won't be offended by a cursory link in that direction.

 

My Pilot 78g has spent the last few months confined to a drawer after becoming scratchy and rubbish. I'd been using a Con 50 and had tried a variety of inks.

 

Despite it being my cheapest pen by a good £10 I missed it dearly so I popped one of the proprietary black cartridges in last night and, lo and behold, it's smooth and beautiful again. I promptly ordered a pack of red Pilot cartridges and am looking forward to bringing it into my marking rotation*.

 

So my question is this: has this happened to anyone else?

 

Unrelated: I'm waiting for Bronze Lizard MR (Metropolitan to you guys) that will be used with Diamine Imperial Purple cartridges. Quite excited.

 

*I divide the number of items I have to mark by the number of pens currently holding ink on the broadly red spectrum (runs from Magenta - Oxblood via Ancient Copper) and keep myself motivated with the promise of a new colour every X books/papers. Is this nerdy? I don't care...

[Zanshin]

Are you sure it wasn't the paper. Some nib and paper combinations just don't play well together and I've had pens that are usually nice and smooth feel absolutely awful on a certain paper while other pens aren't so badly affected

[ac12]

I have a DRY 78G also.

I was about to adjust the nib to increase the ink flow, when I decided to try a really WET ink in the pen.

This ink would BLOT and feather BADLY on all of my test papers, using my standard test pens.

So I figured a really wet ink with a dry pen, might work, and it did.

The ink in question is Noodler's Emerald City Green.

It is a really nice green, but way too wet for most of my pens.

Out of my dry 78G, it works just fine...so far.

 

So, you do have to match the flow characteristics of the pen to the flow characteristics of the ink.

- Dry pen with wet ink.

- Wet pen with dry ink.

What does not work is:

- Dry pen with dry ink, you get hard starts and skipping or even little to no ink flow.

- Wet pen with wet ink, you get ink pooling or even dripping/drooling ink from the nib.

 

If you want a pen to work with a specific ink, you may have to adjust the nib to match the flow characteristics of the ink.