Gillott 404 Vintage (Bronze)

[Intellidepth]

I scored a gross of vintage Gillott 404's at a local antique store a few weeks ago for AU$10. A straight holder from Japan turned up today so gave the 404 a go for the first time. There's not much that comes up for a search on FPN re these nibs so here are a few minor observations.

 

Something I found fascinating was that compared to my Aikin Lambert gold dip nib, this Gillott 404 vintage (one of the bronze ones) could use standard modern fountain pen ink without any thickening agent added. My gold dip nib needs slightly more viscous fluids to work well without flooding.

 

So it raises the question: does this marvellous ink retention have to do with the ultra fine abrasions on the nib? I'll see if I can get a few shots through my loupe for you all. I've seen comparisons of old and new Gillott nibs online before and noticed that the old ones have ultra fine abrasions a bit like what steel wool might make on certain portions of the nib (upper and lower sides of the nib but in different directions), whereas the newer ones appear to have horizontal lines stamped/grooved into them.

[Intellidepth]

The top side has horizontal ultrafine abrasions starting from approx 3mm from the tip right back to and including the entire breather hole, stopping about 2-3mm above it. The area the abrasions cover (width) covers not only the central slit, but reaches to each of the vertical side slits that help this nib flex.

From the way this nib is reflecting light, it appears that the abrasions were applied before the slits were cut.

 

On the rear side, the abrasions are not so numerous and look slightly larger in size than on the front. They also run vertically rather than horizontally. It's as though the finest of fine steel wool was used in the upper side and the next grade of steel wool used on the rear.

Edited October 1, 2015 by Intellidepth

[Cryptos]

I think - choosing the word carefully - that you are referring to cross-grinding. Those horizontal lines can be seen on a number of vintage nibs, and on the modern Nikko G IIRC. Incidentally, you are very fortunate to find a box full of 404s. Never seen a single one myself.

Edited October 1, 2015 by Empty_of_Clouds

[Intellidepth]

Thank you for the terminology. Do you think it is this feature that helps with ink retention? I haven't tried any modern steel nibs so don't have any point of comparison. However I recall seeing a youtube video where a man said he liked the vintage Gillott's over their modern equivalents, couldn't really pinpoint exactly why except that he felt ink flowed from it better and could write more words with it per dip.

 

Need to play with it a fair bit more still.

[Cryptos]

Hmm, I don't know if that was the purpose of the cross grinding. I have heard that some people do it with the idea of increasing flexibility, but with limited success. Certainly having more tooth to the surface of the nib material is going to help the ink stick to it I would imagine.

[smk]

Vintage Gillott 404 is a really good, and in my opinion very underrated, nib.

 

As Empty_of_Clouds has already clarified, the grooves you see on the nibs are from grinding. Grinding was a process carried out to make the nibs more flexible - it required a fine control by the operator (Grinding wheel operators were paid slightly more than other operators). On more flexible models (like the Gillott 303) you will find both cross and longitudinal grinding.

 

Grinding was an expensive process though as it needed to be done carefully by skilled operators, it cost more in both money and time. Also, not all operators produced the same results so you would have variations from batch to batch. The process was replaced by stamping where grooves would stamped across the nib by a machine. This was supposed to be a more controlled operation that resulted in more reliable results. While this might sound right in theory, the stamped versions of nibs have not really been able to match the grooved ones - possibly because of lower quality control standards.

 

It is important to note that not all vintage nibs are of the same quality. There are some vintage 404's on which the grinding stops short of the breather hole. On the best versions of the 404, the cross grind continues past the breather hole. The example pictured above is the best vintage Gillott 404 you can get. Later versions would have reduced grinding which was then replaced by stamping and the modern ones have only a very light stamp that doesn't really do anything resulting in frustratingly useless nibs.

 

Ink adhesion is a problem on gilt (or polished) nibs. The use of Iron Gall inks, which are acidic, cause nibs to wear out quickly. Various acid resistant materials were used to coat nibs in an effort to slow down this process (e.g. in Radio nibs from Esterbrook). These nibs work fine with Iron Gall inks but not so well with inks designed for fountain pens. A drop or three of Gum Arabic in the ink improves flow characteristics in such cases - not necessarily because it makes the ink thicker but because it changes the way it sticks to the nib.

 

I hope this clarifies things a bit.

 

Salman

[Intellidepth]

That's fabulous info. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge Salman.

[dhnz]

While cross-grinding was said to increase flexibility, I doubt that it actually had much effect; when you examine a ground nib closely, the amount of steel removed was exceedingly small – too small, in my opinion, to make any appreciable difference. To test it myself, I've removed much more material from nibs and compared their performance before and after and not noticed any change, so I think it had more to do with marketing than anything. After all, one commentary on nib production states that the vertical grinding was for the sake of appearance and had no actual performance function, and the fancy grinding above the vent hole on nibs like the Principality seems also there for decoration. That said, stamping the nibs didn’t remove any material, it just redistributed it, so I’m doubtful as to what effect, if any, that had too.

 

You mentioned vertical grinds on the bottom of the nib, but as far as I know they didn’t actually grind the bottoms (it would have been hard to, since the grinding was performed after the nibs had been shaped), so any marks are probably the result of the earlier scouring that was carried out .

 

Although grinding was carried out originally by hand, by 1865 Gillott was already reported to have a self-acting machine that carried out the cross- and vertical-grinding automatically, so I suspect that a lot of the vintage nibs that people prize from the late 1800s on were not in fact ground by hand at all. Of the nibs made today, I know of only one nib that still is cross-ground as opposed to stamped, and that is the Hunt 101.

[Intellidepth]

Thank u dhnz.

[smk]

The shape of the nib (curvature, tine and shoulder shape) and the material contribute largely to the flexibility but I would not be so quick to dismiss the usefulness of removing some material from the tines. Modern nib specialists do it all the time when doing their flex mods to modern gold nibs on fountain pens along with changing the shape of the nib in some cases.

 

I have four flex modded nibs - 2 from Richard Binder on a Pelikan and an MB, 1 from John Mottishaw on a Namiki Falcon and 1 from Pendleton Brown on a TWSBI steel nib. The Pelikan and MB nibs have their shoulders trimmed as well as material removed from under the tines. The Falcon just has the material removed (the nib doesn't really have any shoulders). The TWSBI nib has slits cut at the shoulder as well as material removed from the underside of the tines.

 

In my own experiments I have made similar modifications to nibs on two Noodler's Creaper pens and achieved significantly increased flexibility.

 

On dip pen nibs, there are usually slits a little above the shoulders to allow for tine movement when flexing. These slits are quite short on nibs that are not designed for much flex - removing material from the tines will only marginally increase the amount of flexibility but might make the nib flex with lesser force.

 

I have experimented with several dip pen nibs - not always successfully but I learned a bit. I got the best results with Eagle 630 and 870 (Muscular) nibs. Both of these nibs have the tine shape and long side slits that suggest good flex but are quite stiff in use. They are also made from fairly thick material, especially when compared to Gillot 303 and 404 nibs. Taking off some material from the top of the tines has produced increased flexibility in 4 out of 5 cases. I took too much off the 5th and proceeded to spring the nib when testing the limits :-)

 

I have two types of vintage Gillot 303 nibs and the ones with the longer grind are more flexible as is the case with 2 types of vintage 404 and 170 nibs I have. I cannot attribute this directly to the grinding as I don't know if the steel composition or annealing processes were the same for the various generations but even so, the grinding marks serve as a good identifier of better made nibs IMO.

 

Salman

[dhnz]

^{… I would not be so quick to dismiss the usefulness of removing some material from the tines. Modern nib specialists do it all the time when doing their flex mods to modern gold nibs on fountain pens along with changing the shape of the nib in some cases.}

 

 

My comments were directed only at cross-grinding on dip pen nibs, which usually starts some small distance above the point itself, does not remove any material from the point or the underside, and does not reshape the tines. All it does is remove a very small amount from the top of the nib, and from my experiments I do not believe that this alters the flexibility to any noticeable degree. Removing a lot of material may well make an appreciable difference but the old nibs essentially got a light sanding with emery rather than a full-on metal filing.

 

I would say that in general the more fancy the grinding patterns were, the more expensive the nibs would have been, and the more care they would have taken in quality checking the nibs, but the actual build quality of a ground pen and a not-ground pen made by the same company seems to me to be the same. As A Charles notes in The Steel Pen Trade, ‘The process of grinding was not essential to the use of the pen and many pens in the cheaper markets of the world were sold without any form of grinding at all.’ Interestingly, Charles claims that only John Mitchell had an automatic grinding machine but, as I noted above, Gillott also had been able to automate cross and vertical grinding.