Dip Pens For Testing Ink

[bunnspecial]

I've read some old threads here, but couldn't really come to a good conclusion.

 

Over the years, I've at times used standard steel nib dip pens to test ink. I've never had any especially good dip nibs-they're usually just the generic fine flexible nibs that are inexpensive at craft stores and the like. These seem to work great with thicker inks like India ink. My experience with them with FP ink has been less than great-they seem to alternate between running completely dry and dropping big blobs of ink on the paper. Of course, it probably doesn't help that the nibs I use seem to be very scratchy.

 

Do I need to step up nib quality to get decent results, or is this just inevitable with any steel dip nib?

 

I've never owned a glass pen. The comments I've seen on them seem to indicate that they're not really like an FP nib, which makes sense. What I am wondering, though, is if I can expect one to be reasonably usable with an FP ink. The multiple little capillary passages many of them have seem to make me think they would be a bit more comparable to the nib+feed on a fountain pen, but I don't know.

 

Can anyone offer any insight in this regard?

 

I know one other alternative is to just dip a fountain pen, but in my experience the feed will soak up a lot of ink that will write far longer than I generally want to just for testing an ink, and will also leave me needing to spend a few minutes making sure the feed actually is clean.

 

 

[A Smug Dill]

I haven't found any way to make/allow ink to cling reliably to just a nib — made of metal, glass, or any other material — upon dipping into the bottle, but flow in a manner that resembles or emulates ink flow through a fountain pen (with a nib supported by a feed connected to the ink reservoir).

 

Most experiments end up either with larger drops of ink on the dip pen nib than required, which is then offloaded onto the page sporadically instead of in a consistent and controlled manner, or not being able to pick up enough ink and requiring reloading (by dipping again) in the middle of a word or a minuscule.

 

I've since come to the conclusion that, if I want to test an ink for how it would look and behave coming out of a fountain pen, then I have use a fountain pen with those very characteristics I think are representative and/or relevant; and the closest I can get to minimising cleaning is to not attach a converter when dipping the fountain pen, but even then it produces a different ink flow rate from having the nib being fed from the converter.

 

If you can logically separate the presentation and characteristics of an ink of an ink from flow rate, that's fine. It's why I don't think ink swabs or chromatography strips are worthless or 'misleading'; they show something about the ink being tested and/or under review. However, for a user to 'know', by seeing examples or representations of, how an ink will look and perform out of his/her fountain pen(s) of choice — and on the type(s) of paper of choice — the only way is to physically do exactly that on a throwaway or at least separate 'sandboxed' instance of the substrate in the use case's typical set-up. Testing comes at a cost, whether from using/sacrificing the back pages (with or without perforations) of a journal in which one intend to write, or setting up a duplicate environment away from the 'production' site/artefact; and I hate it that some fellow hobbyists (just to be clear, I don't mean you specifically) either try to circumvent that cost or offload it to reviewers who already have the ink, some units of the reader's/spectator's preferred (or have-no-choice-but-to-use) types of paper, and even a pen of the same model and the type of same nib of in he/she intends to fill the ink.

[AmandaW]

I test inks with either a glass dip pen (if I want a fine line) or a metal edge pen like the William Mitchell Round Hand (I think this one is a size 4). It's important with the metal nibs to clean it or burn it before using so the ink sticks. The tiny reservoir on this one works well with fountain pen inks.

 

[PithyProlix]

I agree with AmandaW - dip pen nibs with the little reservoirs work reasonably well.

I recently got a couple cheap glass pens and I was really surprised how long they are able to go before having to dip them again. I have to test again because I don't remember specifically how long it lasted but I was taking multipage notes with one 4-5 days ago and I recall it going for about one-third of a B5 page before I had to dip it again (this was fountain pen ink, too - specifically Cult Pens/Diamine Deep Dark Purple). And they are super easy to clean - just dip 'em in water. Especially given the price - I think I spent less that $2 for each of my glass pens - I suggest getting one for your quiver of pens.

 

Here is what I got. It's the pen with the spiral channels, not the one with the straight channels. Two for $ 2.76 USD, which included shipping to Thailand.

 

 

[edited to add info about the pen I bought]

Edited October 27, 2020 by PithyProlix

[PithyProlix]

I should clarify - I don't think glass pens are very comparable to other pens. But I think ink tests are particularly good when they have a variety of nib types.

[tim77]

I have a Rohrer & Klingner glass pen which will write for several lines per dip. The way it writes is comparable to a rather dry fine-nibbed fountain pen. If you are careful to shake off excess ink (a plastic inkwell helps avoid bashing the nib), the flow is fairly even.

[Dimy]

I take A Smug dill stance.

In my case apart from testing the color of ink everything else is done in a FP I want to use and even the color from dip pen is not completely trusted by me and used as reference point, reason being that some pen run dry others can be wet noodles and the color will change in both cases dry pens may give significantly lighter color while wet pen may become unexpectedly dark (well its easy to get around as dip pen will start dark which is wet noodle stage and when end will become light which usually is dry pen state)

 

Then as pointed above are other properties which cannot be judged by dip pen at all. Personally I fill slight ink in convertor and write a page or two to get exact idea of inks nature in that pen and get a general idea how it would behave in other pens as I know all of my pens nature so its easy to do so, this also means I can change the pen to what matches the pen or mood.

 

Cheers and happy hunting.

[A Smug Dill]

The tiny reservoir on this one works well with fountain pen inks.

 

I have a set that looked just like that made by Nikko, which I must've picked up when I was a schoolboy many decades ago. The size 4 works OK sometimes, the size 5 one was best (until it rusted and eventually had to be discarded) and I used that for ink writing samples for a while back in 2018, but even so some inks just refused to cling to the metal, and would either leave the nib mostly dry after a single dip and could not put down two words, or 'firehose" off the nib's reservoir as soon as the nib tip touched paper.

[Mech-for-i]

Gum Arabic is what artist would suggest though the said mateial are not for fountain pen use, and you would need to clean the nib each and every time after use , but that's so for all the artist as far as their use of pen / brush / spatula / whatever ....

Edited October 27, 2020 by Mech-for-i

[ENewton]

I love my dip pens, but they don't give results that look like the lines a fountain pen would produce.

 

At one point, I thought it might be helpful to others if I used a dip pen to produce a comparison, on a single page, of all my purple inks (about 20 of them, including samples). But with a dip pen, almost all my purple inks looked black. The subtle differences that account for my wanting to have so many purple inks were gone.