(It is my privilege — and I mean that sincerely — to be able to have ‘blog’ articles of my own on FPN, and so I'm using it now.)

Notwithstanding that my career was in Information Technology, I've resisted having “social media” accounts on me-me-follow-me platforms in the fashion of MySpace and Facebook for literally (two) decades, … until this month (July 2025). Some opportunities to link up with “local” hobbyists are alas limited to “private groups”, for which signing up for an account on one of those platforms and then asking to be admitted to the group, are only available that way.

And so, I've recently attended my first in-person (organised) local meet-ups — outside of Pelikan Hubs — of fountain pen hobbyists in Sydney. Ahead of the event, it was suggested to me (by informed powers-that-be) that I should consider bringing some supplies newcomers to the hobby may want to get but find it daunting to buy/order/find in small amounts or volumes.

Me being me, I think I've overdone it, and now I have an ever-growing list of packaged up “hobbyist” supplies in boxes, given I have hundreds of units of some of the individual components here.

The items other attendees can have, free-of-charge, for the asking (if they know to ask me):

• packs of 3ml of Novus #1 ‘Plastic Clean & Shine’ and ≥1ml of Novus #2 ‘Fine Scratch Remover’ solutions, as samplers enough for two or three jobs of polishing resin-bodied pens
• containers of ~3ml or ~3g of silicone grease, which is probably more than the average hobbyist need to maintain a whole fleet of fountain pens

These items I've packed up, for the ‘ask’ of micro-transaction amounts of money to recoup costs and compensate for my time in preparing them (but I'm always happy to tell someone how to organise getting their own supply from the same sources instead):

• packs containing a 1ml and a (an individually sealed) 3ml syringe, along with one short and one long 16-gauge blunt needle attachment, so that it's possible to extract ink from the very end of the inside of a LAMY, Aurora, or even a (Faber-Castell or Pelikan) long “standard international” cartridge while having the option of using a less unwieldy short nozzle to reach inside and deposit ink into converters, etc.
• bulb syringes (too easy to get individually as retail items in local pharmacies/drugstores)
• packs of five Majohn A1/A2/A3 empty ink cartridges (compatiable for use in Pilot fountain pens) with silicone plugs, in a “hard” plastic carry case
• individual (transparent film) crack width gauge measurement cards, useful for objectively measuring line widths on the page
• packs of five nominally plastic 1.8ml sample vials with screw-caps, each capable of holding at least 2.1ml of ink when filled to the brim
• packs of five nominally plastic 5ml sample vials with screw-caps
• individual 30ml squeeze bottles with ‘eyedropper’ nozzles, the option to attach finer/longer Luer-lock needle attachments (one is supplied with each bottle) to the nozzle if required, and a screw-on cap to prevent ink evaporation, for portioned-out “workhorse” inks with which one would like to directly fill empty ink converters, cartridges, or eyedropper-filled pen models
• packs of silicone plugs usable for plugging not-quite-empty ink cartridges of different format — for now I've only packaged multiple plugs together of single types together, instead of packs of single plugs in multiple formats
• unbranded rollerball pens (complete with a piston-driven converter each) that use fountain pen ink

Is there anything else you can think of and suggest that may be useful to newbies?