Beginner Question: What Is Scratchiness?

[Bo Bo Olson]

95% of scratchy is caused by miss aligned tines and or holding a fountain pen too high, like a ball point.

 

Tooth is more the feel of a pencil, than scratchy. Many like a bit of tooth.....others often 'noobies' think tooth is scratchy, in they want only butter smooth. Aurora is famous for making nibs with a bit of tooth.

 

Drag is not tooth. Drag happens a lot in old pens that sat unused in a drawer for a generation or two....micro-corrosion or 'iridium' rust. A bit of brown paper bag does that well. In it don't eat a nib like micro-mesh can in new hands. Micro-mesh can be used lightly and should be.....not every nib needs to be butter smooth.

 

If I am using slick paper I like good and smooth, the level under butter smooth, then the pen don't try to skate off the paper. To me good&smooth is what I mostly want....a bit of feeling in the nib, but still smooth.....but not slippery butter smooth.

I have a few butter smooth nibs, and a few toothy nibs, but mostly I have nibs that are to me, good & smooth. When I removed drag, I did not chase butter smooth.....sort of lazy. Good and smooth is what I stopped at.

 

I like the term feedback.

Edited March 16, 2015 by Bo Bo Olson

[Crewel]

Personally, I think "scratchiness" is more akin to the tendency of the nib "catching" aggressively on the paper as one writes. Think of a bunch of tiny hooks trying to hook onto the paper surface hindering the movement of the nib. Typically, the culprit is misaligned tines. Rarely have I seen the issue be a poor polish on the tip.

 

As others have mentioned, all this depends on nib, paper, and ink combination and your writing angle/style. One thing to try just to give you an idea is to try writing with the nib turned 180, i.e. the feed up rather than the normal feed down. Most nibs are not ground/polished so that you can write in either orientation. In a decent nib, the correct orientation should give you the "normal" non-scratchy experience. The 180 position will tend to be scratchy.