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The state of BayState Blue


Inky.Fingers

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Such a beautiful color.  Yet so riddle with stoppers.

 

How do you cope with it or do you not use it?

 

- Feathering - Which paper is best to tame this ink?

- Staining - What to do about it?  What pen is best used for not seeing the stains (ebonite eyedroppers?)?

 

I know that my name is Inky-Fingers, but I really don't want to be a Smurf all day.  Some of my friends began calling me Papa Smurf!

 

Thank you for your help.

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I also have a bottle but never use it anymore (except for comparisons). It hurts my pens, my sinks, my eyes.

If you like a vivid -- but not quite that eye-etching -- blue, then think about Horizon Blue, Radiant Blue etc.

Life is too short to drink bad wine (Goethe)

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One of my favorite inks.  I have been using it for many years now.  I dedicated a Sheaffer touchdown filler to it years ago.  Yes, the plastic on the pen is stained, but it doesn’t bother me.  I have no problem with feathering.

 

When I taught college, I used it to mark papers.  Hard for students to miss comments in BSB as the comments jumped off the page at them.

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Thank you @carlos.q and @lapis.

 

Dear @inkandseeds, it seems to me that BSB is best used with a UF(XXF)/EF (XF) points and extra-dry pen.  What pen point is the Shaeffer?

 

Thanks

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18 minutes ago, inkandseeds said:

 I have no problem with feathering.

Does this mean it doesn't feather for you; or that it feathers, but the feathering doesn't bother you? :)

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I like it and I use it.  I have a dedicated Noodler's Ahab that sees BSB and only BSB.  All the innards are now blue but it doesn't matter to me.  For a year and a half I used BSB in a very beat up Estie J with a 2556 nib that already had some corrosion pitting with no complaints.  I tame the feathering somewhat by making a 9:1 or 8:1 dilution, BSB to distilled water.  I had success on the old Tomoe River and some (but not all) batches of Staples bagasse paper.  Sinks clean up with dilute bleach solution.  I never let it near anything that can't handle the bleach except the Ahab.  To me it is worth the hassles.

Dave Campbell
Retired Science Teacher and Active Pen Addict
Every day is a chance to reduce my level of ignorance.

fpn_1425200643__fpn_1425160066__super_pi

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I blow hot and cold on BSB.  I'm not overly enamored of the color; Noodler's makes way better blues than that -- color-wise AND behavior-wise (I've become very enamored of Baltimore Canyon but don't know if it was just an LE or whether it's made it into to the regular lineup).  

I have a pen dedicated as the BSB pen only (something cheap that I don't care if it stains) -- originally it was a five dollar Guanleming demonstrator; nowadays it's a Noodler's Charlie eyedropper.  As for your question about combatting the feathering, Inky Fingers, the only way I've found to combat that is to dilute the ink about 20% with distilled water, and the Charlie is the easy way to do it -- filling the barrel most of the way up, and then topping off with the distilled water.  It doesn't dilute the color a lot but does get rid of most of the feathering.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

"It's very nice, but frankly, when I signed that list for a P-51, what I had in mind was a fountain pen."

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I mostly use BSB in a broad nib TWSBI Go. I use it for signing and filling out greeting cards. I've had no problems from feathering and bleed through but that may be inherent in the type of papers I am using ... and largely I don't care if my signature feathers a bit.

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11 hours ago, Inky.Fingers said:

How do you cope with it or do you not use it?

 

I just don't use it. After experiencing Baystate Concord Grape, I was never tempted to try any of the other Baystate ink colours.

I endeavour to be frank and truthful in what I write, show or otherwise present, when I relate my first-hand experiences that are not independently verifiable; and link to third-party content where I can, when I make a claim or refute a statement of fact in a thread. If there is something you can verify for yourself, I entreat you to do so, and judge for yourself what is right, correct, and valid. I may be wrong, and my position or say-so is no more authoritative and carries no more weight than anyone else's here.

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I have it constantly in a blue Jinhao 450 with a medium nib for the past year and half. I don't use it often, but when I do I truly enjoy it. But I haven't found a paper to manage to handle it... But I don't care about bleed through and feathering personally :)

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Even though I claim to like this ink and remember using it some time in the past, I went through my ink Journal for the past 10 years and couldn't find where I had inked any pen with it!?

PAKMAN

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I've skipped it. Too many worrying stories.

As I've never tried it I probably don't know what I'm missing, but possibly ok like that?

so many other inks out there...

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17 hours ago, LizEF said:

Does this mean it doesn't feather for you; or that it feathers, but the feathering doesn't bother you? :)

Means it doesn’t feather.

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I myself have never used any of the Baystate of Concord inks. I have a number of other Noodler's inks that I like and have never caused any problems with pens.

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On 2/27/2021 at 5:15 AM, inkstainedruth said:

.... Noodler's makes way better blues than that -- color-wise AND behavior-wise (I've become very enamored of Baltimore Canyon but don't know if it was just an LE or whether it's made it into to the regular lineup). 

I'm not all that much into Noodler's in general, but my favorite N's blue is their "Blue".  Name fits well to my own description of it. Pure, clean, simple, no bells, no whistles.

Life is too short to drink bad wine (Goethe)

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19 hours ago, inkstainedruth said:

I blow hot and cold on BSB.  I'm not overly enamored of the color; Noodler's makes way better blues than that -- color-wise AND behavior-wise (I've become very enamored of Baltimore Canyon but don't know if it was just an LE or whether it's made it into to the regular lineup).  

I have a pen dedicated as the BSB pen only (something cheap that I don't care if it stains) -- originally it was a five dollar Guanleming demonstrator; nowadays it's a Noodler's Charlie eyedropper.  As for your question about combatting the feathering, Inky Fingers, the only way I've found to combat that is to dilute the ink about 20% with distilled water, and the Charlie is the easy way to do it -- filling the barrel most of the way up, and then topping off with the distilled water.  It doesn't dilute the color a lot but does get rid of most of the feathering.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth


Ruth, Goulet has Baltimore Canyon 

With the new FPN rules, now I REALLY don't know what to put in my signature.

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