HOW MANY TIMES CAN YOU FILL A FOUNTAIN PEN WHEN USING AN HERBIN 10ml ink bottle ?

[Patrick L]

Hi,

           I am mulling the purchase of some 10ml Herbin ink bottles and would like to know how many times  It's possible to fill a fountain pen with these tiny bottles.

           Cheers

           Patrick

[arcfide]

Just lookup the capacity of your fountain pen and you'll get a pretty accurate estimate, though getting the full fill potential out of the small bottles requires that you use a syringe and syringe/eye-dropper fill your cartridges or converters. Otherwise you'll lose a bit of ink through excess toweling and you'll also be unable to fill from the bottom once it gets low enough. 

 

Just on the capacity alone, most pens hold between .5 and 3ml of ink per fill. 

[PithyProlix]

And, as a matter of practicality, you also have to consider how quickly the ink flows from your pen to get an idea of how much 'mileage' you will get from a bottle, of course. 

 

I like the 10ml bottles - I wish other manufacturers would offer their inks in this size. Given the size and how they are priced you get a much better bang for your buck than samples. I really like many of the Herbin colors for calligraphic use or just to play with and it seems like its enough for those purposes. There are only a small handful of colors that I want bigger bottles of, i.e. that I want to use for general writing. The 10ml bottles are enough to put the ink into general use, trying them with different pens and paper until I find a really good match, and discover if I really want to buy a larger bottle for long term use. Can't do that to my satisfaction with less than around 4ml or so.

 

I have nine 10ml Herbin bottles and I'll probably buy one or two more. That said, of those nine, there is one that I will almost definitely buy a larger bottle of (Cacao du Bresil) and two others that are 'maybes' (Vert Empire and Vert de Gris). While I like all the colors I have and I'm glad to have them in that size I would have been a bit disappointed had I bought larger bottles of most of them.

Much more than what you asked for but there you go ...

[txomsy]

Ditto. It all depends on the pen, cartridge or converter capacity and how do you fill it.

 

For maximal profit use a cartridge and syringe fill it. Then it will depend on the cartridge chosen, whether a standard small or double-sized one.

 

The easiest is to take a clean cartridge that you will use for this ink, fill it with water from a syringe to measure its capacity and then divide the 10ml by that capacity. For other filling mechanisms direct from the bottle, it is too difficult to know and may depend on your own personal filling rituals.

[Dione]

Deleted

[vtgt]

Should be able to fill a Jinhao converter 15 times which could mean 150 A4 pages in EF-F. A syringe would help to extract the last two fills, if you transfer the ink to a sample vial you could get the penultimate fill but not all of it.

[A Smug Dill]

7 hours ago, Dione said:

It's not just about capacity of the filling system.

 

Oh, but it — the O.P.'s question at the start of this thread — is specifically about the capacity of the filling system and/or ink reservoir of the fountain pen at hand, not how many lines, pages or hours of writing the active user can get out of 10ml of ink, or how often the pen will need refilling.

[Karmachanic]

 

10cc will fill a Tohma Kumataka 55 once.  😁

[sirgilbert357]

4 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

 

Oh, but it — the O.P.'s question at the start of this thread — is specifically about the capacity of the filling system and/or ink reservoir of the fountain pen at hand, not how many lines, pages or hours of writing the active user can get out of 10ml of ink, or how often the pen will need refilling.

 

Exactly.

 

So in a pen with a 1.0 ml capacity, you can fill your pen 10 times with a 10 ml bottle of ink. Doesn't matter how many words you write or how often you have to refill.

 

*The above only takes into account the standard practice of filling the pen's reservoir/converter, and does not allow for how much ink the feed holds -- which on some pens can be quite significant. If you fill your DRY pen's converter with a syringe and then prime the feed to get it writing, you will notice that you have the ability to "top off" most pens' converters. Thus, if you write your pen dry each time before doing the above, you could very well end up putting 1.2 or say 1.3 mls of ink into a pen at filling time even though your converter only holds 1.0 ml of ink. This would result in less full fills from a 10 ml bottle obviously.

 

This tactic is helpful for topping off pens that have a smaller converter capacity if you want to extend the time between refills (Sailor's converters, for example).

[silverlifter]

NOT MANY

[gyasko]

I get 0 fills of my 149s out of those 10 mL bottles

[Dione]

Deleted

[sirgilbert357]

41 minutes ago, gyasko said:

I get 0 fills of my 149s out of those 10 mL bottles

 

Will your pen not fit into the neck of the bottle or something?

[inkstainedruth]

5 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

 

Oh, but it — the O.P.'s question at the start of this thread — is specifically about the capacity of the filling system and/or ink reservoir of the fountain pen at hand, not how many lines, pages or hours of writing the active user can get out of 10ml of ink, or how often the pen will need refilling.

Actually, it kinda does.  Back when I was just using cartridges, a Parker cartridge lasted much longer when I used a Vector with an F nib over a Reflex with an M nib.  Especially when the OP didn't actually specify what pen/nib the pen in question was, or whether it was a firehose or dry as the Sahara.  For that matter, the paper is going to make a difference as well, depending on whether it's coated like Rhodia or super absorbent like the Piccadilly sketch pads I use for testing ink.

There's also the question of whether the OP is using something with a small nib or some honking big #8 nib -- some bottles have openings too small for larger nibs to even fit in the bottle (this topic came up last night at my local pen club meeting).

If you buy a 10 ml bottle, is it more cost efficient than a larger bottle (per ml)?  Maybe not.  And if you can't fill a pen out of that 10 ml bottle, it's a complete waste of money even if it *is* more cost effective than a sample vial.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[sirgilbert357]

8 minutes ago, inkstainedruth said:

Actually, it kinda does.  Back when I was just using cartridges, a Parker cartridge lasted much longer when I used a Vector with an F nib over a Reflex with an M nib.  Especially when the OP didn't actually specify what pen/nib the pen in question was, or whether it was a firehose or dry as the Sahara.  For that matter, the paper is going to make a difference as well, depending on whether it's coated like Rhodia or super absorbent like the Piccadilly sketch pads I use for testing ink.

There's also the question of whether the OP is using something with a small nib or some honking big #8 nib -- some bottles have openings too small for larger nibs to even fit in the bottle (this topic came up last night at my local pen club meeting).

If you buy a 10 ml bottle, is it more cost efficient than a larger bottle (per ml)?  Maybe not.  And if you can't fill a pen out of that 10 ml bottle, it's a complete waste of money even if it *is* more cost effective than a sample vial.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

I don't follow.

 

If a pen holds exactly one ml of ink and the ink bottle has 10 mls in it, then you can fill that pen 10 times.

 

Nib size/wetness has nothing to do with capacity of the converter. It's like we have two different conversations going on here, LOL...

[gyasko]

25 minutes ago, sirgilbert357 said:

 

Will your pen not fit into the neck of the bottle or something?

 

The 149 is the quintessential big fat pen.  It doesn’t fit.  On top of that, it’s a piston filler so no syringey workarounds are possible either.

[sirgilbert357]

15 minutes ago, gyasko said:

 

The 149 is the quintessential big fat pen.  It doesn’t fit.  On top of that, it’s a piston filler so no syringey workarounds are possible either.

 

Get an Ink Miser Shot Inkwell and never look back. I never fill from the bottle now...

 

Linky: https://www.gouletpens.com/products/ink-miser-ink-shot-inkwell-clear?variant=11884657770539

 

I even tried the Pineder Pen Filler...should have just bought the Ink Miser first. Unless I need to fill up on the go, I doubt I'll ever use the Pineder Pen Filler again...some of my pens won't even fit it (Visconti Medici, Pilot 823 is borderline). It's also more hassle to clean out than the Ink Miser and well over double the cost. For just filling at home, it doesn't make much sense.

 

 

[bunnspecial]

39 minutes ago, gyasko said:

 

The 149 is the quintessential big fat pen.  It doesn’t fit.  On top of that, it’s a piston filler so no syringey workarounds are possible either.

 

It's annoying and fiddly, but it is possible at least with the plastic feeds.

 

Screw the piston all the way down, then use a syringe to deposit ink directly on the feed. It should fill the fins pretty readily. Draw the piston in just enough to suck the ink off the fins, and repeat.

 

You probably won't get the pen completely full, and it will take a while, but you can do it.

 

I've never tried this on an ebonite feed 149. I suspect that it would be harder to "fill" the fins, so I'm not sure if this would work. I only have one plastic feed 149 and the rest of mine are ebonite, so the trick doesn't work on all of my pens, but does on some.

[inkstainedruth]

I've seen that trick described.  But the one time I tried it, I ended up getting ink on the top of my grandparents' old dresser.  And that ink was Noodler's Kung Te Cheng -- which means it's NEVER coming off unless I maybe strip the varnish off it.... 

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[A Smug Dill]

3 hours ago, sirgilbert357 said:

Nib size/wetness has nothing to do with capacity of the converter. It's like we have two different conversations going on here, LOL...

 

4 hours ago, Dione said:

It seems that my literal translation of the OP's words it's possible to fill was different to others.

 

These:

• https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fill
• https://www.lexico.com/definition/fill
• https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fill

all seem to agree that “fill a fountain pen”, in the context of the O.P.'s question, is literally all about getting ink into the fountain pen, and has nothing to do with getting ink out of the fountain pen, or the manner and rate of consumption (or otherwise extraction) of ink in the application of putting pen to paper.

 

3 hours ago, gyasko said:

On top of that, it’s a piston filler so no syringey workarounds are possible either.

 

That statement only applies to piston-filler pens that do not lend itself to having the nib-and-feed unit unscrewed and removed from their gripping sections, and then replaced after filling their barrels. I often fill my Pelikan Classic and Souverän, as well as Aurora Optima and Ottantotto, piston-filler pens by injecting ink directly into their ink reservoirs with a syringe, so I can certainly vouch that as a class or category of pens, “piston filler” does not entirely preclude "syringey workarounds".

 

The Montblanc 149 model to which you specifically referred may hobble the user of a 10ml ink bottle, with or without the aid of a syringe, but many other piston-filled pen models aren't so limiting.