Terrible luck with Bock #6

[joshi]

decided to try a bock #6 broad platinum nib and bought one from the lovely people at beaufort inks here in the u.k. 

 

skipped a lot. and ran dry with a few minutes 

of writing. beaufort inks replaced it and the new one was slightly better but had the same problem. so i bought a couple of steel #6 bock nibs and they had the same issue - poor ink flow after a few minutes.

 

tried flushing the feeds with soapy water water and had some marginal improvement.

looked at the nibs through a loupe and there didn’t seem to be an issue with the tines, but then again i’m unable to judge baby’s bottom which i suspect might be the problem as the nibs aren’t scratchy at all.

 

the ink i used was diamine gray which writes beautifully and wetly say with all other pens.

 

 just bad luck? give up on bock? i must add that the jowo nibs i have are wonderful compared to my bock nib experience. 

 

[Karmachanic]

Have a dozen or so Bock nibs, steel, 14k and Ti.  All without issue.  Not that that's of any help.  Maybe it's personal.  😨

 

Poor flow can sometimes be a pen/converter issue:

 

[Bo Bo Olson]

Converters are well known for vapor lock problems. Folks stick in plastic (from Pelikan cartridges) or steel balls, others swear by gold plated piano springs....others say use just a common old chopped up ball point spring and change it when it rusts.

 

Piston pens are wider so don't have vapor lock.

 

Props to Karmechanic....I'd just been puzzled, in I only very seldom use converters....in I have some LE or other ink cartridges of inks I was not bottle sure of.

@75-80% of my pens are piston pens, so I don't have converter problems....= don't think about what I've read here many times.

[sansenri]

Bock nibs sometimes tend to come a bit tight, since I like wet flow it's not rare that I floss them a little with a piece of old photographic film or that I pull back on the shoulders a touch to improve flow. It depends nib by nib. In rare cases I have found some baby bottom especially on the B nibs, usually manifesting itself with hard starts and skipping on the first stroke. I those cases I run them on micromesh 12000 with ink in short tests until they stop skipping.

Since you seem to have collected a few you should possibly try that on one of them, starting with a steel one, to see if that is the problem. Be careful with the titanium as they tend to misalign more easily.

 

PS just noted you mentioned platinum, yes, I have seen those on Beaufort, but not tried. I have a few platinum nibs on Visconti's, they are usually nice nibs but quite soft, are you sure you are not pressing them too hard (which might bend them away from the feed and cause the hard starts)?

[joshi]

thanks for the suggestion! no i write lightly .. 

i house them in a namisu pen (naos) which i really like for its heft and length and of course its design. 

 

indeed the nibs need hard starts.

[sansenri]

then first try could be on one of the steel nibs, either widening the gap between tines or giving a go on micromesh,

better to get some experience rather than have a bunch of nibs that don't write...

if you are not confident yet, give it a go on some cheap nib first to get the hang of it

[DvdRiet]

2 hours ago, sansenri said:

I pull back on the shoulders a touch to improve flow.

 

Sansenri, would you mind elaborating a bit on how you do that? I have some pens, particularly from the 80s and 90s for some inexplicable reason (to me anyway), that always feel a tiny bit too stingy and a nudge like this might be just what they need!

 

Appreciate it!

Darla

[sansenri]

sure, according to the most experienced advice (you may actually find reference if you search the forum), the correct way of increasing flow is not so much running something between the tines (although some do this, I tend to us this method too at times) but rather holding the shoulders of the nib with your fingers and pulling them apart.

 

this article, by Giovanni Abrate,  describes this much better than I can

 

https://newpentrace.net/articleGA04.html

[Bo Bo Olson]

Take your thumbnails....well needs to be a classic nib, not a spade nib....thumbnails under the shoulders....press out ...somewhat a 2-3 times...just a bit in you can do it again....if needed.

 

If too much, press the top of a tine under the other pressing also at the shoulder, then the down tine up; and cross them again....again do it twice and see if the nib has gotten narrower again.

 

If you went bananas with the tine spread, could take you lots longer to get them to close up enough.

 

Confession, only did it a couple times...the first time I had to reverse the treatment.

The second time I learned to tiny movement is the way to go....tinier than you originally think. Just enough to see the tines have moved.  .... You have time....so there is no hurry.

[DvdRiet]

10 hours ago, sansenri said:

this article, by Giovanni Abrate,  describes this much better than I can

 

This is a fantastic article! Thank you very much for sharing that. And thank you, @Bo Bo Olson, for those tips also.

 

I discovered a little about this and about the geometry of the nib when I was trying to fix my very first vintage fountain pen - a low-end brand with a steel nib bought cheap so I could learn how to replace a sac by myself 🙂 - so it is very good to see 1) that I was already on the right track and 2) the real professional way of doing these tweaks!

 

The vintage pen I was learning some of this on by pure experimentation turned out to have the tines bent under at the very tip, which took me some time to figure out, being a noobie and all. Then once I figured out I should try and straighten them, all sorts of other issues popped up. In the end, the real solution to getting it back into the correct shape (w/o nibmeister tools, mind you) was to use a smooth metal burnisher from the bottom and slowly round out the wings/shoulders so that it sat better on the feed. (Hence my question re pulling on the shoulders.) It may not have been the ideal professional method, but I learned an awful lot about the geometry and how nibs and feeds work with that pen! It's now also one of my very favorites in my tiny collection of celluloids. Once I got it straightened out and measured, it turned out to be a fine calligraphy nib and I LOVE it!!

So glad my perfectionist tendencies didn't let me give up on it.

[DvdRiet]

10 hours ago, Bo Bo Olson said:

Confession, only did it a couple times...the first time I had to reverse the treatment.

 

Confession: been there, done that, but in the opposite direction! Very wet writer that I tried to make a little drier, got frustrated that it wasn't moving so squeezed just a little too hard, took me FOREVER to get the tines back apart again 😬 

 

But I did recently get a 60s pen (with a semi-hooded spade nib...grrr) where a previous owner had managed to make the slit a mile wide from top to bottom, but with the very tip still touching. (How??) That one seriously tried my patience, haha! So I know exactly what you mean about it taking a lot longer to get them back together.

[sansenri]

5 hours ago, DvdRiet said:

 

This is a fantastic article! Thank you very much for sharing that. And thank you, @Bo Bo Olson, for those tips also.

 

I discovered a little about this and about the geometry of the nib when I was trying to fix my very first vintage fountain pen - a low-end brand with a steel nib bought cheap so I could learn how to replace a sac by myself 🙂 - so it is very good to see 1) that I was already on the right track and 2) the real professional way of doing these tweaks!

 

The vintage pen I was learning some of this on by pure experimentation turned out to have the tines bent under at the very tip, which took me some time to figure out, being a noobie and all. Then once I figured out I should try and straighten them, all sorts of other issues popped up. In the end, the real solution to getting it back into the correct shape (w/o nibmeister tools, mind you) was to use a smooth metal burnisher from the bottom and slowly round out the wings/shoulders so that it sat better on the feed. (Hence my question re pulling on the shoulders.) It may not have been the ideal professional method, but I learned an awful lot about the geometry and how nibs and feeds work with that pen! It's now also one of my very favorites in my tiny collection of celluloids. Once I got it straightened out and measured, it turned out to be a fine calligraphy nib and I LOVE it!!

So glad my perfectionist tendencies didn't let me give up on it.

 

glad to help, there is quite a lot of wealth to be found on FPN, often shared by pros.

The one thing that sucks a bit is the search function in FPN...

but easiest way round that is use the "power of google"...

type your topic in the google search engine and add FPN at the end... works a charm

[Karmachanic]

1 hour ago, sansenri said:

type your topic in the google search engine and add FPN at the end

 

 This may render better result:

site fountainpennetwork.com searchword/s

[sansenri]

right you are, but my method is easier to remember and works practically all the time...