What pen(s) are you using today?

[Penguincollector]

@Cjtamu- that’s a gorgeous Sailor! I have a tiny Chalana that is nowhere near the nail (still enjoy them) that Sailor currently produces.

[Mark from Yorkshire]

Lamy Al-Star with Sailor Studio 473.  In my journal which is currently a Life Noble notebook with square ruling.

[inkstainedruth]

Today, so far, it's been the Violet Safari, B nib, still with Lamy Turquoise.  But I've grabbed a couple of other pens because the "early bird" prompt for NaPoWriMo 2026 just dropped around midnight last night.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Cjtamu]

3 hours ago, Penguincollector said:

@Cjtamu- that’s a gorgeous Sailor! I have a tiny Chalana that is nowhere near the nail (still enjoy them) that Sailor currently produces.

Thank you. Now I need the Lapis Lazuli. There was supposedly a brown but I’ve yet to see a picture of one. The nibs are really wonderful. See one, snag one would be my advice!

[Penguincollector]

2 hours ago, Cjtamu said:

Thank you. Now I need the Lapis Lazuli. There was supposedly a brown but I’ve yet to see a picture of one. The nibs are really wonderful. See one, snag one would be my advice!

  I will keep that in mind, I really like Sailors. 

[flodoc]

On 3/24/2026 at 7:40 PM, Scribs said:

 

If I had 10 pens to clean, I would likely spread the cleaning out into small sessions dealing with two or three at a time, along the lines of the 10% method suggested in the book Atomic Habits.

 

 

Pilot makes some of the best nibs around, no matter which model it is, no matter the price tag. Enjoy! 🙂

 

 

That's an interesting Pelikan you've got there Flodoc. I hope the Ancient Copper doesn't start staining your demonstrator. I've noticed some of Diamine's inks can sometimes stain, which is fine all the while it's only a converter or a windowless piston filler. 

 

My pens used today include;

Leonardo MZG 'Masterpiece' (rosewood ebonite) EF inked as usual with Leonardo Red Passion

Platinum 3776 Mt Fuji Unkei Kinu Gumo SF inked once again with Akkerman Stormachtig Blauw

Montblanc Origin 149 EF inked with Montblanc Mystery Black

@Scribs I'm almost 79 and am not worried about passing on perfect pens. My children view fountain pens as novelties and may keep a few just because pens remind them of me. I also own a C7 Z06 Corvette that is bearing 45,000 miles. I'm not saving it for the next person. I'm enjoying it, along with my pens, now.

[flodoc]

Today's pen is my newly re-sac'd Visconti Millennium Two crescent filler with 18k fine nib and Yama-budo ink.

[Doug C]

7 minutes ago, flodoc said:

@Scribs I'm almost 79 and am not worried about passing on perfect pens. My children view fountain pens as novelties and may keep a few just because pens remind them of me. I also own a C7 Z06 Corvette that is bearing 45,000 miles. I'm not saving it for the next person. I'm enjoying it, along with my pens, now.

72 and right there with you!

[USG]

9 hours ago, Cjtamu said:

Yes, they do. Wonderful pens, keep an eye out. Today’s pen is the jade green Sailor Magellan I received Friday. Broad 14K nib inked with ku-jaku. This Broad is great for me, which means it’s more like a European Medium. Smooth, wet, and just a little of that Sailor feedback. The nibs on these are wonderful and the pen is a little longer and slimmer than a 1911S and really comfortable in my hand. I think it was @USG that commented in another thread on the color of a 21K nib he has? These nibs are a much paler color than the current 14K 1911 nibs. And they’re not the nail that the current nibs are. This one was made for US market. Was extremely lucky to get with original presentation box and outer sleeve, ink carts, instructions, and I believe original converter with a white piston. Other than the dried kon-peki in the feed and converter you’d never know it was used.

 

GREEN GREEN GREEN.... 👍😀    Very nice.  😀👍  Where's the nib? 🤠

It's hard to get a feeling for the size of the pen .....

.

1 hour ago, flodoc said:

Today's pen is my newly re-sac'd Visconti Millennium Two crescent filler with 18k fine nib and Yama-budo ink.

 

Love your photos  FD 😀👍  Any chance of a Yama-Budo writing sample? 😃

[USG]

Magna Carta Mag 600

Waterman Inspired blue

Midori MD paper

 

CLICK TO ENLARGE

 

Still practicing with this pen

[Scribs]

3 hours ago, flodoc said:

@Scribs I'm almost 79 and am not worried about passing on perfect pens. My children view fountain pens as novelties and may keep a few just because pens remind them of me. I also own a C7 Z06 Corvette that is bearing 45,000 miles. I'm not saving it for the next person. I'm enjoying it, along with my pens, now.

 

And as I already responded the first time you said this to me several days ago; I am very glad that you are enjoying both your pens and your car. Rest assured, my mind hasn't changed.

[Scribs]

12 hours ago, InkyProf said:

 

 

 

 

 

That's a handsome pen, just my kind of blue! I notice your literature appears to be bilingual, is it by any chance a German publication? 

 

Today I've been enjoying my black Namiki Emperor again, FM, still inked with Pilot Black, and the Nakaya Piccolo Writer (Aka-tamenuri), F inked with Platinum Blue-Black

[InkyProf]

12 minutes ago, Scribs said:

That's a handsome pen, just my kind of blue! I notice your literature appears to be bilingual, is it by any chance a German publication?

 

Thanks, @Scribs!

 

The book is a bilingual Latin and German edition of Giambattista Vico's De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), published under the title Vom Weg und Wesen der Geistigen Bildung in 1947. (In English it's translated as On the Study Methods of Our Time.)  An inaugural lecture from the University of Naples in which Vico compares ancient with modern approaches to education.

[USG]

32 minutes ago, InkyProf said:

 

Thanks, @Scribs!

 

The book is a bilingual Latin and German edition of Giambattista Vico's De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), published under the title Vom Weg und Wesen der Geistigen Bildung in 1947. (In English it's translated as On the Study Methods of Our Time.)  An inaugural lecture from the University of Naples in which Vico compares ancient with modern approaches to education.

 

The balanced approach is so overrated  😎

 

[USG]

13 hours ago, InkyProf said:

This morning, I've been using a new arrival: a (modern) Onoto Magna Classic in Blue Pearl with gold trim, with an Onoto no. 7 stainless steel nib customized to a fine stub. It's filled with Bungubox Omotesando Blue, an intense azure without much shading or sheen (on Midori paper, which doesn't show sheen especially well). Initial thoughts about this pen below the photo if you're interested.

 

 

First reactions: 

 

• The material is gorgeous; the pearlesence is vivid and deeper in person than in photos, as you'd expect.

 

• Having seen some inconsistent size information on Onoto's webpage, I double-checked with Onoto's very helpful customer service before purchasing and confirmed that this pen would come in the slightly longer size to which they transitioned the Magna (127mm uncapped rather than 122mm), which is, as I'd hoped, long enough for me to use unposted.

 

• The cap, with its heavy clip and bands, is 13g, fully 50% of the total weight of the pen with a full converter of ink, which means two things: that posting the cap really requires a tight fit of the cap into the back of the barrel to feel secure; and that posting also backweights the pen a little awkwardly, at least for me.

 

• If I had it to do over again, I would probably add the "extra weight" option. It's not that the barrel strictly needs extra weight to be used; rather, I think there's a misfit in my perception between how the pen feels when capped (substantial) and how it feels when uncapped (where'd all that substance go?) A brass insert would make the barrel feel more proportionate in weight to the cap and thus to the pen as a whole. 

 

• The fine stub nib is very well done. I had been considering a cursive italic, but based on reports that John Sorowka's CI grinds tended toward the sharp end of the spectrum, I opted for a stub instead, and that was the right decision: this is likewise very crisp for a stub, and for my purposes, I wouldn't have wanted this nib to be any more positionally sensitive than it is (a little but not much). It is tuned beautifully and writes flawlessly. For all that, the cost of the nib customization was eye-watering, and it's also possible (I am looking into this) that some of my description of the customization I was requesting was cut off by the Onoto web interface, which seems not to warn the user if the text they've entered has exceeded the string limit, with the result that my preferences concerning maximum line width didn't register. Indeed, based on a first test, this fine stub does seem to me more like a medium stub; but it's close enough to be usable even given my small handwriting, and I enjoy writing with it, so as disappointments go, this is minor, and will be forgotten quickly.

 

All this Onoto talk makes me want one... but I'm trying to resist....

 

Could you go into a little detail about the "extra weight" option and the The fine stub nib.   And maybe a few words about the #7 nib.

 

Which Onoto would you suggest as a first entry into Onotos?  I like Vacs, Do I want the plunger option?  Do you know if the section unscrews for cleaning like my Pilot 823 does not.

 

 

 

[flodoc]

4 hours ago, Scribs said:

 

And as I already responded the first time you said this to me several days ago; I am very glad that you are enjoying both your pens and your car. Rest assured, my mind hasn't changed.

Sorry for the double post. For some reason the software wouldn't let me make a new post until I hit post again on this one as if I hadn't posted it already. Bugs are afoot!

[InkyProf]

9 hours ago, USG said:

 

All this Onoto talk makes me want one... but I'm trying to resist....

 

Could you go into a little detail about the "extra weight" option and the The fine stub nib.   And maybe a few words about the #7 nib.

 

Which Onoto would you suggest as a first entry into Onotos?  I like Vacs, Do I want the plunger option?  Do you know if the section unscrews for cleaning like my Pilot 823 does not.

 

 

 

 

The "extra weight" option adds something -- I believe it is a brass sleeve? -- to the barrel of the pen to increase its weight by 7g, which is an extra 50%, roughly, of the weight of the pen without its cap. It's an add-on at purchase, which costs around $25, I think.

 

I'm not sure what more I can say about the fine stub nib, other than that it's very well-ground and also very expensive. If I were a regular pen show attendee I would not have paid what I did for this grind, but I live a hermit-like existence in a "centrally isolated" location, as we like to say of Ithaca (not quite a cabin in the woods, but a boy can dream), and didn't want to send the pen out to sit in someone's queue for six months.

 

The #7 nib is a stainless steel nib; the nibs are from one of the big German manufacturers (I've heard conflicting information about which) but may be made to Onoto's specifications and/or finished in-house; I can say for sure that this one is not a stock JoWo, based on the shape. Dimensionally, it's ever-so-slightly smaller than a JoWo #6, and roughly the size of the nib in my 1980s MB 146. There is a recent thread about the advantages and disadvantages of Onoto's gold vs. steel nibs; for me, the price difference made this an easy choice, as I could buy a couple of good vintage pens with 14k nibs for the price of the gold-nib upgrade.

 

I don't know much about the plunger option, except that I believe it is NOT like the old Onoto plungers, in which the barrel serves as the ink chamber: from the photos I've seen, there's a converter-like attachment with a clear ink chamber and a plunger knob that you access for filling by removing the barrel from the section. I don't know if it's permanently fixed to the section or if it can be removed for cleaning. I didn't bother doing much research on this because it adds $300 to the cost of the pen (and cannot be combined with the added weight, although I'm sure it adds weight of its own), which (like the gold nib) is simply not worth it to me, though everyone will have their own preferences (including not paying luxury prices for an acrylic pen to begin with, of course).

 

I'm not really the person to ask about best points of entry, as I have two (modern) Onotos, this one and a "Heritage" pen (a smaller chased ebonite pen, without a clip or metal cap bands, based on one of their classic models), which was a little less expensive despite being a limited edition (they are still available). They also make a pen called the "Scholar" which is considerably less expensive than the Magna; I've never handled one, but others here might be able to chime in.

 

Hope this is useful!

 

[Cjtamu]

14 hours ago, USG said:

 

GREEN GREEN GREEN.... 👍😀    Very nice.  😀👍  Where's the nib? 🤠

It's hard to get a feeling for the size of the pen .....

 😃

Here you go. 1911L on the left, Magellan in the middle, 1911S on the right. The Magellan is slightly longer and slimmer than the 1911S but nib size is very similar and maybe exactly the same. Magellan in use again today.

[InkyProf]

After yesterday’s rain (precip reports aren’t in but I’m guessing 2-3 inches), waterfowl seem appropriate, so I’ve lubricated and inked up one of my two Pelikan MK10s, a modest but attractively streamlined late-sixties piston filler, with Kobe #19 Minatogawa Lime, a nice bright but readable spring green. 

 

[PennyTheDog]

My go-to grading pen