MB released 146 Flex in resin

[bunnspecial]

I realized I flexed it a lot, and I don't see myself routinely doing that if ever again. With that said, this isn't my first flex nib and although I think I was close to its limit, nothing about it was telling me that I was there or past the limit.

 

It's full of Permanent Blue now, and I've gone back and tweaked the nib position over the feed a bit. It's somewhat more reliable now, but doesn't seem to want to write at all with a small enough amount of pressure to get the line width(totally unflexed) as my first photo shows.

[como]

@bunnspecial Glad you finally received the pen. Does it write consistently very fine lines at no pressure, or does it have inconsistent flow at normal writing? I agree with @arcfide that one should not over flex this pen. My 146C and 149C flex about the same width, but given that the tines on 146C are shorter than 149C, I would suspect that it would be easier to spring the nib on 146C.

 

Please write it as you normally would for a few days/a week, and see how it goes.

[bunnspecial]

9 hours ago, como said:

@bunnspecial Glad you finally received the pen. Does it write consistently very fine lines at no pressure, or does it have inconsistent flow at normal writing? I agree with @arcfide that one should not over flex this pen. My 146C and 149C flex about the same width, but given that the tines on 146C are shorter than 149C, I would suspect that it would be easier to spring the nib on 146C.

 

Please write it as you normally would for a few days/a week, and see how it goes.

 

Been writing with it all morning with it as unflexed as I can consistently manage, although this nib is definitely soft enough that it's hard for me to keep it there all the time. Still, though, I'm mostly managing to keep it to what MB would call an EEF if they sold a standard one, or probably even a bit skinnier than my 50s EF 149 if I manage to stay light enough on it(about the same with normal-for-me pressure).

 

It's MOSTLY writing reliably now, although it seems to like me writing faster and will stop if I pause even just a bit. Wiping the nib occasionally(down the slit) seems to help also.

 

I'll keep this up to continue getting a feel for the pen. I do really wish I'd bought/could find a 149C as I write with 149s often enough now that I do feel like I can control the pressure/angle on the nib a bit better on that size pen.

[Arcadian]

18 hours ago, bunnspecial said:

 

Been writing with it all morning with it as unflexed as I can consistently manage, although this nib is definitely soft enough that it's hard for me to keep it there all the time. Still, though, I'm mostly managing to keep it to what MB would call an EEF if they sold a standard one, or probably even a bit skinnier than my 50s EF 149 if I manage to stay light enough on it(about the same with normal-for-me pressure).

 

It's MOSTLY writing reliably now, although it seems to like me writing faster and will stop if I pause even just a bit. Wiping the nib occasionally(down the slit) seems to help also.

 

I'll keep this up to continue getting a feel for the pen. I do really wish I'd bought/could find a 149C as I write with 149s often enough now that I do feel like I can control the pressure/angle on the nib a bit better on that size pen.

 

This pretty much mirrors my experience with it, even after using it for two months now. I am running out of patience. 

 

 - P. 

[maclink]

Although my 146C is sensitive to inks when it comes to reduced railroading, it never skips.  It's very well behaved and this has been from out of the box.  OTOH, my 149C is more finicky.  It has a tendency to hard start while writing normally.  I've been practicing Spencarian a lot and mostly write without pressure.  With the 149C, it will intermittently hard start at the very beginning of writing a new word or when crossing a letter 't'.  A comma almost always requires repeat strokes.  This behaviour, though much diminished when using particular inks, never seems to go away completely, although I think it has been diminishing overall with continued use.  OTOH, the 146C behaves perfectly.  So the mileage definitely varies.

[bunnspecial]

Alright, ink attempt #3...

 

First of all, I never really can seem to like Permanent Blue. It seems to always misbehave on me if it's in the pen more than a couple of days.

 

That aside, I gave the pen a thorough soapy water flush then a dry. I refilled with Midnight Blue(the new dye based kind).

 

So far so good. I got a page out with a tiny bit of skipping, but nothing of significance and usually just if I paused for a bit. I even chanced a bit of flex-nothing extreme, just out to about a wide M or skinny B-and it did fine.

[arcfide]

7 hours ago, bunnspecial said:

Alright, ink attempt #3...

 

First of all, I never really can seem to like Permanent Blue. It seems to always misbehave on me if it's in the pen more than a couple of days.

 

That aside, I gave the pen a thorough soapy water flush then a dry. I refilled with Midnight Blue(the new dye based kind).

 

So far so good. I got a page out with a tiny bit of skipping, but nothing of significance and usually just if I paused for a bit. I even chanced a bit of flex-nothing extreme, just out to about a wide M or skinny B-and it did fine.

 

Sounds good! I think people seem to be hit or miss about MB Permanent Blue, with some people reporting similar experiences to yours, and others having very good luck with it. 

[maclink]

8 hours ago, arcfide said:

 

Sounds good! I think people seem to be hit or miss about MB Permanent Blue, with some people reporting similar experiences to yours, and others having very good luck with it. 

I'm convinced that I have a dud bottle of permanent blue.  I'm yet to use the ink in any pen where it doesn't hard start after two hours without use and then seeming, after a day or so without using a pen inked with it, to dry up and if I do get it going, to badly skip, eventually leading to a flush in frustration.  Something must be wrong with my bottle for such a comprehensively bad experience.  MB Permanent black has been the opposite.

[bunnspecial]

8 minutes ago, maclink said:

I'm convinced that I have a dud bottle of permanent blue.  I'm yet to use the ink in any pen where it doesn't hard start after two hours without use and then seeming, after a day or so without using a pen inked with it, to dry up and if I do get it going, to badly skip, eventually leading to a flush in frustration.  Something must be wrong with my bottle for such a comprehensively bad experience.  MB Permanent black has been the opposite.

 

I have two bottles of it-one a nearly full bottle I bought new, and the other an older half-full bottle that was in a lot of ink I bought.

 

I've mostly used the older bottle but have been less than impressed.

 

With that said, I filled the 146C with ink out of my new/full bottle and it's behaved similarly to my older bottle.

 

Maybe I just have two bad bottles. I did buy an 8 pack of cartridges around the time I got my 147, and used one of those. I liked it a bit better, but of course cartridges in general are too expensive for me and that little $10 8-pack of MB Permanent Blue is an even harder pill to swallow.

 

If only MB still offered "Permanent" Midnight Blue. I still use that one frequently, but wasn't about to use it in a finicky pen...

[maclink]

Robert Oster's 'Fire and Ice' as well as 'Motor Oil' have been behaving very well with these pens.

[bunnspecial]

Mine seems to be somewhat more reliable with Midnight Blue, although I certainly hope going forward I can find a more interesting ink.

 

One thing I'm noticing is that it will start VERY reliably if held at what I'd consider an uncomfortably steep angle relative to the paper-say 60º or so(more like what a ballpoint wants). I normally default to 45º or even shallower, so I need to be rather deliberate to get it to work there, and I also find flex somewhat less controllable at that angle. Once it STARTS at that angle I can lower it, although it will randomly stop when lifted(even momentarily such as between letters or words). Once it is going, though, flow remains great even when flexed.

BTW, Montblanc does prescribe "too much flex" in the documentation and say's it's when the feed touches the paper(if I read correctly).

[arcfide]

5 hours ago, bunnspecial said:

Mine seems to be somewhat more reliable with Midnight Blue, although I certainly hope going forward I can find a more interesting ink.

 

Have you tried one of the Iroshizuku inks? It seems to me that they might be a good match. I'd also be curious whether some of the Sailor inks would work well with the design. 

[dbs]

3 hours ago, arcfide said:

 

Have you tried one of the Iroshizuku inks? It seems to me that they might be a good match. I'd also be curious whether some of the Sailor inks would work well with the design. 

 

Iroshizuku tends to dry or relatively hard to start, old Sailor ink is better than Iroshizuku but the current production all have little hard to start, especially Sailor Pigment Souboku Ink, I found only Aurora pen with ebonite feeder can write without hard to start issue.

 

Platinum Blue Black iron gall ink is very reliable but little too wet. Most De Atramentis ink is also reliable. The blue ink bottle comes with Pilot 823 also writes very well .

 

[tunney]

On 4/30/2022 at 10:34 PM, bunnspecial said:

Mine seems to be somewhat more reliable with Midnight Blue, although I certainly hope going forward I can find a more interesting ink.

 

One thing I'm noticing is that it will start VERY reliably if held at what I'd consider an uncomfortably steep angle relative to the paper-say 60º or so(more like what a ballpoint wants). I normally default to 45º or even shallower, so I need to be rather deliberate to get it to work there, and I also find flex somewhat less controllable at that angle. Once it STARTS at that angle I can lower it, although it will randomly stop when lifted(even momentarily such as between letters or words). Once it is going, though, flow remains great even when flexed.

BTW, Montblanc does prescribe "too much flex" in the documentation and say's it's when the feed touches the paper(if I read correctly).

 

I have a 149c and a 146c.

 

My 146c is perfect, however my first 149c behaved as you described. Eventually i returned it and got a pen back from MontBlanc that just works.

 

Sounds like it may need to be returned.

[tunney]

On 5/2/2022 at 10:39 PM, tunney said:

 

I have a 149c and a 146c.

 

My 146c is perfect, however my first 149c behaved as you described. Eventually i returned it and got a pen back from MontBlanc that just works.

 

Sounds like it may need to be returned.

I retract this statement. After leaving my 146c in a drawer for a month it now railroads and is scratchy as can be. Any ideas?

[txomsy]

Sounds like dried ink. A good soak might be all that is needed.

[como]

@fpupulin Franco recently showed us a script that I didn’t know before in the 149 Calligraphy thread, called “Elegant”. I started learning it. Here written with 146C, on a size A5 Brause Calligraphy Premium Pad, 125g. I like this paper a lot. A light cream color, smooth with slight texture, very suitable for calligraphy indeed. About €8 for a pad of 30 sheets, bought in a stationery shop in Como during a recent trip. Ink is MB Royal Blue.

[a student]

1 hour ago, como said:

@fpupulin Franco recently showed us a script that I didn’t know before in the 149 Calligraphy thread, called “Elegant”. I started learning it. Here written with 146C, on a size A5 Brause Calligraphy Premium Pad, 125g. I like this paper a lot. A light cream color, smooth with slight texture, very suitable for calligraphy indeed. About €8 for a pad of 30 sheets, bought in a stationery shop in Como during a recent trip. Ink is MB Royal Blue.

 

Very nice indeed!

[tunney]

On 5/7/2022 at 12:10 PM, txomsy said:

Sounds like dried ink. A good soak might be all that is needed.

Thanks, this fixed it

[Nabado]

On 1/25/2022 at 6:23 PM, Nabado said:

After I had spent the first couple of days with my 146C trying different inks, I started to encounter similar problems as the ones @Sinistral1described:

In my case, these symptoms only occured some time after inking the pen. For some time after inking, the pen would write like a charm. However, after some time railroading on almost every downstroke would occur. I suppose this had to do something with the feed not being able to provide enough ink for when the tines spread for flex writing or some defect in the nib that would stop the capillary flow of ink between the tines.

 

I  tried every ink in my arsenal over the past days and also resorted homemade pen flush to remove any possible residues from the manufacturing process or oils from between the tines and the barrel. However, I never achieved a satisfactory result.

I would always have the comparison with my 149C, which has no issues with railraoding whatsoever and does not seem to be overly picky when it comes to ink compatibility. None of the inks I like most in my 149C worked with the 146C. In fact, no ink would not have the pen railroad after the first saturation of the feed had been "written off".

 

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, my 146C also never quite reached the flex level of my 149C, which ran contrary to what @como experienced with his 146C.

 

This combined with the apparent ink flow issue made me reach the conclusion that my 146C was in some way defect.

 

...

 

My 146C is now going to Hamburg and will, according to the associate, probably just get an entirely new nib mounted on it, as this is a warranty case.

I will report back once the pen is with me again.

 
It’s been quite a while, but I finally want to make good on my promise to report back on my 146C warranty case from all the way back in January.
 
Almost four months later, I have been through hell and back with customer service but finally seem to have a perfectly working 146C in my hands. I have had it back with me for almost a month now and wanted to make sure there are no issues with it before I share my experience.
 
I think I went through almost all levels of MB customer service with my pen because there did not seem to be a lot of experience with how these pens work and/or are supposed to write at the first support levels, which somewhat surprised me as the 149C at least has been around for quite a while now. At one point they even had the pen shipped back to me without being able to tell what they had done to fix the problem I had. Needless to say, whatever they did, if they did anything at all, didn’t fix it.
But the service experience is another story for another time.
Eventually, my persistence was more than worth it, though.  
I feel confident to report that the 146C now finally writes flawlessly, similar to the numerous wonderful samples posted in this thread in the meantime by @como et. al.
It lays down a smooth and very slim line when unflexed and used without much pressure, a finer one than my regular EF even, similar to the EEF lines described by @bunnspecial, and it writes flawlessly when using the flex. Skips are virtually non-existent. It has the slightest tiny bit of feedback when writing, which I also like a lot in other pens, but that is just my personal inclination.
 
I am now more than pleased with the 146C. While it is somewhat stiffer than the 149C, it delivers a very pleasing writing experience to me, and the smaller form factor of a 6-size calligraphy nib makes it easier for me to control the flex.

It may very well become my new favorite pen.

 

On 5/1/2022 at 8:28 AM, dbs said:

 

Iroshizuku tends to dry or relatively hard to start ...

 

 

For my everyday writing with it I mostly use Iroshizuku inks, but the 146C has been very well-behaved with other inks (MB, Diamine, Waterman), too. I have been too much of a coward to try the MB permanent line, though.
Hard starts have not been my experience with Iroshizuku inks in my 146C at all, but as others have already pointed out, hard starts may be caused by lots of other different factors than inks alone.
 
But the moral of my warranty experience is:
If a 146C does not write consistently well with any ink, as was the case with mine: that's definitely not right, and you should have that checked out.