Problem with Pilot Heritage 91 drystarting.

[Asteris]

On 2/23/2024 at 3:23 AM, arcfide said:

One other thing to check, is whether the alignment you have to the paper with that nib is just a tiny bit rotated. It's very common for people who are right handed to rotate the nib just a little inward, which, if you have a highly polished nib, can keep the slit away from the paper more than might be expected. A thing I do to check is to find when the nib has "dried out", and before wetting it again, I test very gentle touches to the paper at very meticulous angles, rotating by about 5 degrees each touch to see how wide the writing angle is. Some nibs are sensitive to first touch angle, and you need to be right on the sweet spot to get ink to flow quickly. You can also confirm some things by examining the nib with a loupe at that point and see how much of a "dip" appears at the tine slit when the pen is at your writing angle. Pens with high first stroke reliability will appear to have a smooth, almost flat surface at the tip of the nib, whereas on nibs that have a touch of baby's bottom or that are highly polished, you will see a very tiny valley or hill at the slit. 

 

If you are using very smooth paper, this can exacerbate this problem, so you can also try using a rougher paper. 

 

To answer your other question about baby's bottom, it is actually the opposite of what you thought: nibs with baby's bottom tend to be overly smooth, not scratchy. This is because the inside of the tines are overly rounded out, which makes the pen extremely smooth at a wider range of rotations, but also causes the ink to "suck back in" from where the tip contacts the paper. Too much of that and you get hard starts. 

 

For reliability, I wouldn't worry about ink on the "cheeks", as all inks will recede from the surface of the tipping in time, and that's not what will make the pen reliable or not on the first stroke. You should focus on the nib slit and ink meniscus. 

 

At this point, you'll want to specifically diagnose your issue, and I recommend you look at this to learn how to do that:

 

workshop_notes (richardspens.com)

 

 

So I used my loop and with the help of the document you mentioned (thank you al lot) I checked and I think the nib has a bit of a baby bottom, not much though.

[arcfide]

1 hour ago, Asteris said:

So I used my loop and with the help of the document you mentioned (thank you al lot) I checked and I think the nib has a bit of a baby bottom, not much though.

 

If that's the case, and it's a very small thing, you *might* try to live with it and see if it manages to just work itself out a little over time. I have had that kind of happen before. 

 

If you really *must* have it fixed and don't want to send it off to a nibmeister to adjust it, a small amount of baby's bottom can be fixed up with a very, very slight amount of polishing, but IME, if it's only a very little, the potential risks of making things worse or losing the nice parts of the way the nib feels are too great to make it worth it without a large amount of confidence in your nib grinding. 

[Asteris]

9 hours ago, arcfide said:

 

If that's the case, and it's a very small thing, you *might* try to live with it and see if it manages to just work itself out a little over time. I have had that kind of happen before. 

 

If you really *must* have it fixed and don't want to send it off to a nibmeister to adjust it, a small amount of baby's bottom can be fixed up with a very, very slight amount of polishing, but IME, if it's only a very little, the potential risks of making things worse or losing the nice parts of the way the nib feels are too great to make it worth it without a large amount of confidence in your nib grinding. 

Considering this is the first gold nib that I have used and the fact that this problem ain't that big and could be fixed by time, I'm not going to touch it. Nibmeister would be an option if I could find one in my country, although it might now worth it.

[arcfide]

10 hours ago, Asteris said:

Considering this is the first gold nib that I have used and the fact that this problem ain't that big and could be fixed by time, I'm not going to touch it. Nibmeister would be an option if I could find one in my country, although it might now worth it.

 

The nice thing about waiting is that you can give it some time and use, and then if you still feel that it isn't up to your standards after some time has passed and you've "run in" the nib, you can still send it off to be tuned.