Very, very basic question about Pilot Metropolitan

[fountain_new]

Ahem.

 

If there were a Pilot Metropolitan that had sentimental value to someone...and an ink "destroyed" the pen...

 

one could get another PM and just swap out the grip section, right? The ink wouldn't somehow destroy the metal body and cap?

[inkstainedruth]

Metropolitans are c/c pens, so I'd think that if there was a problem with an ink it would be easy to just get a new converter for it (they take the Con-B converters, BTW) and then maybe flush out the section and barrel.  I think they're stainless steel, so it should just be a matter of rinsing out the barrel and section (maybe with cleaning solution (either ammonia and water, with a bit of Dawn dish detergent in the mix; or white vinegar and water if it's an iron gall ink -- I use distilled water because I have very hard water where I live), then rinsing the solution out with more distilled water, and drying the pen well.

I had an IG ink destroy the sac in a Con-B converter in one of my Metropolitans, and I got a replacement converter for it. 

Of course now I'm wondering what you mean by an ink "destroying" the pen....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[fountain_new]

Well, I don't know, either. It's something I want to avoid.

 

But I'm asking because I want to try an ink in the pen, not because it's happened.

[fountain_new]

1 hour ago, inkstainedruth said:

 

Of course now I'm wondering what you mean by an ink "destroying" the pen....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

I ask this because I've heard such horrible things about how Noodler's ink will destroy a pen, and I wonder what that means -- the feed? the nib? the body of the pen?

[SLinkster]

12 minutes ago, fountain_new said:

I want to try an ink in the pen

Then try an ink in the pen. Half a converter and a few days or a week won't be an issue.

 

What problems are you worried about? 

[fountain_new]

47 minutes ago, SLinkster said:

Then try an ink in the pen. Half a converter and a few days or a week won't be an issue.

 

What problems are you worried about? 

I dunno, some people make it sound so extreme. Nib destroyed! Feed blows up!

[SLinkster]

9 minutes ago, fountain_new said:

dunno, some people make it sound so extreme. Nib destroyed! Feed blows up!

 

 

*Pssshhh*

 

Unless you've got a crummy pen with a tissue-thin stamped low-quality steel nib that'll rust if you breathe on it, and nasty home-brew ink you can use to vanish a body, there's not much to worry about.

 

At worst you'll have to clean the pen, maybe replace a cartridge or converter, maybe your fingers will be inky, you might sacrifice a towel. 

 

Your Pilot Metropolitan has a good stainless steel nib and a con-b with (I believe) a silicone sac.

 

Ink on! 

[arcfide]

You should be fine. However, there are ways of making a pen completely inoperable if you don't use only fountain pen ink in your pen. If you use a non-fountain pen calligraphy ink, those will often have binders that, when they dry, cannot be removed easily without essentially dissolving the feed. 

 

In general, the biggest danger to messing up a modern pen if you use *only* fountain pen ink is the ink drying out in the pen and being the sort that's very hard to remove with just a water rinse. This would include Noodler's and Pigmented inks. In those cases, most of the time, just pulling the nib and the feed and cleaning the feed with some careful manual agitation and a mild surfactant will do the trick. However, with inks designed for fountain pens, as long as you don't let the ink dry out in the pen and rinse the pen at appropriate intervals, you should be fine. 

 

If you want to try a Noodler's ink and don't want to deal with the excess maintenance, you can dilute Noodler's with distilled water quite a lot, and this will generally make the ink much less likely to clog or cause issues. I usually think of Noodler's ink as a sort of "concentrated mix for making fountain pen ink" rather than ink itself. 

 

In the end, you'll definitely be able to buy another Metro and replace the nib/feed/section if you have to. 

[fountain_new]

Cool, my thanks to @SLinkster and @arcfide. Guess I'll give it a shot. 

 

So the ink dries out only if you don't use the pen for a while? 

[A Smug Dill]

5 hours ago, fountain_new said:

So the ink dries out only if you don't use the pen for a while?

 

The cap on the Pilot MR^† (aka Cocoon, in the Japanese domestic market) does not seal well.

 

Thus, even if you cap the pen properly while the pen is unused and lies undisturbed, whether that's overnight or over a fortnight, evaporation of (specifically, the solvents in the) ink, and loss of volume of what remains in the reservoir (i.e. converter or ink cartridge), occurs.

 

While it isn't strictly (or even nearly) a linear function, if it takes roughly six weeks for about 0.9ml of liquid ink in a cartridge to be lost through evaporation completely from a capped Pilot MR pen, then on average ~0.02ml of solvents is lost every 24 hours, making the ink that remains in the pen more and more concentrated, hence affecting both dye load/saturation as well as ink flow properties. If you don't write with the pen for three days, the next time you uncap the pen and write with it, the ink lines on the page will be darker than one would normally expect from that particular ink — until the liquid trapped in the feed has been consumed and replaced by what was drawn from the reservoir. The dye load would still be higher than that three days prior; but you probably won't notice, especially after the initial shock of seeing more concentrated ink coming from the feed.

 

It only gets ‘worse’ from there, until you flush and/or refill then pen.

 

You can't really make the Pilot MR seal better; but the Pilot MR's inferior cap seal effectiveness should not be unduly extrapolated to indict other fountain pen models. The (gold-nibbed, and much pricier) Pilot Custom Heritage 91 has far superior cap seal effectiveness, as does the (much cheaper) Platinum Preppy, or the roughly equivalent (in terms of standing in the respective brands' product hierarchy) Sailor Profit Jr.

 

^† There is no such pen model as “the Pilot Metropolitan”. The pen model — even in the US market, according to the literature of Pilot Corporation of America — is Pilot MR, and “the Pilot MR Metropolitan collection” is one of three subgroups of colourways in which the Pilot MR pens are offered, alongside the MR Animal and MR Retro Pop collections. If you don't recognise “the Pilot Retro Pop”, which would be technically the same product as a pen in the Pilot MR Metropolitan collection, then there is no “the Pilot Metropolitan” in proper naming or terminology.

[Maurizio]

If I may, and with no criticism in any way intended, it seems to me that the issue is your understanding that Noodler’s Inks, all Noodler’s Inks, are problematic. As a general proposition this is not true.

 

Biases up front, I am a fan of Noodler’s Inks for a variety of reasons I’m not elaborating here. The only Noodler’s Ink that has ever caused problems for me was Bay State Blue, and, the problems developed after I had let it just sit in a Noodler’s Ahab pen for more than 3 months. After that span of time, the ink “ate” -  that is corroded  - the ebonite feed, and the steel nib,  and rendered the pen unusable. In my view, this does not mean that one should never use that ink, but that it must be used with some caution: put into inexpensive pens - eg a Platinum Preppy or other inexpensive pen the damage to which would not caused tears, and that the pen into which it is put be used regularly, flushed maybe once every 2 weeks, and thoroughly flushed when planning not actively to use Bay State Blue for some time beyond 2 weeks.

 

Since this is the Japan forum, let me also say that I’m a fan of Pilot pens and have several nice (gold-nibbed) ones. That being said, besides the MR (Metropolitan) the Pilot Prera and the Pilot Kakuno are very nice steel-nibbed pens. Others here please correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the nibs on the Prera and the Kakuno (despite the smile cutout) are essentially the same as the nibs on the MR (Metropolitan).

 

I have 3 Kakuno’s and one Prera (and a Platinum Plasir) I use to put inks into such as Platinum Carbon Black or other permanent or nano inks that I prefer not to put into my gold-nibbed pens.

 

NB:

The Pilot MR Metropolitan is listed on USA vendors Jetpens, and Amazon, as the Pilot  “Metropolitan” fountain pen. I haven’t done a comprehensive survey of other USA vendors but have a feeling the pen is similarly listed.  

[Sailor Kenshin]

21 hours ago, fountain_new said:

Ahem.

 

If there were a Pilot Metropolitan that had sentimental value to someone...and an ink "destroyed" the pen...

 

one could get another PM and just swap out the grip section, right? The ink wouldn't somehow destroy the metal body and cap?

 

Hypothetical situation, right?  I wouldn't worry much.  Mets are very sturdy pens and I don't see how an ink (unless it's India ink, or another shellac-based type) would harm a Pilot converter.  

 

Or maybe you're talking about the squeeze converters that have an internal black rubber sac that makes it impossible to see the ink level?  Don't worry about that either.  I have multiples, and should one of yours somehow get destroyed by ink I'd be thrilled to part with one of mine. 😜

[A Smug Dill]

2 hours ago, Maurizio said:

The Pilot MR Metropolitan is listed on USA vendors Jetpens, and Amazon, as the Pilot  “Metropolitan” fountain pen. I haven’t done a comprehensive survey of other USA vendors but have a feeling the pen is similarly listed.  

 

Exactly why it's such a bugbear of mine.

   

 

The above is from the official 2024 Product Catalog issued by Pilot Corporation of America, linked to in the navigation panel at the bottom of every page on the Pilot US website at https://pilotpens.us/.

 

Pilot's US distributor gets to name its products authoritatively, and retailers in the region should just toe the line and call the products by their proper names. As far as I'm aware — supported by some long forgotten 2013 press release by Pilot Corporation of America, retrievable only from the Wayback Machine — it has always been officially Pilot MR Metropolitan Collection, not Pilot Metropolitan. In this, I have a particular disdain for Goulet Pens, since especially back in those days Brian was one of the few leading the charge in “educating” North American consumers. I cannot easily find records showing he got it wrong upon the product line's release in the US, but even if he wasn't the first, he has certainly forgone all the opportunities in the years since to correct everyone's error through his YouTube videos and communiques, or at least just to use the proper name and go against the flow. If “Pilot Metropolitan” stuck in the US market without being challenged and corrected, then I think Goulet has to wear at least some of the blame.

 

If “Pilot Metropolitan” is a thing, then so must “Pilot Animal” and “Pilot Retro Pop” be, equal to but not the same as “Pilot Metropolitan”; none of them being either a pen model, or a particular colourway or variant of a pen model (such that “Pilot Metropolitan” would be, say, shorthand for the black pen in the Pilot MR Metropolitan Collection but not the gold one). It makes no sense the use “Pilot Metropolitan” to also cover the Pilot MR Animal Collection pens, when talking about either a product set or design features of the pen model; the model is clearly Pilot MR (and nothing but “Pilot MR”), and not distinguished in name from the Pilot MR pens that are officially distributed in the European market (which use “standard international” ink cartridges instead of Pilot proprietary format ones).

[inkstainedruth]

As I said before, the ONLY inks I'd really worry about in a Metropolitan are iron gall inks, because of the issue with the sac in the Con-B converter (IG inks are very acidic).  But a replacement Con-B converter is not horribly expensive.

As for Noodler's inks, they can't all be tarred with the same brush.  The only ones that really can be (somewhat problematic are the Bay State series ones, because that line is VERY alkaline -- and even Noodler's says to not mix them with anything but each other, because of that.  So, on the few times I use BSB (I mostly don't like the color all that much) I make sure to *seriously* clean out the pen so there isn't a trace of it left anywhere in the pen or on the nib, after seeing photos a few years ago where someone tried to mix BSB with the regular Noodler's Black (which is a neutral pH) -- and the results were NOT pretty....  But I think I've used other Noodler's inks in my Plum Demi 51 (I think even one of the purples) -- heck those pens were supposedly originally designed to use SUPERCHROME ink in them  and that stuff is apparently so noxious it makes BSB look like a walk in the park on a sunny day in comparison....   Of course the issue real issue with BSB is that it stains everything and its cousin -- I've even seen photos where it stained a stainless steel sink (the wife of the guy who posted THOSE photos was, I gather, UNPLEASED -- to say the least).  So that get relegated to a Noodler's Charlie eyedropper (I don't care if that pen stains -- it was free with a 4 oz. bottle of some other Noodler's ink) and before that a $5 Guanleming demonstrator (both being pens that I didn't care if they got stained).  And I tend to dilute it about 15-20% with distilled water, to cut the feathering issues I had with it -- the other advantage of the Charlie pen is that it's easy to eyeball how much to top the ink off with water is.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[inkstainedruth]

11 minutes ago, A Smug Dill said:

Exactly why it's such a bugbear of mine.

I hate to break it to you, but it's not JUST the Pilot Metropolitan that gets renamed for the US Market.  I went to a talk at B/W this past weekend on the history of Pilot Vanishing Points (apparently everyplace else the model is called "Capless").

So, I'd say you can EITHER complain to Pilot about it, or NOT ever move to the US.  Or, option 3 (which is probably the best choice) -- just get over it....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

ETA: Because somehow, I don't see you staging a buyout of Pilot anytime soon....  

[A Smug Dill]

 

45 minutes ago, inkstainedruth said:

I hate to break it to you, but it's not JUST the Pilot Metropolitan that gets renamed for the US Market.

 

But that's exactly the thing: Pilot Corporation of America is the authoritative party calling the pens Pilot MR Metropolitan Collection (as opposed to “Pilot Metropolitan”) in the US market. Did you not see the attached screenshots from the official product catalog?

 

Retailers don't get to call the shots on naming or renaming the products; the distributor of said products in the US market does. My problem is with vendors in effect usurping the naming rights in that market, not that it has a different name. I'm happy to acknowledge that Pilot Capless models known as Pilot Vanishing Point in the limited US market instead. For discussion in global fountain pen hobbyist forums online, such as FPN and Reddit, of course I'll refer to the models as Capless, since that is the name by which it is known in more markets. Also, I've ordered Vanishing Point pens from the US before, and guess what the sticker wrapped around the pen clip read? “Capless”. 

[inkstainedruth]

You're missing the point.  The retailers are just calling "Metropolitans" that because that's what the US distributor is calling them.  Just like the US distributor is the one calling the other pens "Vanishing Points" that instead of "Capless".

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[A Smug Dill]

6 minutes ago, inkstainedruth said:

You're missing the point.  The retailers are just calling "Metropolitans" that because that's what the US distributor is calling them.

 

Who, pray tell, is the US distributor of Pilot, if not Pilot Corporation of America?

[inkstainedruth]

If the US distributor/Pilot Corp USA calls them "Metropolitans" and Pilot's corporate headquarters in Japan doesn't object, I don't see why YOU are objecting to them being called "Metropolitans" instead of "MR" pens.

And the US retailers are going to call them what THEY are told the name of the pen is.

You don't like that?  Go ahead and try to buy Pilot, and that way YOU can decide to change the name [shrug...].

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

[XYZZY]

I suspect (i.e. assume, i.e. I have no inside knowledge) that it is Pilot Corporation of America that lets vendors get away with the wrong name, and not Pilot (in Japan) letting the US get away with it.

 

If I was a vendor I would be hesitant to "fix" the name I had been using for over a decade, and that is the de facto name for the product in this country, as that might confuse customers.  As long as everybody in the U.S. consistently uses the wrong name then I might loose sales by changing it.

 

Remember it's Pilot we're talking about:  they'll sell more Frixion pens during lunch today than fountain pens over the whole decade.  Hassling vendors to fix the name probably has a benefit of close to $0 and might not be worth the opportunity cost.