Tine alignment

August 26, 2005

In Dutch you separate different parts of a sentence with commas, and it supposedly is obligatory, but in English it isn´t. Once I got he commas in the right places, I understood .
[RANT] In my school days, it was obligatory in english as well, Wim, but we've become very lazy, nowadays. That, plus a new fangled, whiz-bang, K-12 education system in the U.S. that doesn't pound the fundamentals into the pupil, preferring, instead, to be more concerned with the pupil's self esteem...well, you get my drift. [/RANT]

"The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself." Bill Gates

Here for more : Bill Gates' Lessons in Life

Edited August 26, 2005 by Denis Richard

August 30, 2005

ordinary rigid nibs need only finger pressure, perhaps overdo a little bit and let the errant tine settle into place. flex nibs are not that simple, because flex nibs have a great deal of strain energy locked up in them. to correct tine alignment, you must find a way of channeling the excess strain away. brute force won't cut it because the strain will merely be transferred elsewhere, so that you may find your tines aligned, but a breather hole crack all of a sudden that was not there before! the only reasonable solution is to use heat in conjunction with pressure. the heating redistributes stresses so no cracks develop. heating does change the temper of the nib so that it may flex differently (often less) than previously. in short, flex nib alignment is a lose-lose situation, except in the few cases where it is not ;--]

August 30, 2005

ordinary rigid nibs need only finger pressure, perhaps overdo a little bit and let the errant tine settle into place. flex nibs are not that simple, because flex nibs have a great deal of strain energy locked up in them. to correct tine alignment, you must find a way of channeling the excess strain away. brute force won't cut it because the strain will merely be transferred elsewhere, so that you may find your tines aligned, but a breather hole crack all of a sudden that was not there before! the only reasonable solution is to use heat in conjunction with pressure. the heating redistributes stresses so no cracks develop. heating does change the temper of the nib so that it may flex differently (often less) than previously. in short, flex nib alignment is a lose-lose situation, except in the few cases where it is not ;--]

How would you go about in heating the nib? Over a candle flame????!!!!???? Probably not since it would discolor the nib with black soot.

August 30, 2005

no, high temperature heat using a butane torch will be needed, please practice on junkers first. (ps. giovanni's website retails such a mini-torch, usual disclaimers.)

August 31, 2005

[RANT] In my school days, it was obligatory in english as well, Wim, but we've become very lazy, nowadays. That, plus a new fangled, whiz-bang, K-12 education system in the U.S. that doesn't pound the fundamentals into the pupil, preferring, instead, to be more concerned with the pupil's self esteem...well, you get my drift. [/RANT]

This is a bit OT, but:

Whilst I can rant with the best about poor punctuation, I think the lightening up of punctuation in English was a stylistic trend. It was in part driven by publishers, who got dominated by accountants in the 1970s. Before the rise of wordprocessing, when text was set by actual compositors, the pointy-haired bosses worked out that it cost about 1/2 of an English new penny (a cent or so US) to set every character. Therefore, if you could cut out commas while leaving the text intelligible, you could save MONEY.

There were other reasons, too, but what gets me going is people who put in commas in meaningless places, or use a comma where there ought to be a semi-colon or a new sentence.

Best

Michael