Fountain pens

I need a little help here, and as usual, I’m going to the SDMB to get it.

I’m trying to find a fountain pen with the following characteristics.

  1. Filled using a pump style reservoir, NOT a cartridge.

  2. Medium tip.

Price less than $100.00.

Surprisingly, a pen with these specs seem to be very difficult to find. 99% of all the pens I’ve found use some kind of cartridge system, and I have found these to be a recipe for leakage, plus a cartridge will hold only about a third of the ink that a full-sized reservoir will hold.

Anyway, if any of you dopers know of any pens with these characteristics, I would much appreciate where they can be found.

Look at the Pilot Metropolitan or Lamy Safari with a converter. Well under $100 and great pens.

I am about to be a little pedantic, I don’t mean anything mean by it but it is just to make sure we are speaking about the same things.

By “some kind of cartridge system” I assume you mean a cartridge/converter system where you can either use a pre-packaged cartridge, or else a converter that allows you to use bottled ink, yes? You are correct that the cartridge or the converter can become detached inside the pen and then leak, although I have never had a problem with that.

And by “pump-style reservoir” I’m going to make the leap and surmise that you mean a piston-filler, where you turn a knob on the end of the pen barrel (with the nib submerged in the ink) that moves a piston forward towards the nib, and then by turning in the other direction moves the piston away from the nib and draws ink in by suction. That kind of pen stores all the ink (usually) directly inside the barrel.

There are some other variations on filling systems, and any fountain pen can leak, but a well-made piston filler pen is usually very reliable. The only drawback I have found is that they can be tedious to clean out, which you should do maybe a couple of times a year even if you are always using the same ink.

The Pilot Metropolitan is a variant of the converter system, and I suspect is not what you want. So is the Lamy Safari and all its variants.

For a reliable and inexpensive piston-filler pen, I recommend pens from TWSBI, a company based in Taiwan. You can order them with a variety of nib widths (such as fine, medium, broad, stub), and you can also buy replacement nibs if the one you picked out doesn’t suit you. They are available at a variety of online dealers such as gouletpens.com and jetpens.com (I have no affiliation with them, but I have bought from them both myself). I would avoid buying pens from Amazon or eBay unless you really know what you are doing; you might save a few dollars, but the risk is great, and the after-purchase service is probably nil.

Good luck, I’m glad to see someone looking at fountain pens for regular use.

Those Lamy Safari pens work fine, but it is true that the ink capacity (< 1 ml ?) is not that great, particularly if you use medium or thicker nibs.

It sounds like you want a pen with at least 1.5 or even 2 ml capacity; there are actually a lot of possibilities, look for a piston-filler, or “vacumatic”, or similar, not one that accepts cartridges. OTOH, the “small” cartridges you don’t like hold about 0.74 ml, but I have also seen longer ones, depends what you can find.

ETA I see that Noodler’s Ink, makers of expensive-yet-colorful fountain-pen ink, sell a line of inexpensive (like $20) piston-filling fountain pens made of acrylic or ebonite plastic. Sounds like a good deal to me.

I like the Pelikan pens, also the Pilot. I don’t think I paid a hundred dollars for either of them but it was quite a while ago. OTOH they are still working!

This Pelikan isn’t quite what I have, but looks similar.

The Pilot Vanishing Point is the other pen I use. Once again, I have an older model. They are fun because the entire internal nib and reservoir are removeable and replaceable.

The problem I found was collector’s pens seem to be designed to be ooh-ed and aah-ed over, write about three sentences and be locked in a drawer forever. If you put them to work for day to day use, they die. The pens from Japan and Germany, however, are meant to be used.

One of us! One of us!

I’ll add to this that if you go to JetPens, you can hover over the Pens in the upper left hand corner and get a listing of their pens. Then you can go to the piston-fill or the vacuum-fill to see the different varieties.

I’ll just add one more thing which is the opposite of what you’re looking for. It’s possible to convert several cheap pens to a reservoir pen (eyedropper pen), but you have to refill the reservoir which is not what you want. The reason I bring it up is because it’s the leakiest thing possible. Figuring out how things leak could help solve some of the problems of cartridge pens for you. Then you might be able to use your cartridge pens as well.
Eyedropper Fountain Pens (Fountain Pen 101) (Goulet pens video)

The way that they stop leaks in an eyedropper pen, they use o-rings and silicone grease on the threads of the parts where they’re screwed in. Silicone grease might help with the leaks on your pens, depending on where the leaks are coming from.

The problem I’ve had with eyedropper-fill pens is not that they leak, that’s pretty easy to ensure against, it’s that they can burp ink into a blob on your paper, due to your hand warming up the ink in the pen and causing it to expand. There are some pens (Opus 88 among them) that have taken steps to resolve this, but I wouldn’t recommend eyedropper-fill pens for beginners (even though they can be among the simplest of pens to take care of).

Thanks for the tip about finding a particular kind of pen on jetpens.com, I hadn’t noticed that before. That made it easy to find the cheapest Penguin they have, which is the M205 at $132. Over OP’s budget, but it will last forever given occasional rinsing out of the nib and ink chamber.

I don’t like the Vanishing Point pens. I have two of them, and they are going up for sale one of these days. The problem is that the little door that shuts the nib off from the outside air is inadequate to it’s purpose, and the nib dries out way too fast for me. I had them at work because the nib is more quickly available to write with than a pen with a cap, and I liked the idea of the clicking action, but they ended up in a drawer. Also, the position of the clip makes them a little unpleasant in the hand.

I can see I’m going to have to watch myself in this thread, I can go on forever.

[Moderating]

Since this is asking for advice, let’s move it over to IMHO.

No disrespect intended but why on earth would you want to use a fountain pen? (asked by a guy who had to make copious handwritten notes in meetings much of his working career)

They require zero pressure on the paper so you can write for a long time without getting tired (a good non-fountain pen will also have this feature). Also I find that it is easier to write more legibly, or at least more expressively, with an ultra-flexible nib (nb fountain pens may be fitted with a rigid nib too, but at least you have the choice). They are also potentially cheaper than disposable pens if you truly write a lot: I am nowhere near even halfway through my 1-litre bottle of ink. This is all IMHO; I use all sorts of writing implements. I like fountain pens for taking notes, but you need a good (does not necessarily mean expensive) one; of course nobody wants to deal with inconsistent ink flow, leaks, or a less-than-smooth nib, but, again, that goes for any type of pen.

I like the Waterman Phileas They don’t make them anymore, but they’re easily available on eBay for good prices. You can use a pre-filled cartridge, but I use the refillable piston cartridge. I have a blue one and a green one.

As much as I like the Watermans, I love my Levenger Mediterranean. They’re no longer made, they cost $100 twenty years ago, they’re hard to find now, and they’re pricy. It’s my pen of choice. I wish I had gotten the Aegean (transparent green), Red Sea (transparent red), Caribbean (translucent yellow), and Adriatic (transparent purple), ones when they were available.

I have several Esterbrook pens from the 1940s/1950s. They have a bladder that’s filled by working a lever. I never use them; they just sit in a case.

Do you mean like a snorkel pen? Pipe comes out behind the nib and draws ink into the reservoir? I believe a few companies still make them but the last one I bought was a fairly cheap Sheaffer or something like that – say 10 years back. A link to a rough idea of what you want would help.

Why do I drive a manual transmission, often ride motorcycles, shoot flintlocks against modern firearms in competitions, and ---- I could go on. I won’t speak for others but for me I like the journey as much as the destination. In these days of fast e-mails and tweets to sit and write a physical letter, or take physical notes with a fountain pen, is allowing myself that extra second or two to remember the moment and appreciate it. Once you learn them a fountain pen isn’t that much slower than a rollerball and it just feels good to me.

You should take a peek at The Fountainpen Network.

There you will find the heart of fountainpendom on earth.

Why would a fountain pen write any more slowly than a rollerball? A good fountain pen is a good pen, and writes well, while a shitty fountain pen is first and foremost a shitty pen and a pain to use.

Unless you mean a “dip pen”-- there you must indeed take an extra second or two each time you need to dip it. They have their niche uses, but whipping one out to jot a quick note is not one of them.

Fountain pens are faster than rollerballs.

I can’t disagree with anything from the previous posters, except to say that I haven’t had any trouble with my eyedropper conversions spitting out blobs of ink. (Well except for that time I was carrying my Kaweco Sport in my bra…)

Right now my pen of choice is a delicious Staedtler aluminum pen that I’m not sure is available in the States. (Picked in up in Nuremberg last summer for about 60 Euro). I generally prefer bottled ink, but I’m being lazy and using cartridges right now. Since it takes a standard cartridge, I can use the Private Reserve double-size ones. Those are really nice.

Chill.

Lets be honest; how many of us have and use fountain pens compared to how many of us use fountain pens exclusively? I left a little fudge-room in my reply to keep it more in terms of average. The person I responded to thinks we’re all nuts anyway.

Some depends on how often you use one and how you maintain it. My daily driver is just as fast as any other pen and just as reliable; but I do tend to keep up on the “regular service routine” and cleanings every couple of fillings. Some of the more colored ink ones at the desk need a knee-slap or three before the ink flows totally at speed. When you keep 5-6 in ink at any one time the ones with the least mileage can get a little slow starting like that car only driven on Sundays.

And there are those who have never used fountain pens; don’t know them except from films. They figure the ink dries slow as hell and every so often you have to hit the blotting paper before moving on with your thoughts ------- and so forth. We know none of that is true but the average person (that I responded to) probably doesn’t.

And since we’re headed to the usual crap in pen threads ---- peace out, all.

Thanks to all for your replies. I went to Noodlers, and found just what I wanted.

Actually, I had already (sometime around a year ago) ordered a bottle of their ink, but did not realize that they also sold pens. Thanks a bunch!

It’s not a pump filler, it’s a piston filler with a large capacity…
Lamy 2000!
/thread

I love mine! A hair outside your price range, but not by much, and it’s a timeless, understated, minimalist design, pure functionality

I agree with everything you write, in any case. Of course a clogged-up pen will not write well. If one needs that many colors of liquid ink always available, that is where a plain dip pen can still come in handy.