Okay folks, you’re making me feel all fuzzy and nostalgic …I haven’t thought about fountain pens for 5 decades…
But now I have a question for you: how many of you nib-lovers are on the West side of the Atlantic, and how many on the East?
Because I have a feeling that fountain pens are a proper British compulsion. Like school uniforms, or tea and crumpets.
I’m guessing that Yankees are less likely to be emotionally involved with their nibs.
Am I wrong?
LOL, I’m not sure about the British, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they were more likely to use FPs than us 'merkins.
Mainland Europeans, are definitely into their FPs. Especially in Germany. As I understand it, it’s quite common to start schoolkids writing in ink with FPs instead of ballpoints, with the thinking it will form better writing habits. (Good call, IMHO) Lots of German manufacturers make pens marketed towards kids.
Luckily, people in the UK have a fabulous pen site: Cult Pens. They have a ridiculously good selection including a bunch of things that are very hard to find in the U.S., and it’s one of my favorite sites to browse. I should really place an order. The prices are good enough to make up for the £10 shipping charge to the U.S. (If you’re in the U.S. remember to subtract the VAT from the price before you convert to dollars.)
And a fun British FP fact - Certain official documents require the use of “Registrar’s Ink” for signatures, so a fountain pen is necessary for that. It’s a very permanent ink that won’t fade over time.
I don’t have a true wet noodle either. I also have some that are pretty close, but none that are truly there. A girl can dream though…
Well, I’m a septic, and most of the people on my FB pen groups are, too. So…yeah, I think you’re wrong.
A completely unsolicited endorsement: Rachel and Brian Goulet have been entirely awesome to order from. After a particularly expensive package from them was stolen off my front porch, they offered to either completely refund me or send me all new items. That’s tough to swallow for a small business so I declined and negotiated a discount on the reorder. They also followed up extensively with the Seattle PD when the thief was finally caught!
In HS, I transitioned from a fountain pen to a Faber-Castell drafting pen, the one with the needle point. It laid down beautiful clean lines of india ink, which were waterproof, unlike the fountain pens I had used. I have a set, but they have not been used recently and may be irretrievably clogged.
Another big fan of the Goulets. But, they recently went over to a whole new platform for their website and many glitches have yet to be troubleshot. I recently had a perfectly smooth ink delivery but others have had problems. I know they are working very hard to fix things; don’t be put off by their present site.
Yes, you are wrong. And in the States we are everywhere. There’s a very active Bay Area club I’m familiar with. There are many other clubs. There are also Pen Shows in various locales, where the nerdly congregate in throngs.
I think I’d need the nib specifically made for the Visconti, which isn’t cheap.
More importantly, I’m a complete klutz. 
American back to the 1600s here. But also an Anglophile (I also like school uniforms, and tea and crumpets. Don’t judge me!)
Anyway, I’m picky about nibs, but also about the writing point of non-fountain pens. Anything too narrow makes my handwriting look terrible. A medium nib takes care of that. And I don’t like to share the good pens!
Heaven forfend. A proper fountain pen nib is like a leather bicycle saddle, it wears to conform to its owner. Anyone else trying to use a properly broken-in nib will have a disappointing experience. Only share things that are meant to be shared.
This. Plus, the number of people who already know how to write with a fountain pen before you hand it to them is going to be quite small. I have had people try to rip the cap off by force (in general they unscrew), try to write with the nib sideways or upside down, or press down so hard that if I hadn’t rescued the pen they would have ruined the tines. Now that most of my pens are in the $100 to $250 range and 60 to 100 years old, I let people briefly admire them while they are in my hand, my hand alone.
Unless they are fountain pen freaks, in which case they are allowed to pet them.
I have had several very nice email exchanges with Brian, and enjoyed my fair share of free lollipops. :). Agreed that their new site stinks. I’m sure it will be fixed though.
Myth. If this were true, then vintage FPs souldn’t be so popular and it wouldn’t be so much fun to use other people’s pens. I wish I knew where this myth came from. I’ve seen it discussed on FPN, but can’t recall exactly what was said.
But yes, one shouldn’t let other people use their pens unless they are certain they know what they’re doing. If you prefer that other aficionados not try your pens at all, that’s your preogative, but in my experience, pens are usually handed around freely.
I started with fountain pens when I picked up a really cheap fountain pen because I read that it’s faster to write with. I was doing a lot of journal writing and wanted to get my thoughts down on the page really quickly. Now I can’t go back to a ballpoint. It’s not fast enough.
That first pen was a Parker Reflex. It was probably like $3.
I only used the ink cartridges that were sold at the store for them. I only liked the washable blue. But when the store (Staples) stopped selling the cartridges, I wasn’t sure what to do. They still sold the black, but I didn’t like the black ink.
That’s when my fountain pen habit began. My goal was to find the cheapest pen with a universal cartridge, so I could get cheap cartridges with a cheap pen.
It was not to be.
I joined Fountain Pen Network to scour the pages to look for the cheapest way to solve my problem. I found out that I could buy a bottle of ink and using a printer syringe, refill the cartridges for my Parker pen. I even refilled cartridges and capped them with a rubber cap. But that was messy and time-consuming. I wanted to buy cheap cartridges to put in a cheap pen. One of my first obstacles was that cartridges are made for specific brands of pen. I wanted a pen that used a universal cartridge because those can be bought less expensively.
So I scoured ebay for cheap fountain pens and also found JetPens. I bought several more Parker Reflex pens, then some Parker Frontier pens, then a Parker Jotter and some Parker Vectors. I also got two Lamy Safaris, one with a medium nib and one with a fine point. I think I got a dud Lamy Safari because I kept reading how smooth they were out of the box. But mine took several years just to get them decent, and still not as smooth as my Parker Reflex. I got a couple no name pens and several Pilot Petit pens. I also got a Pelikan Pelicano. I also have two Waterman Phileas pens. Plus a couple of pens from Target and a few assorted others that I don’t remember.
Remember, this was all to find a really cheap pen to replace my $3 Parker Reflex.
At the end of it all, I didn’t find a pen as smooth as my original Parker Reflex. It’s still the smoothest pen I own. But it’s a really cheap plastic pen, so it’s breaking down and the replacements aren’t the same. I tried breaking in the replacements by writing circles on a brown paper bag, but that didn’t work.
This was all several years ago. At this point, I am using my Waterman Phileas pen, along with a Parker Frontier. I don’t like either of these pens as much as my Parker Reflex, but the cartridges for the Waterman are easier to get and I have a bunch of them. And the Parker Frontier gets less waterlogged if I have to use a converter with it instead of using cartridges.
Any suggestions for a super lightweight, super cheap* fountain pen with cheap and highly accessible cartridges would be appreciated.
*Green Bean’s selection is already out of the price range, although I’ve looked at most of those a lot.
On preview: I’m on the fence about the pen sharing thing. I do know that my experience with the pens that I like differs greatly from the experience everyone else is sharing. People seem to love the Lamy Safari much more than I do while people disdain the Parker Reflex that I love. And for sure, each pen is a different experience even it’s the same brand and style. My writing looks different with each.
Have you made sure your tines are aligned properly? That is both the most common cause of scratchiness and the easiest to fix. You can scribble on a bag all day and it won’t help anything if your tines need a tweak.
Why not just use a converter instead of farting around with syringe-filling carts?
Given what you said, how is a $15 Pilot Metropolitan out of your price range?
ETA - that all sounded grumpier than I meant it to!
I kept reading about this, along with the possibility of a burr on the tines. Then I looked at the close-ups of how to fix it. This may sound lame, but I didn’t know where to go from there. Would I need a loop to see if they were out of alignment or have a burr? Could I see it with the naked eye? I went to price loops and wondered if it would be worth buying one to fix a $10 pen. That’s as far as I got with that.
If I’m supposed to just look at them, they look OK to me. It’s not obvious just looking at them that they’re out of alignment. Of course, I don’t really know what I’m looking for, so that doesn’t help much.
The syringe has a few advantages over the converter. Unlike Lamy and Waterman, where the converter often comes with the pens, Parker converters are less easy to find. The twist converter holds more ink but cost more than most of my pens. The plunge converter was priced right but only held half as much ink as the cartridges.
The syringe was easy to get locally and could be used an infinite amount of times. I could refill ten cartridges at a time and use 5 pens at a time. I was really liking mixing colors at the time, so I’d buy one bottle of blue and one of green and mixed the proportions right in the cartridge with the syringe. If I used a converter, I’d have to mix the proportion in a different container and then use the converter. There was less wasted ink with the syringe. And I could only use the one pen that held the converter.
But all that mixing got old when I just wanted to write something quickly and didn’t have time to fill the cartridges and wash the syringe.
I know this doesn’t mirror pretty much anyone else’s experience, but in my experience, the more expensive the pen, the less enjoyment I got out of it. My Lamy pens were a huge disappointment for me. Luckily, I got them on a huge sale at Pear Tree Pens (I think he quit his business since then). But I was really hoping that the more expensive pen would be a better writing experience than the cheap plastic Parker pens. But I find that I like the cheap pens better. The Waterman Phileas pens were from a close-out sale at a big box store. They were also a big disappointment. After my Parker Reflex, the next smoothest pen for me was the Parker Frontier, another really inexpensive pen. I even like those really cheapy Pilot Varsity pens, but they’re non-refillable, so not economical. The Pilot Preppy pens are OK, but the nibs are really stiff. I’m not sure if they’re worth trying to manipulate.
Because my objective is to write quickly, the lighter the pen, the more I liked it. Cheap plastic pens are lighter but less durable. There’s something about the smoothness of the Parker nibs that I like also. I think that may just be because I got used to it. The Lamy, Waterman and Pelikan nibs all started out so incredibly stiff. They got better over time, but it took a long while for that to happen. I’ve gotten a smooth Parker right out of the box. But Parker cartridges and converters are less widely available and with less options for colors, so I’ve been trying to move away from them.
It seems like a hit or miss type of thing as to whether I’ll like the pen or not. Given that, I’d prefer to spend less and not take a bigger dollar risk, especially when the cheaper pens work out better for me.
I haven’t seen anyone mention calligraphy nibs yet. My love for the last 15 years has been a Reform with a 1.1 mm calligraphy nib—enough to give my letterforms distinction, but not so much that it looks like I’m making wedding reception placecards. Unfortunately, the Reform is no longer made, but I’ve snagged a couple off eBay for the future. Good thing, as one slipped out of my shirt and took a tumble down an elevator shaft. Another was never the same after a clueless TSA agent snatched it from my pocket and pulled the cap straight off instead of unscrewing it.
Before that, my fave was a Waterman, but I had to buy the nibs in Paris. Back when I was a copy editor, I also carried a Sheaffer with a stub nib that was custom made for Bromford in Boston. I kept red ink in that one.
A Pilot 78G perhaps. $10-15 on Ebay with cartridges and a converter. Very light, nice enough to write with. I suspect it’s much the same as the Metropolitan but in a cheaper body.
A Platinum Preppy is cheaper ($4) but scratchy.
You’re in a price range where you’re going to have to compromise. “Highly accessible cartridges” pretty much rules out fountain pens entirely. Ink is a niche product, cartridges are mostly incompatible across brands. For cheap ink, use a converter and a bottle. Keep a few cartridges as a backup and for travel.
I’ve never been able to find everyday fountain pens available in the US. It’s either Mont Blanc or a ballpoint. I guess nowadays I could just order Parker stuff from Amazon but I’d constantly be forgetting to order refills. When I was a schoolboy I used Parker Jotters but they only seem to be available as ballpoints in the US.
Heffalump: You can do a pretty good job fixing your tines without a loupe. Just close one eye and look straight down the end of the nib.
As far as your pen needs - Tellyworth has the answer. If you like the 78G so much, get another one. You’ll have to compromise on the filling system, but that’s life.
3 of the pens I mentioned in post #15 have italic/stub nibs!* 
Same as yours, though we’re calling them different things. I absolutely agree that they are an easy way to give your handwriting a bit of panache, which is one of the reasons I love them.
I like Reforms a lot too, and I’m sad that they’re no longer made. Do you use the 1745s? I have one of those given to me by a friend in my pen club. It’s such a classic. German pens are so great. I’m sorry to hear of the demise of your other two. And jealous that yours has a stub!
I also have 6 Reform Thermos, 3 pink and 3 yellow, that I picked up for a song. (the 4th and 5th pens down on this page) They are ultra-cheapo folded-nib types and kind of scratchy, but they’re super-cute.
Everyday fountain pens are very available in the U.S., just not in retail stores. If you use bottled ink, you’ll pretty much never have to worry about ordering refills because one bottle lasts a very long time. If you get a cartridge/converter style, you can get a bottle or two of ink and a pack of cartridges for back-up, and you’re set.
Parker Jotter FPs seem to be available on and off, but the newer ones aren’t very well-regarded. Try a vintage Parker 45. They’re quite similar to Jotters, they’re sweet little workhorses, and you can get one for 20 bucks or less. And they’re an iconic style to boot.