[filleduchaos]

As someone that still fills a notebook roughly every three months, these pens are actually pretty nifty. Most regular ballpoints aren't ergonomic at all (I don't know how to describe it, but they take way too much force to write with and that leads to hand cramps in a long writing session). Rollerballs are way easier on the hand, and I tipped over to buying refillable ones because someone introduced me to J. Herbin ink and now I hate writing with anything else.

I'm still very much a pen noob though - I just like vivid ink and not having a cramp after half an hour of steady writing.

[qrbLPHiKpiux]

I always go back to a Pilot G2 07. Always. So I just stay.

[sarora27]

I love my Pilot G2. Though i prefer the 0.5 or even 0.38

[twic]

Have you tried the Pilot C4?

[qrbLPHiKpiux]

Yes, I like a click top, though.

[hoorayimhelping]

Interesting. I use Muji gel ink ballpoint pens, typically 0.7mm tips, and they are they first pen I've found that hasn't given me cramps (found 0.5mm to be too scratchy feeling). So I haven't really looked much beyond them.

The comments in this thread lead me to the wikipedia article for rollerball pens, which mentions the ink being the main reason the pens require less pressure to write and therefore produce less stress on the hand.

Either way, I love Muji pens and Muji pads. Finding them has led me to actually start writing, which has led me to keeping a dev journal.

[andy800]

+1 for Muji pads, pens, and everything else. I like to think I'm generally a healthy adult male. I enjoy football, eating steak, driving fast. But inside a Muji store, I'm like a hysterical teenage girl at a Backstreet Boys concert. I just want to take home the entire store. Best explanation I can give is admiration of the basic-ness and pure utility of their products, intrinsically making them beautiful.

[skat20phys]

My experience with gel ink pens is that they're incredibly smooth to write with but that you go through refills a lot more often than with ballpoint or rollerballs.

I've settled on a Retro 51 Tornado. Nice price when I've bought them and they take a lot of different refills.

[slowmovintarget]

Get the Retro 51s while you can. They're going out of business from what I've heard.

[yumraj]

Try fountain pen, they are much more easier to write, as in even less effort.

Especially if you go with a medium nib.

[sizzle]

My nibs are always getting clogged and feel dull like it starts to lack the precision it once had where the nib once felt like it was exquisitely carving into the paper. Any tips on good nib hygiene or how to restore nibs?

I only have used Lamy fine and extra fine nibs, any recommendations for other companies?

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Coarser nibs are harder to clog. Changing ink to a more liquid one can also help, and sometimes a given ink just does not go well with a given nib. I don't use the same nibs as you do but you can search forums for ink recommendations for your specific nibs.

If you want another fountain pen, I recommend the Platinum Century #3776. It has a locking mechanism that prevents ink from drying so it prevents clogging when the pen is not used for a few weeks. For me it works like a charm.

PS: Keep in mind that Japanese nibs like the Platinum are finer than European nibs. So for example a Platinum M should feel roughly like a Lamy F.

[cyberferret]

Make sure you flush and clean the pens every now and then (I do mine every 3 or 4 refills). The climate where I am means ink normally dries in the nib or ink channels if I leave them too long without using them, so a routine flush with tap water tends to keep the gunk out of the system and ensure smooth ink flow and good 'feel' between nib and paper.

[rsl7]

Maybe it's the paper? I have a Lamy with a fine nib and it's amazing. I mostly use decent printer paper, but coarse paper like a typical composition book is not so great.

[phaus]

That shouldn't be happening even with an extra fine nib, what kind of paper are you using?

[sizzle]

I switch mediums often which might be the reason. Typically I use my leuchtturm1917 notebooks which have decent weight paper that absorbs the ink nicely.

I think when I switch materials on occasion when I'm in a meeting and only have scrap paper, think some waxy coated film papers e.g. 3M post-it notes material, this is clogging my nib somehow. What do you think? I never made this connection before, might help me avoid some future grief if I can stick to proper fountain pen paper.

I use noodler's bullet proof black ink.

I have several Lamy pens up to $100

[phaus]

I'd bet its the scraps of paper and the post its. The nicer paper for fountain pens actually has some kind of finished surface, which prevents ink from bleeding much at all. For paper where ink bleeds a lot, the surface of the paper is becoming completely saturated to the point where your nib is scraping soft chunks of ink soaked paper up as you write. That's probably what does it. If some of the paper is waxy, that could also cause clogging.

Different inks might have better results on a wider variety of paper, but that's something you have to try until you get something that works. I generally always either keep a high quality notebook around or I just use felt tip pens and keep my fountain pen at home if good paper isn't available.

Black and Red makes a decent quality notebook that's a good amount cheaper than Rhodia, Leuchtturm, etc.

Also stay away from moleskin they are trendy garbage. Ink bleeds like crazy because the paper they fill them with is of incredibly poor quality.

[fishmaster]

I absolutely cannot stand medium nibs, it's horrible for smaller or narrow handwritings. Also, with a decent quality paper F nibs are just as comfortable to write with.

[bayindirh]

Try a Kaweco or Lamy medium nib with a Kaweco or Lamy blue ink. It doesn't write bold. Same can be said with Lamy nib + Lamy black ink.

Medium can mean a lot of things. My Parker Vector's medium nib with Parker's own ink is equal to broad on many other manufacturers. Kaweco's medium is almost equal to Lamy's fine.

All nibs become quite comfortable after they are shaped by your hand and writing :)

[fishmaster]

I have used Lamy M nibs for several years during school and they're too broad for my taste. Now, after several years of trying pencils I'm using a Faber-Castell studio with an f nib and it's very smooth, even with standard pelikan ink.

[Enginerrrd]

Agreed. Fine is my jam. EF is too fine for everyday writing but is great for more artistic penmanship.

[mattlondon]

Alternatively I significantly prefer pencil to any pen (fountain or otherwise).

Very low friction, super-quick to scribble stuff down, easily erased etc. Even the cheapo mechanical pencils are pretty decent IME

[slowmovintarget]

One of the features of a properly tuned fountain pen is that require zero friction or pressure to write. The reason for this is that they transfer ink to paper via capillary action so mere contact should be enough to put a line on the page.

I can't say erasure is a typical ability in fountain pen inks. In fact if you look into Noodler's Inks (two of the rollerballs mentioned come from Noodler's Inks) you'll notice that the creator of those inks leans the other way, toward forgery-proof, water-proof, tamper-evident, archival-quality, fade-resistant inks. Use those, and you'd be able to prove that you wrote it, and no one would be able to alter it.

That said, Noodler's provides "waterase" inks for use on material like whiteboards. Wipe the text away with a wet cloth.

I've recently taken to using a TWSBI Eco (fine) at work for note taking. I write maybe two to three pages a day. What amazed me about it is that the nib felt like using a pencil! It is tuned to run smoothly across the page, but provide a very subtle feedback to give it that feel.

[Symbiote]

> I can't say erasure is a typical ability in fountain pen inks

By volume, it is probably the majority of ink sold.

Several countries require children to use fountain pens at school, or still have widespreaf use even if it's no longer officially required. Germany, the UK, I think India.

The blue ink that everyone uses most of the time is erasable with a chemical eraser pen [1], which everyone in my class (in the UK) owned.

Other colours were not erasable, so my gothic rebellion (requiring me to write in black or red) meant I had to be correct first time.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_eraser § Chemical

[mattlondon]

Yep I remember the same forced fountain pen work too (also UK) and the inevitable ink-leaks in pencil cases, hands, books etc, and the fairly-awful erasers that went along with it.

The thing with the erasers was once you erased, the chemical was still on the paper so you could not re-write ont he erased parts. This meant you had to use the other-end of the eraser pen where there was a special blue ink pen. Often this would then "bleed" heavily (perhaps I didn't wait for the paper to dry?) and never looked the same as the fountain pen ink, so it was hugely obvious where you made a mistake as your normal wiring all looked normal, then you'd get this huge blurry fuzzy blue mess where you "erased" a mistake :-)

[Symbiote]

Maybe it's because someone (grandma?) bought me a mid-price (probably £15 or so) pen at the start of secondary school, but I don't remember that pen leaking. It seems more likely with a £3 thing from WH Smith.

I had the pen-from-grandma until I was about 30 years old, when it disappeared from my desk at work. "Made in W. Germany."

[frosted-flakes]

> Several countries require children to use fountain pens at school

Now I'm curious. Why is that? How are fountain pens different from regular pens when it comes to school? I've never even seen a fountain pen, let alone written with one (Canada).

[fishmaster]

It forces you to write in a certain way which means you learn correct hand placement, pressure, angle, etc. With a cheap pencil you learn bad habits.

[Symbiote]

The grip on the pen can (should) be much lighter, and the movement on the paper is smoother, so it's easier to write in a cursive script, and more comfortable to write a lot.

It's amusing to see discussions on fountain pens online. They're held in high regard by a section of HN, with discussions around ink type, importing Japanese nibs, using special paper and so on.

Mine cost €13 from a shop in Germany. It's a typical pen a high school student might own.

(You can buy them for as little as €4, although those are more likely to leak if dropped etc. Typical for a primary school student though.)

[krapht]

I didn't even know chemical eraser pens were an option. As a kid, we had to use Tipp-Ex to cover up our mistakes.

[70jS8h5L]

Reading your comment bought back terrible memories of those chemical erasers - they smell disgusting!

[slowmovintarget]

Neat!

[allovernow]

Why don't you try a mechanical pencil? A small diameter like .5mm is silky smooth, easily refillable, erasable, and you can get a nice ergonomic drafting pencil like a Pentel GraphGear, which feels really good in the hand.

[mrob]

>A small diameter like .5mm is silky smooth

The only mechanical pencil lead I've found that matches the smoothness of a good rollerball or fountain pen is Pilot Neox in 4B. Although it's my favorite pencil lead, it has the significant disadvantage of smudging easily.

[grawprog]

I'm not a big fan of mechanical pencils myself, but i've found drafting pencils, similar to these to be nice.

https://www.amazon.ca/Mars-STAEDTLER-Technical-Pencil-Set/dp...

They've got the pros of both mechanical and standard pencils without the flaws of both. I use one for writing and sketching and i've had the same pencil for 12 years now and still use it to this day. The refills can be a bit tricky to find though in stores. Art supply stores sometimes have them and i've seen them at places like staples.

[gnicholas]

> A small diameter like .5mm is silky smooth

When I was in high school, I bought a .9mm mechanical pencil, and it was glorious for standardized tests. Filling in circles was just a quick spiral inward, and the forms with rectangles were even easier — just a swipe across. I still have the thing, even though I haven't taken a multiple choice test in over a decade.