Ink Nouveau

Leuchtturm1917 is a notebook brand that we've recently started carrying. They're great build quality, a tremendous value, and have a slew of small details that we're excited to see. They're kind of a crossover from the pencil/ballpoint world, but they handle their fountain pen ink respectably. This video covers an overview of the brand and all of the different size and formats.

As our October 2012 Ink Drop, we are featuring a new brand of inks, Scribal Work Shop! We're excited to offer these new inks made by a young chemist/calligrapher.

I thought it would be fun to put together a video using all 4 nib sizes of the Pilot Metal Falcon's 'soft' nibs! Enjoy :)

Pilot has a twist retractable fountain pen called the Fermo that's the sibling to the Vanishing Point (click) pen. It uses the same nib unit, but has a slimmer slimmer design. I do a full review of this pen showcasing the amazing Pilot VP extra-fine nib, and compare the pen to the Lamy Dialog 3 and Stipula DaVinci.

We just recently started carrying the Pilot Metal Falcons at GouletPens.com, and I was really excited to show you what they're about. Specifically, the 14k soft extra-fine nib, because it's a unique nib that's not available in the resin Namiki Falcon. The whole pen is slightly longer than the Namiki Falcon, which is just enough to allow it to use the Pilot Con-70 converter, which has significantly better ink capacity than the Con-50 that comes in the resin version. It's much heavier, obviously, but very comfortable and well-balanced in use. All of the trim on this pen is plated in rhodium, which I really think looks nice. The design of the nib and its flexibility is the same as you'd expect with the Namiki Falcon, but this particular nib size is only available in the metal version, which is why I wanted to show it off!

Every now and then, I get a fun surprise that an ink has changed formulas. It's happened before with numerous brands, and it seems that it's more often the case that it catches me by surprise because the manufacturer doesn't tell anyone about it. Here's the latest one, Noodler's Army Green.

One of the really cool things about the Monteverde Invincias, Napa, and Regatta is that they all use the same size nib that you can swap pretty easily. This allows you to buy their pens with nib colors (black or steel) that wouldn't normally be offered, as well as buy extra nibs to keep on hand to swap out on a single pen. Swapping the nibs are pretty straightforward, but can be tricky if you aren't familiar with the nibs and how they fit in the pen. This video is to clear up any confusion you have about swapping your Monteverde nibs.

Rhodia has come out with a new line of colorful notebooks called Rhodiarama! There are 15 fun colors of the smaller 3.5"x3.5" Rhodia Webnotebooks, and I show them all off to you here. Same 90g Clairefontaine off-white paper you've been seeing in the Webbies all along. Fun!

Here is a review of the much anticipated J. Herbin 1670 Bleu Ocean, the sibling ink to Rouge Hematite. It's an entirely different ink than RH, with no sheen, but it writes very smooth, wet, and dries quickly.

For the last two years, I resolved myself to the fact that the Noodler's Nib Creaper rollerball couldn't have the piston mechanism removed from it....but I was wrong! it turns out it can, with a handy trick that I show here in this video.

Nathan Tardif of Noodler's ink has always been willing to do custom oversized bottles of inks by request, you may or may not have seen some of them before. Noodler's regular bottles are 3 ounces, some come in 4.5 ounces, which is a LOT of pen ink! But if you think that's a lot, just think about how much 16 ounces, or even 32 ounces is! Nathan makes all of the Noodler's inks by hand, by himself, and he's easily the busiest man that I know. He likes making these large bottles, so he makes time for them. It usually takes several months for him to make the time to do them, so a few times a year we'll get a shipment of large bottles that'll come in...and this is the largest assortment of large bottles I've ever had at once! I thought it was definitely worth showing in a video.

I kind of left out this footage of my big Monteverde Artista Crystal review, so I thought it was worth sharing in a separate video. I basically just compare the clear pen to several other clear pens like the Lamy Vista, Pilot Prera, Pilot Custom 74, Noodler's Ahab and Konrad, and others.

The Monteverde Artista Crystal is a demonstrator fountain pen that looks very nice, is quite sturdy, and writes very smooth for a $36 pen. I show a full review of it here, with an unboxing all the way through inking it up and writing with it on the page.

Flying with a fountain pen doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have an ink bomb explode all over you...there are some very basic rules to follow, and you can enjoy your fountain pens as you soar like an eagle.

What's the crazy metal doohickey in the Pilot converter? It's to help keep the ink from hanging up in the back of the converter, and I'll show you just how it does that here.