Monday 20 July 2015

What difference does an ink make? Lots!

I was a little bit disappointed with my recent purchase of a Platinum 3776 Nice. It's a lovely pen, but I fired it up with Herbin's Diabolo Menthe - one of my favourite greens - and it wrote like a dog. The medium nib was just too dry - it wasn't any fun to write with; it felt like the kind of biro that you have to push down into the paper, and the ink looked very faint when it did actually hit the paper.

So let's try again. Waterman Vert Harmonie.

This is a completely different pen! Ready and willing to leave a nice, fine-side-of-medium (as you'd expect from a Japanese pen) green line. It even blobbed on first use just to show me it had changed its spots. It's now a pleasure to use.

(Of course the paper you use also matters. With the Herbin ink, it hated my Rhodia, but wrote acceptably - only acceptably, still not a great pleasure to use - on regular computer printer paper.)

It's a good thing I found this out before I decided to go tweaking the nib!

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