What NO ONE told me about FOUNTAIN PENS--a Beginner's Guide.

Summary

Highlights

• Fountain pens offer a tactile and engaging writing experience unlike any other. ✍️
• The variety of pen types, nibs, and inks can be overwhelming but exciting for newcomers. 🎉
• Fountain pens are often wetter than ballpoints, necessitating quicker refills and careful paper choices. 🌊
• Standard copy paper isn’t ideal; special fountain pen-friendly papers prevent bleeding and feathering. 📄
• Inks are abundant and diverse, presenting endless possibilities for customization. 🎨
• Different nib sizes and materials offer varying writing experiences, from stiff to flexible. ✒️
• Learning pen-specific terms and maintenance tips enhances the writing journey. 🔍

Key Takeaways

• Discover the tactile joy of writing with fountain pens – it’s nothing like a ballpoint! ✍️
• The fountain pen universe is vast and customizable, catering to both budget-friendly and luxury seekers. 🖋️
• Prepare for wet ink! Unlike ballpoints, fountain pens require you to be mindful of drying times to avoid smudges. 🌊
• Regular paper won’t do – you’ll need specialized paper to ensure the best writing experience with fountain pens. 📄
• Get ready for ‘inky fingers’ – fountain pens are a bit messier but that's part of the charm! 😄
• Don’t be afraid to explore different nibs and ink types to find your perfect flow. 🎨
• Maintenance is key: fountain pens require more care, including occasional fine-tuning. 🛠️

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to the Fountain Pen Hobby In this chapter, Dave from Beast Made Reviews begins by expressing his surprise at the lack of information available about fountain pens, despite their depth as a hobby. He introduces his channel, which explores quality products across various price points, and mentions his passion for diving deep into new topics. Dave reveals his discovery of the complexities and variety within the fountain pen hobby, indicating that it is a subject with much depth to explore.
• 01:00 - 02:00: The Enjoyment of Using Fountain Pens The chapter discusses the in-depth journey of exploring the world of fountain pens. The speaker shares their surprise at the complexity and richness of the topic, which was discovered while preparing for a video about fountain pens. The chapter hints at various unknown aspects of fountain pens that the speaker had to research and learn through personal exploration and consuming video content. It invites newcomers to the fountain pen hobby by promising to share essential insights and encourages further discussion from those more knowledgeable.
• 02:00 - 03:00: Exploring the Fountain Pen Rabbit Hole The chapter discusses the presenter's exploration and sharing of fountain pens. They encourage viewer interaction by asking for comments about any additional points or terms related to fountain pens that may have been missed. The presenter expresses affection for subscribers, humorously suggesting they appreciate them even more than fountain pens. The presenter introduces a specific fountain pen from Shown Design, the Ultim pen, as a highlight. They mention that more fountain pens will be featured in future videos without detailed discussions. Links for further information are provided in the description.
• 03:00 - 04:00: Differences Between Fountain Pens and Ballpoint Pens The chapter discusses the differences between fountain pens and ballpoint pens, highlighting the enjoyment and unique experience of using fountain pens. It mentions an author's preference for fountain pens due to their feel and weight.
• 04:00 - 05:00: Choosing the Right Paper for Fountain Pens In this chapter, the joy of using fountain pens is explored. The writer discusses the unique experience of writing with a fountain pen compared to a ballpoint pen, highlighting an appreciation for the craftsmanship and the aesthetics of the pens. The varied ink options and the process of inking up a new pen are also praised, underlining a strong emotional connection to the ritual of using fountain pens.
• 05:00 - 07:00: Variety of Inks and Nibs in Fountain Pens This chapter dives into the world of fountain pens, exploring the vast array of options available. It covers the different types and customizations of fountain pens, and the wide range of colors, inks, and materials they come in. The chapter also touches on the price spectrum, highlighting how fountain pens can range from extremely affordable to the price of a luxury vehicle. A key point discussed is the difference between fountain pens and ballpoint pens, notably that fountain pens tend to use more ink, requiring more frequent refills.
• 07:00 - 09:00: Understanding Fountain Pen Terminology This chapter discusses the unique characteristics and terminologies related to fountain pens. It explains that each pen has a distinct personality influenced by its ink flow. Factors such as pen design and ink type can affect ink flow, making some pens write wetter or drier than others. Users may have preferences based on these traits, and adjustments can sometimes be made to suit individual writing styles. A critical point highlighted is that fountain pens generally dispense more ink compared to ballpoint pens, which affects the drying time of the ink on paper. This necessitates careful consideration to avoid smudging.
• 09:00 - 11:00: Maintenance and Care of Fountain Pens This chapter provides crucial tips on the maintenance and proper use of fountain pens. It emphasizes the importance of considering ink drying time to prevent smearing and discusses the variability in paper absorbency. Common copy paper is identified as unsuitable due to issues like ink bleed-through and feathering. The chapter advises finding high-quality paper designed for fountain pens, which allows optimal ink drying without these problems.
• 11:00 - 12:00: Final Thoughts and Advice In this final chapter, the focus is on advice for dealing with the overwhelming variety of fountain pen inks available on the market. The author acknowledges the potential for option paralysis due to the vast number of ink options, but also highlights the positive aspect of this variety, allowing individuals to find colors they might prefer. To help navigate this abundance, it's advised to sample different inks from retailers that offer such options, ensuring you find the right match. Additionally, the chapter touches on the different sizes of nibs, which are the metal parts of a fountain pen that deliver the ink, but details on nibs are not fully provided.

What NO ONE told me about FOUNTAIN PENS--a Beginner's Guide. Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 there are things that people never told me about fountain pens what's the deal with that hey everyone i'm dave with beast made reviews of course a channel dedicated to reviewing quality at different price points you know one of the things that i really love about this channel and what i do here is the rabbit hole i love finding out something new that leads me in a completely different direction and seeing just how deep the rabbit hole goes in that direction case in point fountain pens now i knew the rabbit hole for fountain pens was really deep but
• 00:30 - 01:00 once i started going down the rabbit hole i did not really understand just how deep the rabbit hole really was and recently i've been preparing for a video about fountain pens so stay tuned for that and i found out a lot of things about fountain pens that no one really told me and i just had to figure out some of these things by looking them up or by watching a lot of videos maybe you're new into the hobby maybe you don't really know what's the deal about fountain pens and i'm gonna tell you everything that i think that you should know and if you have any knowledge that i forgot in this video because i'm sure
• 01:00 - 01:30 that i forgot some things let me know down in the comments let me know your terms let me know your points about fountain pens that i just forgot to mention of course if you like this type of content feel free to subscribe down below i'll love you for it it's even better than a fountain pen now i am going to show a couple of fountain pens for this video this is one of them this is by shown design and this is the ultim pen by shown design absolutely love it i have a couple other ones that i'm going to be showing in videos but not necessarily going to be talking about them but just keep that in mind and also i'll have links down below
• 01:30 - 02:00 to some of the best places that i found for fountain pens or fountain pen products if there are affiliate links i will put them down below and anything you purchase through those will help out the channel always appreciate when you do that all right let's go ahead and get straight to point number one fountain pens are fun a lot of fun and no one told me this i recently saw an interview with neil gaiman who is a famous author and who loves to write with fountain pens especially for his first draft he was talking about how he loves fountain pens because of the feel because of the heft
• 02:00 - 02:30 because of the way that you have to write the ink everything about it and i really resonated with that point because there is something about holding the pen in your hand that is completely different than a ballpoint i love the ink i love the craftsmanship in a lot of these i love how beautiful they are i love how fun it is to write i love how wet the ink is i love how many inks you can get i love the ritual of it i love inking up a new pen i love everything about it they are just really cool all right next point and i already alluded to this in the beginning there is a deep
• 02:30 - 03:00 rabbit hole with fountain pens and i mean deep be prepared there's a wide variety of different types of fountain pens different customizations different colors different inks different materials a lot of different price points anything from disposably cheap to ultra luxurious like the price of a car or more next point and this may seem obvious but fountain pens run a lot more wet with their ink a lot more wet than ball points so you'll have to refill a lot more than with ball points now different pens have different
• 03:00 - 03:30 personalities and that might be kind of a sub point here and their ink flow is different from pen to pen sometimes it's just a combination of things within the pen sometimes it's the ink but they all have their different personalities and so when you write with one you might like a more wet pen you might like a more dry pen and you can adjust that out sometimes but just keep in mind that typically fountain pens run a lot more wet than ballpoint pens and because of that my next point you also have to keep in mind drying times of the ink because the ink is a lot more wet you have a lot more ink on the paper you have to keep
• 03:30 - 04:00 in mind the drying time of the ink that you don't smear it or that you just let it dry first and also the type of paper that you're using some papers are just more absorbent some are not which leads me to my next point a typical paper you'll find around the house copy paper is terrible for fountain pens the ink bleeds through really easily it feathers it's just typically a bad paper for writing with a fountain pen what you'll want to do is hunt down paper that is really good for fountain pens that allows the ink to dry that doesn't bleed through that doesn't feather and that
• 04:00 - 04:30 sort of thing my next point is there are a ton of inks out there and i mean a ton way more inks than you'll ever need option paralysis is very real with inks on the flip side what's great about this is that there are a lot of inks you might like certain colors more than others and also there are some sites that allow you to sample the inks that they sell so definitely shop around and buy samples of inks next point there are many sizes of nib a nib is the metal part on a fountain pen the part that you
• 04:30 - 05:00 write with here but there's several different sizes of this now number six is typically the most common from what i found but there are different sizes out there and these are pretty standardized across the industry you can find different size nibs and you'll have to double check if you want to change your nib you have to find out which size nib that you have this leads me into my next point which is the size of nib is different than the tip of the nib and this varies in size a lot you can have an extra fine fine medium broad stub in different sizes
• 05:00 - 05:30 italic and even more different sizes than that and those sizes are about the tip of the nib and how thick the line is that you're putting down on the paper and that is not standardized you'll find that different manufacturers have a different idea of what an extra fine fine medium broad etc those type of lines are they vary in size sometimes japanese manufacturers might have a finer line for that particular size than maybe a german one my next point is that
• 05:30 - 06:00 the nibs can come in different materials and that can lead to them being either stiff or flexible in the way they write having a flex nib or a flexible one can offer you a little bit of springiness when you write it can offer maybe a little bit of line variation it can make the inks shade a little bit better and it will typically use more ink on the paper some people like flex nibs and some people just don't some people like the standard stiff nib on a pen so again experiment of course pins come in different materials like acrylics and metals and woods you might have a feed that's made of plastic or ebonite
• 06:00 - 06:30 ebonite is a hardened rubber that is used a lot in nibs and a lot of people consider it to be a superior material for nib feeds i don't know if there's necessarily a difference between a plastic feed and an ebonite one but that's just something to keep in mind my next point is that there are a lot of terms about the pen that you may not be familiar with so i'll go over some of these real quick i'm probably missing some so if there's any pin aficionados out there that have some terms that i just didn't mention in here just mention them down below so first let's talk about the pen itself you have the cap
• 06:30 - 07:00 which that's obvious you have the body of the pen you have the grip section which is what you hold you have the nib which is the metal part you have the feed which is on the back of the nib or under the nib the feed is what draws the ink to the nib on the pen cap sometimes you'll see a little top like this this is called a finial the ink is stored in either a cartridge or a cartridge converter or also called just a converter a cartridge obviously is just a little cartridge of ink that you can store in the actual pen itself i have a little cartridge right here a converter is a retrofit that you can put inside
• 07:00 - 07:30 your pen that allows you to draw different inks into the pen and use different inks for the pen instead of having to use a cartridge of course you can use blank cartridges and just stick the ink in the cartridge if you want you could do that too but a converter also holds a little bit more ink than a cartridge does as well now going back to the nib again the little hole in there is called the breather hole and the little split down the middle shows where the tines are the tines are the metal parts on each side of that split some pins will allow you to fill the whole body with ink like this one will and that's called an eyedropper it's like
• 07:30 - 08:00 you're using an eyedropper to fill the ink not every pen will allow you to do that but some will actually do that and they'll expressly say if your pen can be eyedroppered and that way you have a ton of ink the whole body is filled with ink but like i said not every pen can do that it requires special materials it requires o-rings and sometimes silicone grease to put around the threads when you're writing on paper sometimes you can get a scratchy nib which means the tines are not aligned and you're getting some scratch from one of the tines into the actual paper and has a very unpleasant almost like fingernails on a
• 08:00 - 08:30 chalkboard type of feeling or you get feedback which is another term that people use just to mean that you can feel the nib on the paper unlike a very smooth or glassy type of feeling that you might feel from a very wet nib feathering is what happens whenever you write on a paper and the ink goes all over like little spider webs from the place that you wrote bleeding of course is when the ink bleeds through the back of the other sheet of paper i'm sure that's not all the terms but that's a lot of the terms that i think you could probably go away with here but my next point is that fountain pens are messy they're inherently more messy
• 08:30 - 09:00 than ball points are they require more attention and care when cleaning and changing the inks and be prepared to have perpetual inky fingers whenever you get into fountain pens i was not expecting either of these things it's just one by-product of the fountain pen experience my next point is that you might not want to mix inks sometimes that's okay for some inks and some inks actually encourage you to mix them together but sometimes that can be a bad thing you never know what you're going to get whenever you mix inks so i probably wouldn't do it especially on really nice pens so just be mindful of
• 09:00 - 09:30 that going in you don't want to ruin a good pen next point is that fountain pens can dry out pretty easily so you have to make sure that you store them with the cap on and use them pretty frequently especially if they're inked up you want to use them on a regular basis that way you use all the ink in there and you don't have to worry about the ink drying in your pen next point is that you might have to fine tune your pen somewhat now this is especially true on cheaper pins but even pricier pins you might have to fine tune there's a whole trade of people called nib meisters who do this for a living you might have a nib that is scratchy right
• 09:30 - 10:00 out of the box it might be misaligned the tines might be too close the flow of ink might be too dry or too wet and you want to change those things the nib tip might be too rough and you need to polish it some there are things that you can do to kind of fine tune your pen this reminds me somewhat of a guitar in a lot of ways where you can get a guitar but you still have to set it up to your liking even expensive guitars are not going to be set up exactly the way you want so a pen no matter the price has a little bit of a setup that you might have to do before riding with it
• 10:00 - 10:30 thankfully most of the time this is pretty easy all you have to do is maybe get some high grit sandpaper maybe a really thin brass sheet or a little bit of finagling with tines my next point is more of a point of advice than anything else and this might be something that people disagree with don't start off with archival inks inks that are bulletproof or that are resistant to water or that type of thing i think if you're just starting off what you want to do is just get an easy flowing ink something that writes in the paper really well and if you want to get an archival type of ink maybe do that at a
• 10:30 - 11:00 different time once you realize what you like and how you're going to use the pen going back to nibs again nibs are made by different manufacturers two of the most common manufacturers that you'll find are bach and yovo and people are kind of polarized on which one they like more so again it's really just personal preference here i like both but i think personally i think if i had to take one or the other i'd probably take a yovo over the bach that's a personal preference though and my last point here is that most of the time when you're talking about a pen company most of what they're making is just the pen body the
• 11:00 - 11:30 actual nib unit and the converter are usually just after market and companies that sell pens usually just make the body and grip itself now that's not necessarily a bad thing but there are companies out there that do make the nibs and nib units feeds and the converters and everything else so with all that said i think i got some of the more important things out of the way let me know your thoughts down below if i missed anything of course and of course don't forget to like comment and subscribe down below i'll love you for it what do you think of fountain pens
• 11:30 - 12:00 let me know down in the comments i'd love to hear your thoughts and of course keep your eyes peeled for my fountain pen video coming soon thank you again for watching i'll see you next time i'm dave with beast made bye [Music]