Pilot Custom 912 – Music Nib
The Pilot Custom 912 is a nice looking pen with classic styling. The body is black resin and the trim is shiny and silver in color.
The cap screws on and posts easily to the back of the pen. The section is a bit shorter than average and this could present an issue for people with larger hands.
Fill using the included Pilot CON-70 converter or Pilot’s proprietary cartridges. The CON-70 is unique in that it is a push-button / pump converter and it holds a bunch of ink (around 1 ml). I love it, but there are varying viewpoints out there. The good news is that if a user hates it, one of the other Pilot converters can apparently be swapped in easily enough.
To learn more about the CON-70 pump converter, I suggest watching Brian Goulet’s video. Informative and entertaining: “You have to really want it.” “You have to attack it!” “BAM! BAM!”
Music nibs are sometimes referred to as trident nibs because they have three tines. That is to say that this nib has two slits through which the ink flows. Lines drawn vertically are thicker with this kind of nib than lines horizontal lines.
Pilot Custom 912 Writing Samples
With cursive writing, the pen writes wonderfully. But with printing I’m having some hard starts on some downstrokes. Arrgh.
The trouble can be seen in the image below. See where the M in “Music” and the I in “Nib” look a little off? It looks like there’s an issue with the left side of the nib.
Now what? Well, I love the pen and I’m not going to return it, but I will be looking for someone to tune the nib. Do you know a nibmeister with expertise making music nibs sing?
Also, if you have this pen, I’d love to hear what you think of it. Did you get the music nib, too?
I just got my custom 74 music nib (same nib as yours) . It’s crazy soft for a music nib and can manage to double its line width under modest pressure with a noticeable amount of spring and flex with normal writing.
I noticed the same issues though. Occasional hard starts or one tine dry starting and occasional skipping. Inspecting with a loupe showed slightly misaligned tines. Easy enough to level them out. No effect. So i figured maybe i had a tiny amount of baby’s bottom where i wrote, so a few minutes with micro mesh and mylar and the issue is completely solved. Absolutely perfect. It only took maybe two minutes total, the amount it needed to settle in was so small.
The thing i think is the issue is that the nibs are tuned to be held perpendicular to the paper, where mine was literally perfect and glassy smooth, and not tuned to be used for writing, where mine was slightly misaligned and a hair toothy along with the hard starting and useless upside down, both of which were easily solved. Not only is it my favorite nib aesthetically, but with that softness and barest hint of feedback, it’s now my favorite writer in my collection. Also love the con70, as it really is a wet, juicy nib. It’ll railroad on absorbant paper when flexed a lot, but the feed generally puts down enough ink to make sheening inks like yama budo or emerald of chivor shine