Waterman Audacious Red
The scan here doesn’t look the same as the handwritten review. It probably has to do with the Word Cards absorbing much more ink than regular writing paper – and the difference is more obvious with some inks than others.
Back in 2012, De Atramentis came out with (I think) a couple of limited edition inks. Christmas Red was one of those inks. This pretty red ink is no longer available.
And, today, we reach the end of January. Thirty-one days of ink swabs.
When I started this project, I was concerned that I wouldn’t have enough different things to say about each ink. That hasn’t been the case at all. I think I have just one swab with no words – and I did that one just to see if I really could. Haha
I’d love to know what you think. Is this fun even though there aren’t full reviews for each of them?
Monteverde Brown
Dark chocolatey goodness. I’ve not tried this ink, but am going to soon. From the swab, I’d say we have winner. (That is, if I liked brown inks. Which I don’t.)
Caran d’Ache Caribbean Sea is another among the discontinued line of Caran d’Ache inks.
I’ve not written with this ink. Teals are generally not my cup of tea. What do you think of this color?
China Town Red is a terrific ink. The color is bright and shiny. It writes well with no difficulties in any of the pens I’ve used with it.
I’ll need to do a full review on this ink – kind of surprised I never have.
Parker Quink Black
It’s black.
There are a handful of black inks that I would call a standard. That is, they will work well in almost every pen. Quink’s Black is one of those inks.
Fiesta Red is a pleasant brown/red shade. I’m not sure I’d call it a party color, but there you go.
I store all of my ink samples in a dark cabinet. Fiesta Red is the only ink (that I’ve noticed so far) that has turned a different color. It faded to almost the shade of a band-aid. I don’t know why this happened, but I know that after I saw it, I got myself busy swabbing all of my inks samples. Thank you, Fiesta Red!
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?
BONUS
Two ink swabs today!
Organics Studio is responsible for my policy of not using new or very small brands of ink in my fountain pens. I’ll write more about this another time, but for now here are the swabs.
