Fountainpens are not the most practical writing instruments. Probably the least pracical out there.

You need to clean them, refill them, sometimes they leak etc.

I guess most people who are into fountain pens, either bought one or tried it at some point. And really liked either the feeling of writing with it or how their writing looked when using it. Or usually a combination of the two.

What I love about them is a complicated one

First of all I love the tactical feeling for writing with one

Second, I love how much more personality your writing have with a fountain pen nib than a regular pen.

Third I love how you can find more or less any color you want for it

Fourth I love how many pens and nibs there are to pick from. You can literally find anything. Everything from very inexpensive to very expensive.

It feels kind of weird writing about these products after Nock.co is no more. And I have gone back and forth many times on if I should write about them or not.

I decided on yes.

Hightower as the first Nock.co product I got. It is a great pen case. I used to bring it everywhere for years. My setup at the time was to have my current Field Notes + two spares in it (or my previous + current + a spare). Plus two fountain pens, a gel pen and a ballpoint pen.

This was back when I was a student, and because of carbon paper I always had to have a ballpoint.

It was great for this kind of setup, and served me really well for a very long time.

This is just a quick summary of the different filling mechanisms for fountain pens. There are almost certainly a lot of minor details and machnisms I’m forgetting about (or straight out ignorning) here.

In general there are two kinds of filling mechanisms. There are the pens that have some kind of built in system for sucking ink into the pens and the kind where you stick some kind of cartridge into the pen.

The latter are either single use cartridges or a converter that let you fill the pen with ink from a bottle. Some pen use propretary while others use the the international standard for them.

Pens with a built in system are usually what we call a pison filler. It the same idea as most converters use. You have a sylinder, some kind of screw that moves the piston up and down. When you move it down it pushes ink or air out and when you pull it up it pulls in ink or air.

You also have some other systems with a similar idea to the piston like the ones the Conid pens use, or vaccum pens.

A third option that work with some pens is to just fill the whole pen up with ink and seal it off with some grease.

Every once in a while I get the idea to try to do sketchnoting. I have probably tried it like 10-15 times since 2013.

It never works out.

I just don’t think like that.

I had the idea to try it out again in 2020, right before COVID hit. And I got a LT sketchbook for it.

These are really nice books if you need thicker paper for whatever reason. Not something I need or want really. So I’ll probably wont’ buy moe of them before I once again get the idea to sketchnote. But it is really great if you like the Leuchtturm1917 notebooks but want thicker paper .

Field Notes or similar formatted notebooks is what I use when I need a very portable notebook. I usually use them in my Belroy cover. I have a trick where I connect them together with paper clips if I need more than one.

At the moment my only use for it is for capture on the go when I don’t feel like using my phone. For not so long ago I kept a paper log in one and in another I did some habit tracking. So I varies and changes a lot.

Field Notes is not a great notebook from a paper perspective. And I wish I could find something locally available with a similar format with good paper. So far I have not.

I used this system for a couple of months while I was putting together a more permanent solution for it. In my system there was two kinds of habits: stuff I did or did not do and habits where I rated them 1-3.

This is how I did it. I started by writing the date: - 2022-01-01, underlined it. Then I prefixed all the rates with * and the habits I did with -. All the habits was summarized as ideally one work but no more than three. It usually looked something like this

2022-01-01:

• Diet 2
  
• Exercise 3
  
• Money 1
  
• Brush teeth morning
  
• Guitar
  
• Run
  
• Rowing
  
• Walk
  
• Yoga

It worked really well as a paper solution to it. And I will without a doubt move back to it if I want to do it on paper again.

For the longest time I used to keep all the notebooks I’ve ever used.

At some point after moving it all for the millionth time I sat down and went through it all and threw out 90% of it.

And at a later point, right before moving here I threw out the rest.

The reason I don’t keep them is that I never look at any of it ever. So when I have filled a notebook and have transcribed the content I want I just throw it all out.

I think this is one of those subjects where a lot of people will disagree with me.

I think all of the limited editions are annoying as fuck. At least at the current amount of it.

There are kind of two different categories of limited edition products: pure redesigns and limited products. The former is basically just new shit different wrapping. A different colour or design but otherwise the same product. And then you have the kind where the product are actually different, this is kind of what Blackwing used to do when their firmest core was only in a few limited edition pencils or how Field Notes refuse to make a regular edition with dotgrid… 🖕

Other times they go as far as making radically different products.

I’m fine with either up to a point. But I also think that limited products should become a regular product if the reception is good.

I have zero interest in investing time and money into adopting something into my workflow if it will be a hassle to replace it when or if I need to. And I think it is really annoying to read all this news about “New Lami Safari color”, “New TWSBI Eco color”, “New Sailor Pro Gear color” and all of that noice. Or new Field Notes designs and all of this junk.

I think it is fine with some of it. But there are so much of it these days that I just fuck this shit.

What I miss is more focus on making new products instead of new paint jobs.

How good a paper is for use with fountain pens depends. It is usually about how much ink it can take and how it dries. As in will it be obsorbed by the paper or kind of dry on top.

All of this is about aestethics and not always that practical. I usually aren’t into the “best” papers, because they are not practical for me to use because of how long my ink and pen combos of choice takes to dry on it.

If you don’t care too much about how your ink looks on the page. You can just go for really thick paper. It will dry fast and take most ink and nib combos. But purists will hate it for the “feathering”. Feathering is when the ink dries kind of like a feather. It is a sign of the paper soaking up the ink. This used to be my strategy for a long time.

These days I have moved to better papers. But I didn’t really enjoy that experience until my technique made it practical. But the more extreme everything dries on top like Tomoe River is still not something I enjoy.