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Comment by tartoran | Hacker News Reader

> Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll rarely need to refill it.

Please expand on this. I’m utterly confused as to what you mean and why you’d need it.

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The first thing you have to understand about fountain pens is that the ink basically has the viscosity of water, it isn't like other "ink" in ballpoint pens or gel pens. A fountain pen has to essentially function as a controlled leak to write... while not leaking.

When ballpoints came into the picture and steamrolled fountain pens (as the utilitarian writing tool) the methods of creating a vessel to hold ink inside a fountain pen without creating a mess/leaking were pretty primitive/unreliable by todays standards. A common solution was to just fill the hollow body of the pen entirely up with ink and then put silicon grease on the threads where the nib screws in (it could leak out). The easiest way to fill a narrow, light cylinder with ink you REALLY dont want to spill is with an eyedropper type device, hence the name eyedropper.

People still do this with fountain pens, apparently fountain pens are decently popular in india and a lot of indian fountain pens are eyedropper pens.

Most fountain pens these days are what are called "cartridge converter" pens. The name is weird, but the original innovation over crude rubber sacs that you would squeeze to suck up ink (itself an improvement over eyedropper style filling) was to make plastic cartridges that could be filled with ink, sealed with wax and then inserted into the pen.

Another big innovation was piston filler fountain pens that have a piston on the inside of the pen body that can be moved in or out by rotating a knob at the end of the pen. Not only is this an improvement because you can stick the pen directly into the ink and just suck it up through the nib by retracting the piston, ink can be manually advanced out into the nib/feed if the pen was writing dry, and in the opposite sense there is always a bit of suction keeping the ink in that you can adjust. A fountain pen's "feed" is basically a big capillary force engine, and it is nice to have a counterforce with the piston that can be adjusted to either aid or inhibit it.

So then someone took the whole piston filler idea and minituarized it so it could slot into pens designed for cartridges, hence the name "cartridge converter" pens because these self contained piston fillers were called converters.

Eyedroppering pens is something people do for fun still, its an ok way to fill a pen if you dont care about the pen heating up as you hold it, creating a pressure differential and "burping" ink out onto the paper occasionally.... its actually far safer to keep an eyedropper pen mostly full so that there is less of bubble of air to heat up and cause this.

> its actually far safer to keep an eyedropper pen mostly full so that there is less of bubble of air to heat up and cause this.

This tip as well for any fountain pen you’re air-traveling with. Pressurization changes affect the air volume, not the liquid volume, so make the pen pressure-change resistant by having it full of ink.

On fountain pens you can seal the pen body with silicon grease and then instead of putting ink in a container like cartridge or converter you just put it directly in the body of the pen. https://www.jetpens.com/blog/How-to-Do-an-Eyedropper-Pen-Con...

idk op's specifics, but some pens use ink cartridges; by sealing the body of the pen, you can fill it with ink, have way more capacity and you can refill it.

Why tho?

Sure, there are some converters that are notably, notoriously small (Namiki Vanishing Point converters are infamous for this), but in those cases it's simple to use carts instead. (In the Namiki case, the carts last weeks and weeks.)

So you can use different inks other than compatible carts?

A lot of people just reuse empty cartridges a few times by refilling them with a blunt tip syringe (sold by most online pen/ink shops), using whatever ink they want.

It is far easier to get a blunt nosed syringe for $0.10 (not sharpened for medical use) and use it to quickly and cleanly refill cartridges with whatever ink you want.

For a video visualization of how this works, Brian Goulet (who runs a popular fountain pen YouTube channel) published a tutorial on cartridge cleaning and refills: https://youtu.be/QloRQWHe5Gk?t=301

Isn't it even EASIER to get a converter?

I use a syringe to refill cartridges from whatever bottle of ink I want to use. The cartridges can be reused many many times.

edit: lol, if I had reloaded the page before commenting, I would have seen all of these people saying the same thing!

> edit: [...]

Every time fountain pens come up on HN I'm amazed how active the discussion gets.

I mean, how important is the pen as a tool to human history? The pen is one of the most important human inventions and the fountain pen is by far the coolest version of it :P

I am similarly surprised at the number of technical people who prefer one or more of the following:

* Fountain pens * Mechanical watches * Cars with clutches

Most pens either ship with or will work with a piston converter. You don't need to mod a pen just to use inks other than those available in compatible cartridges.

E.g.,

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=fountain+pen+piston+convert...

> Why tho?

Just to expand on the time before refills. Most converters are under 1 ml. Having, say, 3-4 ml in your pen means you fill it a lot less frequently.

The thing keeping me away from eyedropping my pen is the inevitable burps.

As I said, the only converter of mine that seems to have a capacity problem is the Namiki, but for practical reasons I also almost always run carts in that pen anyway.

I don't need a project, and I'm not super interested in locking a pen into a single mode of operation. The beauty of most pens is that you can go with carts OR with a converter, depending on mood. (Obviously some, like Pelikans and TWSBI, are bottle-fill only, but you know that going in.)

Yeah, I don't do cartridges for the same reason as others: I change the ink often, and the selection with cartridges is almost non-existent (and much more expensive per ml).

For a lot of pens, there is no "locking". You just remove the cartridge/converter, and add silicone, and you're good to go. You can always revert back.

Fair.

I ran carts only in my Vanishing Point(s) for years, but largely because it was easier for travel and I found the ink color and consistency very pleasant.

Once I stopped traveling so much I started using more bottled ink, which is fun, but then you get to a point where you have a mental matrix about which inks work best with which paper in which nibs…

My daily driver (Lamy 2000) has a piston converter and I find its capacity quite large, i.e., I need to refill it every week or so.

Cartridges are great too, but I seem stuck with a few options. Lany cartridges are great but it's the only decent one I can find here.

> has a piston converter

The 2000 is natively a piston filler as far as I know. When you say “converter”, are you saying you’ve modified your 2000?

Yes :) The Lamy 2000's been with me after grad. Even had a pen craftsman resharpen my nib!

It allows for more volume. The converters or cartridges take up real estate in the pen with their mechanisms. This alternate approach takes up all that space with ink.

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