Glass Dip Pens (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Glass Dip Pens (2022)

neonaut.neocities.org

76 pointsTomte55 comments

they are pens that are dipped in an ink-well. there is a very small ink capture volume in the nib.

i used them in my first year in secondary school in the uk, in about 1962? we had an "ink monitor" who was a boy who went round re-filling the ink-wells, which were built into our desks. it was a horrible experience. a bit later we all got fountain pens, and much later even the most reactionary of teachers caved in and let us use biros.

It’s nice the ink wells were built into the desk though. Much less chance of spillage that way.

true (when we all got fountain pens, the mayhem caused by having to carry bottles of ink had to be seen to be believed) but the "public" ink wells were susceptible to the previous class putting things in them - pencil shavings were a favourite.

ooh, this all seems like another world - i haven't thought about it in years!

thanks for sharing though. i never would have thought about that as late as the 60s, the Bic roller ball style pen still wasn't around yet. I guess it took NASA trying to write in space for that to be developed. And who says the moon landings weren't worth it?!

the bic/biro pen WAS around when i started secondary school, and was used by sensible people. our teachers simply thought that water-based ink pens were more "character-building" and resulted in more readable handwriting - how wrong they were.

> our teachers simply thought that water-based ink pens were more "character-building" and resulted in more readable handwriting

In fairness, writing with a fountain pen encourages proper cursive handwriting, because it is far less physical effort. Disjointed handwriting is easier than cursive with a ballpoint, because you have to apply pressure the entire time you are writing or the ball won't roll and pick up ink.

i think this may work for an adult - i really don't think it works for a child. at least it didn't for me.

I didn't find that to be the case when I was in school. Handwriting in cursive with a fountain pen was miserable, an utterly pointless waste of valuable class time.

Really? When I first got a fountain pen in school my cursive handwriting experience was far, far better both for me and for my poor teachers.

From the lefties, we hate all you fountain pen lovers, one and all.

As a a rightie who had to write in Arabic with a fountain pen, I really do understand, though there are some inks that make this easier.

Not completely pointless. Fine motor skills need training too.

I learned writing with a fountain pen as late as 1995. We’d stopped using separate inkwells at the time though.

We had the desks with the holes in; but the dip-pen era was before my time. We used fountain pens (no ball-points). There was always a huge jar of Quink blue-black ink at the front of the class.

I had two problems with fountain pens: firstly, good ones were expensive, and the other kids stole them. Secondly, even good ones leaked; boys aged 9-13 are very active, and don't take great care of their clothes. Most of my uniform clothes ended up with huge stains of blue-black ink.

I remember using the same type of desks in Italy in the 90s. Minus the ink well, of course, because we were all using fountain pens or rollerball pens, so we effectively just had a big round hole in the top right corner of our desks.

> capture volume

doh! i meant "reservoir"!

Why were teachers so reluctant to let you use ballpoint pens?

Completely different country: because ballpoint pens not good for calligraphy. I'm still not sure why, but I heard this argument everytime.

Writing the same sentence with a fountain pen vs ballpoint, it looks much nicer with the fountain pen.

Fountain pens let you vary the width of the line depending on how much force is applied.

Unless you know you have a flexy nib, you shouldn't. Too much force can cause your tines to sproing, and then you need a new nib (or get a nibsmith to fix it, which might be more). Most of my pens have nibs that aren't designed for much line variation.

conservatism (in the form of : the kids would never learn how to write properly if they don't time their strokes with dipping the pen in the ink routine)

It is the same thinking as the "you need to start with C to become a good programmer".

They started with ink, it worked for them, so we obviously also had to.

For me it was even worse. My teachers argued that I must not use my Pelikan pen (all my classmates were on fountain pens) and write with pencil instead, because I was using to much force.

The most infuriating thing about it: I never saw a teacher using anything else than a regular pen. Strictly forbidden. Those were for grown ups.

My teachers argument was that fountain pens require more precise control of your writing force. If you start to learn with ballpoint it might mask some issues with your writing (mainly too much downforce) which can cause you problems later in life. (Such as fatique or cramps in your hand.)

I dunno, we started with the Berol handwriting pen which is basically a plastic tip. Your basic biro is not a good writing pen - they are difficult to control. The ink is thick and gloopy so it takes too much force to get going and then shoots off quickly. Modern ballpoints, from the likes of Mitsubishi and Pilot are inexpensive and much much better.

My school was using such old equipment, back in ~2000, I had desks in school with holes in them for the wells.

Ink?! When I was in school we wrote on clay tablets with reed styli. We had to maintain the styli with copper knives. Later, even the most reactionary teachers would let us use the new fancy bronze knives.

Heh, kidding aside I have all the writing implements: glass dip pens, metal dip pens, quill, even some home-made experimental pens (the one made from a plastic drinking straw is actually pretty good).

Glass pens are okay and great to clean but of course there's zero flex in the nib so it's not one that I reach for very often.

A calligrapher in the BBC series on the history of writing makes one out of a Coke can. Some day I'll get around to trying that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxUuPq3mWaU&t=3666s

>Ink?! When I was in school we wrote on clay tablets with reed styli. We had to maintain the styli with copper knives. Later, even the most reactionary teachers would let us use the new fancy bronze knives.

Copper? You was lucky! In my day we had mine our own ore and smelt it down.

JFYI:

https://tinyapps.org/blog/200702250700_why_in_my_day.html

See you and your fancy metal technologies. Chalk on slate was good enough for me and my father and his father before. That were tradition and we were glad of it.

we were dipping our hands in prey's blood and leaving marks on the cave wall. ohhh, the good old times

I went to school in UK on 80s and my primary school still had the individual desks with the lift lids and ink wells. There were two grooves along the edge of the desk for pens and pencils to sit in too. We never used the ink dip pens but I would see them in the stock room: plastic handled with a metal nib. I assume there would have been wooden handled ones in during the 70s.

In case anyone didn't know what these were like me, they seem to be similar to a quill, in that the pen is dipped into a well and capillary actions enough ink to write. They seem quite cool!

https://www.jetpens.com/blog/How-to-Use-a-Glass-Dip-Pen/pt/3...

"Peter Draws" on youtube has some nice relevant videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxcK-V-tf8E

The occasional dry jokes land so perfectly. I have used him as a sleep aid before, too.

These are beautiful.

Unfortunately, I drop things, and my handwriting is atrocious. And somehow with ballpoint pens I sometimes end up with ink on my face.

I think... I shouldn't be allowed to write things down.

Kakimori makes dip pens (nibs, really) in either stainless steel or bronze.

Glass dip pens are easier to clean than fountain pens, especially for shimmering inks.

The pens themselves also allow for different/more playful artistic expressions than fountain pens, due to very disparate materials. It may not be for everyone, but some anime-themed glass dip pens are a hit in certain groups near Japan.

Some examples from someone I know, showing the glassy characters:

https://www.instagram.com/glassophy_bunbou/

I remember an R. Crumb interview about the paper and pen nibs he uses[1]; this reminded me of it.

I also really respect good tools for drawing (and other things), especially things that last a long time.

[1] found it! https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2010/07/r-crumb-supplies.html

Glass dip pens are fun to use. There's a pleasant scratch, they're super-simple to clean, and they lay down ink nicely.

I don't use them for general writing, but for cards, addresses, and little drawings (or an approximation of drawings at least).

Is the scratch any more pleasant than on a fountain pen?

With FPs, I ended up gravitating towards a buttery-smooth, can't-feel-the-paper type setups, so I'm curious if glass pens are worth trying.

Not in my experience. I appreciate the softness of metal nibs be they dip pens or fountain pens.

I had one a long time ago. It was scratchier than my worst fountain pen, very unpleasant. Ink delivery was uneven, very heavy right after dipping and then tapering off quickly.

I like it, personally.

But, it’s also tunable with some sandpaper. A few minutes with 600+ grit, some water, and test ink, and it will feel however you want it to.

Some good YouTube videos on the process.

I find that they can be scratchier, and from what I've read, paying more gets you a smoother pen.

Many folks find that they need to use some sandpaper on the tip - smooth tips make for better writing.

(I use a glass pen for drawing at times)

Pretty cheap on Temu to get started, the ink costs more than the pen -

https://www.temu.com/search_result.html?search_key=Glass%20D...

Cool Fluorescent Ink, will keep some kids busy https://www.temu.com/search_result.html?search_key=Fluoresce... (read I'm too lazy but kids will try it out and make it fun)

I have a glass pen that I use for odd calligraphy jobs that require special ink, because it's easy to clean and change inks. It holds more ink than I would have guessed. Downside is it's rather scratchy compared to a fountain pen.

This site is nearly unreadable on mobile because of the following CSS rule:

    body {
      padding: 50px 150px;
    }

Reader mode saved the day again for me. But it shouldn’t be needed at all.

I wish I liked reader mode, I just can’t get into it. I like how each website looks different. It adds variety to the web. Otherwise everything is just too homogenous.

Yes I agree. The differences from site to site also aid in reading. When things all look the same it is harder to read. That's why justified text is harder to read.

Yup, I noped out of it faster than it loaded.

Hah, that is why it was so bad on my 480px wide screen

Reader mode to the rescue!

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

it seems to me, if there is one discussion forum where you should be able to point out that a website it broken for technical reasons and why, it is HN.

I found this comment interesting (because it explained why the content was completely unreadable) and useful (because the sub comments lead me to a solution that allowed me to read this content).

I can't tell if that is the case here, but a lot of time it is the original author posting their content on HN because they want feedback from smart people, so hopefully this is useful to them as well and they unbreak their website.

Please consider revising this rule. It seems like such complains should be allowed when the website is completely unusable.

Rules like this are approximations and tradeoffs - they always leave in some bad things and/or cut out some good things. So yeah, this rule excludes some interesting things (boo), but it excludes way more repetitive/uninteresting things (yay). That's why we keep the rule - the net influence on thread quality is a clear positive.

Btw, this applies at the meta level too: having this rule generates objections to the rule, such as what you posted here or this example from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36904267. But not having the rule generates more objections, along the lines of "why do people always post these offtopic complaints about page formats etc.? they're so boring..."

Formatting complaints wouldn't be so bad if they would hang out somewhere down the middle or bottom of a thread - but for some reason they nearly always get upvoted to the top. They're reflexive reactions that are quick to appear—much quicker than the thoughtful, reflective reactions we most want on HN, which are slower to process and write*—and then they get upvoted because of co-feeling ("me too, I was annoyed by $thing too") and then stick at the top because of inertia, choking out everything on-topic. Then they really generate complaints ("why is everybody talking about CSS padding instead of $topic? what is wrong with this place? jesus christ you people") and it just gets worse from there.

The point is that the dynamics aren't stable - you can't have discussions about this kind of thing that stay in their lane and don't crowd out the important things. That makes the value of this rule much higher than you'd guess at first sight - once the problem dies down, it doesn't seem so bad, and then the rule seems excessive.

Oh and one last thing - there's nothing intrinsically wrong with comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36914336. As you say, it's helpful and useful information in its place. That it can't stay in its place is a systemic problem, a tragedy-of-the-commons thing where no one is doing anything wrong at an individual level and yet the end result is undesirable. Most of the tricky moderation problems are like that.

Bottom line, this rule is in the running for "best new site guideline of recent years" even though it doesn't feel like it!

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

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