All that said, I reach for my Lamy Safari first. I also have a Pilot Vanishing Point as my “grail pen”, and while it’s a cool fountain pen, I don’t love the feel on paper.
All that said, I reach for my Lamy Safari first. I also have a Pilot Vanishing Point as my “grail pen”, and while it’s a cool fountain pen, I don’t love the feel on paper.
Try moving one nib size up with the Vanishing Point, especially if you're used to Western pens. Pilot's EF is sharp enough to draw blood and you'll never really break it in; the F starts out a little rough but wears in nicely. Too, the Vanishing Point itself I found a little big and heavy for real comfort, both in the hand and in a shirt pocket. The Decimo is mechanically identical but smaller and lighter, enough so that it's my go-to pen for almost every purpose, even sitting alongside a Parker 51 Deluxe.
I have a few other fun (relatively) cheap fountain pens I like: brass Kaweko Sport, Muji fountain pen, other random finds. However, the downside of fountain pens if that if you don't use them, you end up with a bunch of clogged nibs.
I mean, I wouldn't turn my nose up at a $1000 handmade Pilot Urushi but I surely also would not buy one, not at least unless I meant to try to make flirting with ambassadors more than a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It's a beautiful pen and I'm sure it functions superlatively! Just that it belongs in far finer and less hardly used hands than mine. Good grief, I sometimes feel I make even my Decimo look like a sewing needle, and that isn't really at all a small pen, being by mechanical necessity about as long as its thicker, heavier sibling. But it also by far is the tool best fit to my hand of all the ones I've ever tried, and that's what counts, right?
(One final note worth making: the Decimo and Vanishing Point bodies are designed around the same nib unit, which I believe originated with the initial "Capless" models in the sixties. If you order a Decimo with the next nib size up from what you have in your Vanishing Point, then, the nibs and bodies will be fully cross-compatible!)