What’s your favourite that you want to share? Let’s hear them!
My absolute favourite hack is for people who don’t own brass shims to floss a nib that has collected a lot of paper fibre. If you get mail with a plastic window, you can carefully trim a strip long enough that you can hold between your fingers so there is tension. This is often enough to floss a tine.
If you’re an occasional sample user that tends to forget about using them, have a nice eyedropper in the collection. I’m not a huge samples owner and a little forgetful, I found my samples started evaporating before I finished them. Things changed when I got an Opus 88 Demonstrator. Now when I get a sample from a local swap meet, I can drop 3.56ml into the tank, so often that’s an entire sample.
I always wipe the hand section of the barrel on the back of my hand before using a fountain pen, if a small amount of ink got out into the cap I find that in a pinch oddly the best place to wipe it off where it won’t get on something else is the back of my hand.
Blunt nosed syringes are super useful, get some!
A Wing Sung 698 fits Pilot nibs perfectly from a metropolitan or other similar price range pilot fountain pen. Get the italic stub nib on a Pilot pen and then get a Wing Sung 698, swap the nibs and you have a brilliant but affordable piston filler.
Get some cheap pens, fuck the nibs up, mess around with figuring out how to re-align the tines. Once you learn the skill fountain pens are way less frustrating especially when ordering online without the ability to try them. One great way to “gently hammer” a nib back into shape is to get a thick book with lots of pages that you don’t care about. Take the nib off the pen and slip it in between the pages up to where the bend or crease is. Now you can adjust how many pages to cover the nib with so when you make a hit with a hammer or mallet you can adjust how acutely focused the force is. This is important because if a bend is very sharp you might want to only cover the nib with a small amount of pages to focus the hammer hit on the precise spot of the bend, but if the bend is broad and smoothly distributed you can bury the nib with a lot of pages and make sure that even a firm hammer hit doesn’t focus a bunch of force on bending the nib along a crease and make a new problem. It goes without saying, don’t do this with an expensive nib unless you are confident, but you can repair quite ridiculous nib bends with this method if you are careful.
Get a jewel magnify glass, learn what it looks like up close in terms of tine alignment when a fountain pens feels perfect for you.
Gold fountain pen nibs are special because they are jewelry, they aren’t softer or superior to a well designed steel nib. This holds true for flex nibs and they were plenty of flexible steel nib fountain pens in the past. Look at FPR’s Himalaya flex-iest steel nib for the best modern example.