Refillable Fountain Pen, Brass

Details

A brass fountain pen with an AISI 304 stainless nib, a screw cap with an inner cap, and a converter in the box. It fills from the international standard cartridge and converter, which is the one filling system in this trade that is not owned by anybody, so the pen works with cartridges and converters you can buy anywhere and will still be able to buy in ten years. A proprietary filler makes a pen into a subscription, and that is the actual reason so many old pens are unusable rather than merely old. Two more things this listing has to state plainly. The first is the alloy, because brass is a family and not a grade. The second is the grip.

• Barrel and cap are CZ121 free-machining brass, CuZn39Pb3, which carries up to 3 percent lead by specification, because lead is what makes brass machinable. We print the alloy rather than the word brass
• The grip section is not brass. It is turned from POM acetal, because the section is the part your fingers hold for an hour at a time, and a leaded alloy is not where we want that contact to be. It is a deliberate choice and it is why the section is a different colour
• Nib is AISI 304 stainless, tipped with a hard alloy pellet. That pellet is called iridium across the pen trade and it is generally an osmium-ruthenium alloy rather than iridium. Ours is ruthenium-based and we call it what it is
• Nib unit part LEAF-FN, Rs 390, unscrews from the section by hand with no tool. Stocked while the pen sells and for five years after it is discontinued, so a bent nib is a Rs 390 repair and not a dead pen
• Line widths measured on the 120 GSM journal in this range with the 30 ml ink in this range: extra fine 0.3 mm, fine 0.4 mm, medium 0.6 mm. A nib width is a claim about a pen, a paper and an ink together, so all three are named
• Every nib is flow-checked and, where needed, adjusted before it is boxed. That is a bench operation, not a claim about a factory
• Fills: international standard, short cartridge 38 mm or long 72 mm, or the supplied converter at about 0.7 ml. The 30 ml bottle in this range gives roughly 42 converter fills
• Screw cap, one and a half turns, with an inner cap. Left capped for 30 days it writes on the first stroke, tested
• Weighs 38 g capped and 24 g uncapped. It does not post well. A brass cap on the back end makes it distinctly rear-heavy, so we do not claim it posts and we would rather you knew before buying
• There is no BIS product specification for a fountain pen, so what is printed here is the alloy grades and the bench and laboratory methods used to check them