If you are cleaning your fountain pen and noticed that there is ink or water behind the plunger of the converter, you’ll likely find that it’s quite difficult to get at. How do you take apart the converter, clean up that ink, and fully clean your pen?
Continue reading “How To Clean Behind The Seal Of A Fountain Pen Converter”
Many people are trying to reduce the amount of plastic they use in their lives, but this can be quite difficult, especially with small, affordable items like pens. While pens and plastic go hand-in-hand, particularly with lower priced pens, there are some choices you can make to reduce the plastic in your writing instruments.
Continue reading “The Best No-Plastic And Low Plastic Pens And Refills”
There are few writing experiences that are more satisfying than a great gel pen. The right gel pen is buttery smooth, has color that really pops, and is a pleasure to write with on nearly any paper. Gel pens are truly one of the best and most versatile ways to write.
But there are many gel pens sold today. While there aren’t many truly bad gel pens left, a few stand out from the rest. We’ve tested dozens of gel pens, and these are our favorites.
Continue reading “The Best Gel Pens of 2022”
The Pilot Hi-Tecpoint V5 Grip is a needle-tip rollerball pen. The V5 is the 0.5 mm ultra fine size of this pen.
Continue reading “Pilot Hi-Tecpoint V5 Grip Rollerball”In theory, using a fountain pen cartridges should be easy — you insert one into your pen and you start writing. In practice, they are rather confusing. Some cartridges only work on one brand of pen, some work on lots of pens… and they all look alike! Cartridges are rarely labeled well and the downside of messing up a cartridge installation can be a broken pen (bad) or a leaky cartridge (often worse).
This guide will answer most common fountain pen cartridge questions as well help you visually identify which cartridge is which.
Erasable pens aren’t as common as they should be. These writing instruments have come a long way in recent years and now offer both very good writing experience and legibility, while leaving almost no mark at all on the paper. If you haven’t used an erasable pen recently, you should pick one up soon.
Continue reading “The Best Erasable Pens And Refills of 2022”
Is your pen not writing? Has it run out of ink? Here is our guide to changing your pen’s refill.
Many people come to this website with a simple query: how long is a pen? Here is our best take on an answer to this deceptively simple question.
Learning about vintage fountain pens is a difficult proposition as the history of pens and the companies behind them is poorly documented and information often comes from a single source when anything was bothered to be written down.
Anyway, some pens have a rich history that is worth digging into, like the Pilot Vanishing Point and, in this case, the Pilot MYU and Murex.
Continue reading “Vintage Pilot Murex and MYU Fountain Pens Untangled”
The Pilot Lightive is an affordable fountain pen that is similar to Pilot’s Explorer. It was released on December 8, 2021. The name is a combination of “light” and “active.”
If you want a retractable fountain pen, you have to understand that you are diving into a niche within a niche. Only a tiny subset of fountain pens are retractable, so there isn’t as much competition as you’d expect, but this is still a rich and interesting segment of the pen market.
Let’s review today’s top retractable fountain pens.
Continue reading “The Best Retractable Fountain Pens of 2021”
Many people see fountain pens as occasional writing instruments, maybe for doing some before-bed journaling or writing a letter, but that doesn’t have to be the case. The right fountain pen can be a great everyday tool, even if it never approaches the no-nonsense functionality of a ballpoint pen.
Continue reading “How To Choose An Everyday Fountain Pen (And Some Recommendations)”
It’s rare that you are in the market for a pen refill, rather you are likely trying to buy a refill for a specific pen. Even so, here are some truly exceptional pen refills that are worth keeping an eye out for when you next need a new refill for one of your pens.
These are refills that simply make me happy each time I use them and surprise me with their quality when I revisit them. These are refills that are worth buying a pen so you have somewhere to put them.
Pen refills come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Some of these are standards, shared across pen brands and decades of pen designs, while other are propriety and limited to just a few brands or even a few models. This means that replacing the ink in a pen, especially an older one, may end up being a more difficult task than you’d expect.
The goal of this article is to make buying a new ink refill for your pen as easy as possible. A secondary goal to this guide will be maximizing the number of refill options available for each pen. This is only possible once you have a good understanding of refill shapes and which are interchangeable.
The Pilot G2 Limited is a metal-bodied, executive pen based on the popular Pilot G2.