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.
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Sailor Ink Studio 123 is a purple-ish grey fountain pen ink. It’s the most popular ink in the Sailor Studio collection.
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Choosing a fountain pen isn’t always an easy task and a surplus of information can be almost as bad as a total lack of it. With that in mind, this guide is designed to help you choose the best Sailor fountain pen for you.
Sailor isn’t is common as Pilot and a few other competitors in the US, but they make some exceptional pens. This guide will help you decide the right Sailor fountain pen for you in 2021. It will focus on the most popular Sailor lines, with the assumption that if you are looking for something expensive or rare, you probably don’t need a buying guide!
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Sailor Kiwa-Guro is a pure black pigmented ink, which means it’s highly water-resistant. This an ink that useful for artists and anyone else looking for a permanent fountain pen ink. It’s one of our best black fountain pens inks of all time.
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Some of the most interesting things happening with fountain pen ink don’t involve writing at all. Fountain pen ink and a nice paper can become the medium through which all sorts of cool art is created, one style of which is ink splatter.
So how do you make an ink splatter? Do you just pour ink onto paper… or is there more to creating those perfect little splatter droplets?
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Sailor Shikiori Shigure is a dark purple fountain pen ink in the company’s Four Seasons line.
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Sailor Jentle Yamadori is a blue-teal fountain pen ink in the company’s Four Seasons collection. In its previous form it was sold as Jentle Yama-dori but now it’s commonly called “Shikiori Yamadori.”
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Black fountain pen ink tests to be the workhorse ink of many people. Blues can be for work or fun, same with reds, while the purples and oranges are more expressive and usually saved for personal activities. Black ink, despite its huge varieties, tends to be an ink for getting stuff done.
So what’s the best black fountain pen ink for day-to-day use?
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Sailor fountain pens use proprietary converters so this is the only option for your Sailor pen.
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The Sailor 1911 is the company’s most famous fountain pen and the mainstay of their brand.
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Few people would argue that one of the main draws to fountain pens is the amazing variety of inks on offer. This selection can quickly go from an allure to a curse when the paradox of choice sets in and you are presented with literally hundreds of shades of blue, all of which are relatively affordable and easy to access.
If you don’t quit fountain pens right at that moment you are presented with an interesting dilemma: how can I test inks? Taking things to their logical conclusion, we here at Unsharpen further asked, “How can we test fountain pens inks cheaply, efficiently, and accurately?”
Here’s what we’ve found…
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Sailor Jentle Souten is a medium blue ink. It’s a very close competitor to Pilot’s popular Kon-peki.
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The Sailor 1911 Profit Professor is an affordable version of the Sailor 1911 series. Selling for just about $30 but still managing to feature the iconic styling of the 1911 series, the Profit Professor is a very interesting offering.
The Professor is a has a screw-on cap and is a cartridge-converter fountain pen.
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The HighAce Neo is an entry-level fountain pen from Sailor, one of Japan’s “Big Three” fountain pen manufacturers. Despite being one of the “Big Three” Sailor is not known for their more affordable pens — Pilot is very strong in that area and Platinum is gaining ground.
The HighAce Neo is a slim fountain pen with a steel nib. It retails for 1000 JPY or abount $10.
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If you have been learning about fountain pens and have dug deep enough to get into the world of specialty nibs, perhaps you have come across the term “music nib.” After some immediate confusion perhaps you took a guess and figured out it’s a nib for writing musical notes… or is it a nib that produces wonderful music as you write? Just kidding — it’s definitely the former — but what does that mean in practice? What is a music nib and why might you want to own one?
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