Drilling

This coming Sunday 29th, the August meeting of the Wagner Association will take place at the Subaru building in Ebisu, Tokyo. And now, checking my notes of the July Pen Clinic I see some pens worth to mention here.

On a previous entry I spoke about the creations of Mr. Yamada. This time I focused my attention on his modification of a Pilot Custom 823.


On these chronicles and in some other discussion fora, pen users have complained about the boring looks of the pens equipped with more interesting nibs. The case of Pilot is very significant. This company makes as much as 15 different nibs –actually, many more--, of which five or six really stand off the common trend of purely symmetric points. But these interesting nibs only come in black torpedo pens.

Mr. Yamada’s way to correct this problem is quite radical—and inspiring. He modifies the nibs by thinning the nib plate and by drilling holes on them with the final goal of making those rigid nibs more flexible. When needed, he also works on the feeds.


On its side, the Custom 823 model is often praised by its self-filling system (one of the few self-filling pens in the Japanese pen scene) and by its huge ink capacity. On its cons, the small selection of nibs: F, M, and B.


Then, he chose this interesting pen to create a more exciting writer. The result, looks aside, is not spectacular. Maybe because the baseline of this nib is a B, quite broad by default. Therefore, the apparent increase in the line-width is compared to an already wide line. To create more striking results, a fine nib would be more suitable.


There is, however, another alternative to this DIY (do it yourself) approach. Pilot’s size 15 nibs come also as a flexible falcon (FA). Exchanging the nib and feed in a Custom 823 is easy—just grab them firmly and yank them out of the section. A different story might be where and how to find this extra nib and feed.

The discussion on how efficient the falcon nib actually is should be the topic of another chronicle.

(Pilot Custom 742 music nib – Sailor Red Brown)

Bruno Taut
(Inagi, August 21, 2010)
[labels: plumín, evento, Pilot, Tokyo]