Platinum Prefounte Fountain Pen

Last minute Christmas present, perhaps?  I just picked up one of the new Platinum Prefounte fountain pens.  Goulet Pens is selling it for $10USD and I paid only $15CDN locally.  This pen is a bargain, and more.

If you’re familiar with the Platinum Preppy you know something about this pen as it’s pretty much a “super” Preppy, with significant improvements.  First, it looks great and comes in orange, red, blue or green.  You can get it with fine or medium nibs, just like the Preppy.

While the Preppy caps are prone to breakage, the Prefounte cap is a significant upgrade.  Much stronger, and with a very positive click when you cap the pen.  More important, however, is that this pen includes Platinum’s super-d-duper no evaporation double cap seal.  The packaging claims you can leave ink in it for a year without much loss.  Try that with your Lamy (grin).

As a street sketcher, one of the things I really like about Platinum pens is that they are the one company that sells a waterproof ink for their pens in cartridge form.  This is also wonderful if you’re trying to get someone involved with sketching and/or fountain pens because they don’t have to deal with pen filling.  You just throw in a cartridge, about $3 for four of them, and you’re all set.  I’ve been using a Platinum Plaisir that way for quite a while.  This new Prefounte is lighter, though and I know I’m going to love it.  Kinda silly since I’ve got a bunch of high dollar pens sitting around but I don’t have to worry about losing these cheaper solutions.

I apologize for the horrible photos but I wanted to get this post up this morning and the overhead light in my studio isn’t the greatest for taking close up photos.  Goulet Pens, though, has good photos 🙂

I should add that the pens don’t come with red nibs; Prefounte nibs are silver.  I made the mistake of buying the medium nib, didn’t like it, and exchanged one of the Preppy nibs.  Of course I did this strategically to show you that this was possible.  Sure I did (grin).

Wing Sung 3009 Fountain Pen (review?)

I’ve gotten a couple emails asking me what a Wing Sung 3009 pen was.  I’ve referred to several times in my posts.  This isn’t a real review of the pen so consider this post to be just an answer to that question.

As far as I can tell, if you’re in North America, the only place you can buy a Wing Sung pen is through eBay with the product being shipped from China.  There are positives and negatives to this.  The positive is that the price of most of the pens is less than a latte at Starbucks and shipping is typically free.  I paid $3-4USD for my Wing Sung 3009s.  The downside is that instant gratification isn’t served well, because if you order a pen it’ll take several weeks for it to arrive.  I’ve had good luck ordering this way but I have to order and forget about it cuz standing by the mailbox will wear you out.

Ok…so what’s a Wing Sung 3009 and why do I use one given that I own Namiki Falcons,  and lots of Pilot and Platinum pens?  As I’ve said, it’s a $4 pen made in China.  It comes with a fine nib that’s similar to a Lamy nib (they’re interchangeable) but finer.  It has a clip that’s similar to a Lamy Safari but that’s where the similarity ends.

The Wing Sung 3009 is a transparent pen so it’s easy to see how much ink you’re carrying.  It is piston-filled and holds a lot of ink.  These two things combine to make it an ideal pen to carry on location.  And did I mention that it only costs $4?  No big deal if I lose it.  I now own three of them, just in case (grin).

There’s another thing that’s invaluable beyond description, but if you’ve drawn with fountain pens for a while you’ll understand.  This pen has a rubber casket that’s similar to the Lamy Safari, but unlike the Lamy Safari, the cap screws onto the body of the pen and thus, it seals VERY WELL and there is no ink evaporation which is a big problem with Lamy pens.  This is particularly important if you’re using pigmented inks like many sketchers, including me, use because they’re no concentration of ink over time.

So, that’s the reason I’ve been using this pen.  It’s wonderful.  The only drawback is that I have to explain why my $250 pens are sitting on a shelf while I draw with my $4 pen (grin)

Sketching With The Pilot Kakuno

For the past couple years, my sketching tools of choice have been the Platinum 3776 and a Pilot/Namiki Falcon.  Both are excellent sketching pens but a bit on the pricey side.  I’m a pen nerd so such expense was “justified” simply cuz I wanted one but the reality is that one doesn’t have to spend a lot of money on a fountain pen to get good results.

Evidence for this comes in how many sing the praises of the Platinum Preppy that may not win any beauty contests but it only costs $4 and works really well.  I remember a time when everyone recommended a Lamy Safari to newcomers because it was the only game in town when it came to inexpensive pens but since then we’ve seen the release of the Pilot Metropolitan, TWSBI Eco, Platinum Plaisir among others.  Each of these is less expensive and at least the equal to the Safari so choices abound.

I want to talk about the Pilot Kakuno, specifically about the recent release of the completely transparent version, though it comes in a couple of colors as well.  There were two things that caused me to investigate this pen.   I love transparent pens because, as a street sketcher, it’s nice to be able to quickly check the amount of ink in a pen before I go out the door.

Mostly, however, this pen interested me because it was from Pilot and I love Pilot steel nibs.  They are smooth line makers, even when you use fine nibs like I do.  Second, they can typically provide lines that are very fine or a couple times that width with a little bit of pressure.   The low price point ($14) made it easy for me to scratch my curiosity itch and so I ordered a fine nib version of the pen.

I loved it from the start.  This pen may be the lightest pen I’ve used and it fits my hand beautifully when posted.  Like all of the dozen or so Pilot pens I own, this one works flawlessly with the DeAtramentis or Platinum pigmented inks I feed my sketching pens.  I was a happy camper but I was about to get happier.

I decided to order a medium nib version because I had a medium nib Metropolitan that I enjoyed a lot for quick-sketching.  The reason is that the medium nibs provide width variation from a Micron 01 with light pressure to a Micron 03 with a bit of pressure.  In addition to that, if you flip the pen upside down you can get hairline lines from the same nib.  Since I’ve received this pen I’ve used almost nothing else.

I got happier still when I solved the one problem I had with the Kakuno.  It has no clip and I need a clip on my pens.  Happiness came, however, when I discovered that the inexpensive clip sold by Kaweco for their pens fits beautifully on the Kakuno cap.  I immediately ordered a silver one for my fine nib pen and a gold one for my medium pen.  I now have a color-coded set of these pens and I’m thrilled.

My New Toy: The Pilot Cavalier

First it was arthritis.  Then it was atrial fibrillation.  Then my leg blew up to the size of a telephone pole (slight exaggeration for effect).  That turned out to be osteoarthritis in my knee and a long set of physio treatments.  Then it became a steady stream of doctor’s appointments.  This torture just would not end, but it has, sort of.

As long as I fill my gut with pills twice a day, my heart is under control, my arthritis is only problem on really “bad” days, and I’m getting used to not walking as far as I’d like and doing so with a limp.  Things are looking up.

It got better when my doctor informed me that I have type 2 diabetes.  I guess that was the dessert after my months of dining on medical treatments.  But you know what?  That’s good news.  For the past half a year I’ve been very fatigued, having less and less energy.  Initially I attributed it to all those doctor visits but eventually concluded that it was just cuz this was what “old” felt like.  It wasn’t an encouraging prognosis.  But, eliminating the cookies (my favorite thing) and adding a couple more pills to my diet and I’ve gotten my energy back.  I call that a win.

So enough about health, let’s talk about my new toy, the Pilot Cavalier fountain pen.  When I got mine I couldn’t find one in North America so I bought through a third-party vendor via Amazon.  But Jet Pens now stocks them in several colours.

I bought this pen because I enjoy quick-sketching with my Kaweco Lilliput but find the screwing and unscrewing its cap to be sort of annoying when I’m wanting to quickly sketch someone in the food court.  One thing I like a lot about the Lilliput, however, is that it’s got a pencil-size diameter and it’s very light.

The Cavalier has both of those attributes associated with a standard length pen.  The cap snaps in place nicely and seals well.  It also posts well, something I have to have in a sketching pen or I’d lose the cap.  Because it’s a Pilot pen, the steel nib provides a smooth feel.

This pen accepts Pilot cartridges but one problem is that the barrel of the pen is just narrow enough that you can’t use Pilot’s CON-50 converter so I have use a syringe to get waterproof ink into empty Pilot cartridges.  It’s said that you can use the CON-20 converter (the rubber bulb-style converter in it but I like syringe filling so I haven’t tried that.  This pen has found a place in my pen quiver, mostly for quick-sketching food court people.  Here’s a sketch I did while test-driving it.  This was also the beginning of a new Stillman & Birn Alpha softcover (5.5×8.5).  I haven’t used this format in quite some time and thought it might be a good idea.

Tom Petty: 1950 – 2017

I’m not one to have heros or to worship celebrity.  But I am one who appreciates people who are the best at what they do and Tom Petty was one of those.  As I write this I’m listening to I Won’t Back Down, a tune that was meaningful to me at a time in my life when meaning was important and hard to come by.  I’m not much of a portrait artist but I felt the need to draw this.  Rest in peace Tom.