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The Pen Hospital in Kolkata will nurse your broken fountain pen back
- lofatdairy 2y agoFountain Pen Hospital in NYC is also pretty good. Kolkata is probably a lot less expensive though haha
- hwc 2y agoI would love a class on taking care of my fountain pens. Maybe I'll find something on YouTube.
- GarnetFloride 2y agoJetPens has a video and article for the care of fountain pens.
- mangamadaiyan 2y agoMost fountain pen issues can usually be fixed by a good, thorough, cleaning. If the nib is scratchy, its tines are likely misaligned, and need alignment. You'll need a 10x (or better) jeweller's loupe to check the tines for alignment. More complex solutions for more complex problems exist, but these are the most common by far. It is possible to pick up these things by watching videos, but I'd recommend you to make contact with your local fountain pen club - such things do exist :)
- Ancapistani 2y agoDon’t do it. I did, about eight years ago. Now there is a lathe in my office that I use to make replacement parts for century-old pens.
- ashton314 2y agoThe rabbit hole is deep, but boy have you gone far
- ConsiderCrying 2y agoAh yes, the logical endpoint of any quirky hobby - becoming so invested in it that your family simply has to smile and nod approvingly while they pray it doesn't spill over into the living room. That said, if you're that skilled with a lathe, it should probably be considered a useful life skill.
- thenobsta 2y agoGrowing up, my mom drew the line on vintage motorcycle parts in the dishwasher. Sometimes though, in the winter, the motorcycles were allowed inside. God bless her.
- disqard 2y agoThat is lovely to hear! You brightened my day a little more. Keep doing it, and maybe share a blog post about your work? I know there are dozens (!) of us who would read it closely :)
- disqard 2y ago1. Search for "TWSBI Eco" at https://www.jetpens.com https://www.jetpens.com and buy the color you like best. 2. Fill it with the ink you like best. In general, you can't go wrong with Pilot Iroshizuku (again, jetpens) 3. When you're done using this pen, twist it (no need to overdo the torque). 4. When you next need to use it, months (or even a year) later, It. Will. Work. I own several different fountain pens, and this one is the only one that I can truly call "maintenance-free". Of course, if you do enjoy tinkering with your fountain pens, don't let me stop you. It's a wonderful hobby!
- nikau 2y agoThen off to penisland to recuperate Edit: I guess youngins don't remember pen island penisland.com
- websap 2y agoGives me great joy to see my hometown, the City of Joy (Kolkata) making it to the frontpage of HN. :`)
- 0xd1r 2y agoIndeed, quite lovely to see. Wish someone did a piece on 'Metro Gali', where there are people like this for cameras.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deadbabe 2y agoIf you look closely in markets and bazaars you can often come across little niche boutique shops like this: Repair shops for instance that specialize in repairing old school video game consoles. They toil all day replacing aging capacitors, upgrading boards to work with modern TVs and put out clean crisp pixel output, rebuilding broken consoles using harvested parts, replacing batteries of old cartridges, replacing worn cases, and even selling karts with libraries of multiple (pirated) ROMs installed. They don’t make much money, but it sustains their work.
- smeej 2y agoSome seal in my pen broke and ink leaks out around where I hold it. It's disappointing, but I'm unlikely to travel around the world to fix it! I'd happily ship it to them and take my chances on getting it back, because it's not like I can use it right now anyway. Unfortunately, though, I also developed a fondness for stone paper, and apparently that doesn't pair well with fountain pens.
- bayindirh 2y agoWhat’s the brand/model? Maybe you can find the part and replace it. Stone paper is a very fine sand paper in practice. Eats fountain pen nibs.
- smeej 2y agoI don't know how I'd find out. It isn't marked. I picked it up for 10€ in France almost 20 years ago, and while it's my favorite pen I've ever written with, I don't hand write things enough that I ever got really into pens such that I could figure it out. I would need the pen hospital to identify what kind of fixing it needed.
- bayindirh 2y agoYou can share a photo of it with me, or there's a forum called fountainpennetwork (https://www.fountainpennetwork.com https://www.fountainpennetwork.com). They're friendly and knowledgeable bunch. You can ask them.
- WillAdams 2y agoOr, if you're in the U.S.: https://fountainpenhospital.com/ https://fountainpenhospital.com/
- cge 2y agoI mostly write with fountain pens, primarily pre-1980s, but find myself rather confused by much of this article. Presumably there are terminology differences involved, but I have no idea what he is referring to by 'socket', why it needs to be washed weekly, or why he would add one to a pen. I can't find anything online, and the various uses of the word in the article don't really fit any part of a fountain pen that I do know about. I don't understand how a nib would be curved to fit a smaller hand: the 1930s Waterman reference he makes might be a reference to the Lady Patricia, but that's a smaller-bodied version of the at-the-time quite large Patrician; I don't think the nib, or even the size, is particularly different than Watermans before it. I'm also not sure I'd agree about modern pen mechanisms being more complex: while the article is inconsistent about when the shop was opened (77 years ago, but also late 1950s), that would have put the shop during his grandfather's time right around an era of pens like the Sheaffer Snorkel (filled through an extending snorkel by a pneumatic mechanism to avoid the nib, itself with an unusual cylindrical design, needing to be immersed in ink) that are particularly complex compared to modern fountain pens, which mostly seem to use typical, stiff nib and feed designs, and cartridges or converters rather than elaborate filling mechanisms. I certainly don't 'wash off' a pen with water once a week when I'm using it, and I'm not even sure what that would mean. Unless there's a problem with ink flow, there should not be 'excess ink'. Is he saying the pen should be flushed once a week? That seems quite excessive. It's just very odd that he seems quite insistent about the necessity of something that I've never heard of.
- LennyHenrysNuts 2y agoI came here to say this. I have no idea what a socket might be. I flush my pens monthly or if I intend to put it away for a while.
- jlund-molfese 2y agoI think he must be talking about the ink bladder (and replacing, rather than adding), there's nothing else that makes sense. Although, depending on the properties of your ink, it shouldn't be necessary to rinse the bladder every week anyway.
- ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
- xnx 2y agoInteresting story to show up the same day as "The rise of the disposable car": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40512517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40512517 In Cuba, they refill disposable lighters: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6ysxekWL9Gk https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6ysxekWL9Gk
- TomK32 2y agoIt's quite sad how many disposable e-smoke thingies one can find littering the streets, even in a quite nice city like the one I live. OTOH: Most times it's another small rechargeable battery for my electronics projects. Madness
- shivdeepak 2y agoI remember my first and only visit to Kolkata (then Calcutta) in the late 1990s. I had never seen such a huge density of pen shops anywhere else. I am not a collector, but I used to like pens then because I was a student. I loved that place.
- noufalibrahim 2y agoI'm from Kerala in India and have visited a similarly named establishment in a town called Trichur https://www.thenewsminute.com/kerala/visit-hospital-kerala-thats-been-repairing-pens-almost-80-years-now-34054 https://www.thenewsminute.com/kerala/visit-hospital-kerala-t.... It's got some nostalgic value but not much more. There's another shop which fountain pen enthusiasts might like as well. It's also in Kerala but closer to where I live called "Kim and Co.". They make pens with ebonite bodies. These don't have pistons on any other such reservoirs. You pour ink straight into the body and it stays there. Their claim to fame is that the thread is good enough so that with 3 turns, it locks and holds the ink without leaking. I have one of their pens but don't use it on a daily basis. https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/304573-a-masterpiece-from-kim-and-co-kerala-india/ https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/304573-a-mast... My own daily use pen is a Noodlers Ahab. The main reason I prefer this is because the nib is flexible and so you can do simply copperplate or spencerian using it. Great for headings.
- draven 2y ago> You pour ink straight into the body and it stays there. If you want to search for more examples of this kind of pens, they are called eyedropper pens.
- Brajeshwar 2y agoAnd the tip is to use a Syringe to "pour" the ink.
- noufalibrahim 2y agoYup. That's what I do.
- Al-Khwarizmi 2y agoI didn't know Kim and Co.; but I have handmade Indian fountain pens from ASA Pens, Ranga Pens and Fosfor Pens and all of them are excellent. And the price is a steal compared to what one can get in e.g. the EU. My only peeve is that for some reason (cultural I guess?) most pens by these manufacturers are what I would consider very large (for my taste, 13-14 cm length closed and ~13 mm diameter, like a Platinum Century #3776 or an Aurora Optima, is a good size). I always end up fishing for the smallest models, e.g. I like the Ranga Markandeya.
- lawrenceyan 2y agoWhat a lovely read. Sometimes I forget why I keep opening HN everyday, and then I remember. I will wash my pen once a week from now on!
- mangamadaiyan 2y agoPlease don't wash your pen once a week. You only need to flush it if you're changing inks, or if you're putting it away in storage. As long as you're writing with your pen at least once in a couple of days, _and_ you're using a reasonable ink - you most certainly do not need to wash it every week. You don't have to take my word for it -- just hang out on FPN, or even better, hang out with your local fountain pen club.
- bandrami 2y agoThis is without a doubt the most Kolkata thing I have ever seen
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pigcat 2y agoWeird thing... The links in that article are to totally unrelated pages on the same Vogue India site. eg. the first link `pen` takes you to an article about therapy. Anyone know why they might do this? Is it some SEO trick?
- tempodox 2y agoI'd love to see a fountain pen with its clip in a cast. But seriously, +1 for doing the repairs and reducing waste.