First proper attempt at stub grinding

Blogging every week is hard @_@

Well, for those of you who didn’t know. I have a fountain pen hobby (a little pricey one I feel).

I tend to buy some for collection but always try to keep my collection small (I have 8 pens looking to sell one). I buy fountain pens as they are durable enough to last a few lifetimes, reduce fatigue on long periods of writing and generally the workhorse inks are decently cheap comparable to gel rollerballs I use (I highly recommend Zebra Sarasa and Jetstream 101, latter being an oil based ballpoint, for smoothness and ease).

I would say that I do not have a gold nibbed pen to this date, as I feel that the performance of a gold nib vs a good steel nib pen is not worth the premium.

I have one for work (phasing out the old one due to technical issues due to the design of the feed).

Nib grinding is usually done by nib meisters (my favourite being Mike Masuyama), we have two local nib meisters here in Singapore, Sunny and Urner Hoo (specialising in flex grinds only). My prior one was a gift to someone where I clipped away the tip of a Pilot 78G XF to make it into a stub for daily writing but due to the lack of tipping and proper tools I managed only to make it into a crisp italic. Another was a DIY italic dip pen where I made it using a soda can and a brush (cost me slightly below 1SGD in total :p).

These are generally rather costly (I have 3 pens grounded into stubs by Mike), so I thought I’ll do it myself.

Recently, I bought some micromesh nail buffers from Sunny (Straits Pens) to try grinding myself on Fountain Pen Revolution (FPR) nibs (cheap nibs for trying out and practicing). Fitted onto a budget japanese pen, Ohoto Dude (also from Straits Pens, a budget version of the Faber Castell Ondoro Series, ~200 bucks compared to my ~30-40 bucks pen, as I was just looking for the faceted shape).

Nevertheless I would say it would seem that it works. Dip testing showed different line widths, will try to ink it up once the pen is dry and write with it to test, followed by smoothing or further grinding to flatten the nib if necessary. Pictures below =D