The nib of a well maintained, vintage Vacumatic.1 Writing with a fountain pen requires a slightly different technique than writing with a stylus-like instrument (such as a ballpoint or pencil). A bit more deliberation is needed, and a more careful application of pressure. If you’re new to fountain pen writing, it may take you a couple of weeks or so to develop the necessary touch or “chops”. It may help to visualize your pen as a brush with two bristles; you are painting ink onto the paper, rather than pushing it into the paper (as with a ballpoint). Just as jamming the brush onto the canvas isn’t likely to produce an attractive result, bearing down too hard or in an uncontrolled fashion with a fountain pen won’t give you the best performance.
2 Some fountain pens do better on unfriendly paper than do others, well-setup or not. Some of the artsycraftsy papers with fancy (read “troublesome”) coatings are awful for fountain pen use regardless of what their manufacturers or retailers say to the contrary. If your pen writes okay on generic 20-pound copy paper (from the ream, not run through the machine), then your pen is fine. Avoid coated paper at all costs (magazines, paper made artificially smooth by coating, multipart forms, register receipts) and avoid newspaper and other similarly fibrous paper which can load up a nib slit with junk.
3 Over flushing your pen with water will over-clean a pen to the point where it will need to be broken-in again. Your pen needs to have at least some slight traces of ink residue present in its guts for it to work as intended. Fill your pen, then hold it by the far end and let its tip rest on (not slide on) a paper towel. If the pen can make a dot a half inch in diameter in less than a minute, then the ink-delivery system is probably okay and you are looking at a problem with nib profile or tine alignment or tine spacing or bad paper or bad ink. Or a combination of some or all of those.
4 Most expensive new pens use piston-style fillers, either built into the pen or in the form of a cartridge converter. These are a bit trickier to fill than the typical sac (lever filler) pen. For one thing, if the pen is dry, it may take a couple of attempts to get the ink reservoir to fill completely (you can’t get a good vacuum with the slow-moving piston). For another, you MUST bleed off a few drops of ink after filling in order to “prime” the feed. A great deal of skipping or poorstarting problems can be traced to leaving out this important step. Sac pens, for whatever reason, usually do not require this treatment. Many people are a bit impatient to get on with life, and tend to pull the pen out of the ink bottle before the suction is fully relieved, resulting in incomplete filling. When you fill a sac pen or pneumatic pen (like a Sheaffer Vac-Fil), make sure you leave the point inside the ink bottle for a good ten count, to allow the pen to fill completely.
