- An all-black LAMY Safari fountain pen filled with a mix of water, Platinum carbon black, and inkjet printer ink.
- A blank sheet of A4, folded in half three times.
- My passport.
- A fully loaded Secrid card carrier.
- A really nice rock. It has been in my pocket for a year. Don’t think about it.
- A dumb watch. (Casio W-59. Very small, light as a feather. Green LED-backlight LCD display. 50 metre water resist. Tough, within reason. Effectively infinite battery life.)
- A beta of the PinePhone Pro, equipped with dreemurrs archlinux.
- A USB drive containing all of my computers’ boot partitions and Archiso.
Yeah, I was looking for a good CMYK fountain pen ink set. Nobody seems to make such a set. I could get a lot of half-solutions that would kind of work, but nothing beats the colour space coverage of a complement of CMY inks that were specifically designed to cover the whole colour space. They’re also about 10 times cheaper than fountain pen ink.
About six drops of ink and water the rest of the way gives you an entire cartridge of ink. This stuff is super concentrated.
I would use printer ink for the K too, but that’s too much of a crapshoot. Too often, the K is pigment-based, and that is likely to ruin a fountain pen. And it’s easy enough to find a good neutral black fountain pen ink. That is what the Platinum carbon black is for. It’s actually even more concentrated. Just one drop of it divided between two refills makes about a 50:50 grey that I can further modify with the printer ink. For less grey I have to go all the way down to one drop every four refills.
are you using distilled water or tap?
Oh fuck, should I use distilled water? lol hm… Well, I’ve used tap water and so far, so good… You think I need to use distilled water, @merde@sh.itjust.works ?
There’s minerals and other things in tap water. These things will cause issues and damage.
Though, the Lamy Safari is a cheap enough pen to not worry about buying a new one after causing damage.
However, there are other considerations for not using printer ink. Printer ink is designed to be used on specific paper, while fountain pen ink is designed to be more versatile.
The colors for fountain pen ink are also more than the base color. There’s the shading which can be a different color from the base The sheen, which can make the ink shine a different color in different lighting. It’s designed to flow properly through the feed with an appropriate level of viscosity. There are a lot of factors and testing that goes into fountain pen ink. You can read more about it here: https://www.jetpens.com/blog/The-Beginner-s-Guide-to-Fountain-Pen-Inks/pt/968
Hm. Thanks for the link. This could help me with my ink mixes. Oh, one thing that annoys me: I wish I had pure CMY dyes without surfactant in them, so that I could change the surfactant level and not make the ink so god damned bloody. But I have no fucking clue where I could find CMY dyes without the surfactant.
not a “should”, but it would help the nib, i assume, considering the state of the kettles and washing machines &c
it depends on where you live and the quality of the tap water 🤷