Not pictured: spatters of forest green ink all over my phone and table.
It started out simply enough – おじいさんダン , sensing my interest in fountain pens got me started with a Pilot Cocoon loaded with brown de Atramentis document ink. I’ve been enjoying practicing my writing and journaling with it. But did it stop there? It did not! Soon arrived at my door a package consisting of 2 Pilot Kakuno (clear), 2 packages labeled “con-40”, multiple tiny vials of ink and a long, blunt-tipped needle on a syringe. ダン assured me “it should all be self-evident”
Sounds like a challenge. Step one: convert the Kakuno from a cartridge to a refillable converter. Ok easy enough. Step two… get ink into it. Watched a few videos which demonstrate the plunger filling technique, showing manicured hands dipping the entire nib into the bottle and drawing up ink. Ok …… well, these little vials were too narrow-mouthed for that. I mean, I tried. Maybe if I sort of … tilt the bottle … ? It’s a wonder it didn’t end up worse. I got some ink into the pen but more of it on my fingers. It seemed like to get this to work I would have to relocate the ink from the tiny vial to a wider well, but I didn’t have anything like that that was the right shape for the small volume at hand.
Ok, time to investigate this giant needle. This involved taking the converter back out of the pen body (more inky fingertips) and then drawing up a needle-worth of ink ….. way too much as it turns out … and trying to inject it into the reservoir. And that worked! But then my hands were full without a plan so I tried to set down the syringe but I didn’t draw it back up enough so it jostled and sent out droplets everywhere while I tried to get the nib back onto the perilously full converter. And people say the con-40 is hard to fill to the brim! hah.
Anyway managed to get the ink in, the pen re-assembled, the ink seems to be flowing normally, and nothing brand new was stained (only because I cleverly changed out of my new shirt before getting too invested in this).
Next step: filling a second pen with another color ink, or mixing up a custom blend who can say.