Ink

December 18, 2009November 7, 2013

The Answer is Carbonite

However, the question is not about ink so I’ll leave it till the end.

C12

We all know carbon since it’s everywhere around us which makes sense since it’s the fourth most common chemical element in the universe. In fact you’re not seeing it right now in front of you since the atmosphere surrounding us contains carbon (apologies to those who live in a vacuum). Burn something and you’ll often find a black carbon residue which if you are making toast doesn’t taste very good. The smelly, thick smoke you see coming out of diesel cars and trucks is exhaust gas laden with microparticles of carbon. If you’ve drawn with charcoal you’ve actually drawn with carbon. While on the subject of making marks pencil “lead” is actually graphite mixed with clay and graphite is carbon.

Now that we segued into writing implements we can talk about the fun stuff in our pens: ink. Just about all fountain pen inks are dye based and these colorants are soluble in water resulting in a solution which has no solid bits in it. Is this bringing back any memories of high school chemistry yet? There are complex formulas about how to mix these dyes to make certain ink colors along with additives to promote the inks longevity and stability. This, however, is out of the scope of this post. Whew! I was worried there for a minute.

The other way to get color into a liquid is by adding a pigment. Despite the name there is nothing porcine about it. A common pigmented liquid is paint which gets its color from having little teensy tiny colored bits (the pigment) added to a carrier. Pigments remain in this heterogeneous fluid as solid particles that don’t dissolve which is known as a suspension (more high school chemistry I’m afraid). When pigmented fluids with a binder are used on a substrate like paper the particles get all tangled up in the fiber and stay put on the surface really well. But don’t run out and put an ink that is made like paint into your fountain pen just yet since those are a big no-no in these. The particulates tend to build up and clog the passages that ink travels through and soon your favorite pen is just a short stick with a pointy end.

After wading through all this I assume you are wondering what the point is. Well, what if you could have the positives of a pigment based ink without the negatives? Wouldn’t that be great? Our friend carbon can be refined into very, very tiny particles which theoretically shouldn’t clog a fountain pen and are very black. With that in mind both Sailor and Platinum in Japan have developed fountain pen safe fluid using this technology creating a new category of ink: carbon black.

Testing

Recently one of my favorite people was super nice (thanks Mia!!) and gave me both a bottle of the Platinum carbon black and a sample of the Sailor version of the same. I immediately wondered how they performed especially if compared to each other and a traditional dye based black ink. Since I like to answer obscure questions I did a few tests to determine the shades of grey among black inks.

As a control ink I chose J. Herbin’s Perle Noire black since it is rich, dark, and performed well for me. These attributes made it a good representative sample of dye based inks in this color. The paper I conducted just about all the tests on is my favorite and oft used Clairefontaine 90g gridline white pad.

Sheaffer Snorkel Pens — The pens used in the testing (L to R): Stub, Left Oblique, Right Oblique.

Deciding on what pens to have in this test was a bit harder. First I wanted them to be of the same construction with similar nibs. Next I didn’t think it would hurt to try a pen with a delicate filling and feed system to give the ink a fighting chance of causing some kind of havoc if so inclined. In the end I didn’t have three identical pens but I did have three that were greatly similar with wide, wet nibs that would allow the ink to boldly go onto the paper like no ink had gone before (forgive my lapse into Trek there). Sheaffer Snorkels were my test instruments sporting a stub, a right oblique, and left oblique nibs. An additional plus was that the Snorkel has a rather tricky ink delivery system which met my requirements on the second point. I’ve shown these pens in the image above. Don’t forget to click on this and all of the following ones to see them larger.

Writing

I filled the pens and it seemed to me that the carbon inks were a bit thinner. That impression is of course subjective but I can state that the flow quality was very good. All three inks wrote well and there was no way to tell which was which by feel. If you look past my lousy handwriting you’ll see that the two inks in question allowed me to form words and lines without any injury or unexpected explosions. Score one for them!

None of these inks had any bleedthrough on the Clairefontaine paper even though the pens were not stingy in their application of the dark liquids. Drying time was rather quicker for the carbon blacks than for the J. Herbin.

Color

Scanning in ink samples is never perfect but I think if you look closely you can see that the Sailor and Platinum lines I wrote (really scribbled) on the sample sheet are not as dark as the Perle Noire. I couldn’t see much difference between the two carbon inks and both seemed greyer in tone than blacks I used normally.

I did a swatch of the three subjects to get a better idea of depth of color. What is seen indeed supports my observation that the carbon black inks are not incredibly dark. To me it seems that the Platinum is darker than the Sailor but if so it’s a very small difference.

Sponge

One thing advertised about the pigmented carbon inks is that they are “permanent”. I always say nothing is permanent and I think a single match would make a mockery of writing fluids that claim. Barring that how does one determine this in normal circumstances? I can’t wait around for 10, 5, or even .001 years to see if time takes a toll and fades the written pages but I can subject them to a bit of torture.

In this test I took a piece of the sturdy Clairefontaine paper and wrote some line and text on it in the three inks. After a few hours of drying time I took a damp sponge and ran it across them all in one swipe. The results show that the carbon based inks are pretty good at resisting running. The winner was the Platinum ink but the Sailor certainly wasn’t bad.

Soak

As long as we’re doing the tests aquatic I decided to give the inks a real workout. In this case I wrote in each ink on the Clairefontaine paper and let them dry an hour before trying the traditional method for determining if a person is a witch. This page was put underwater for 15 minutes and agitated about every minute. When done the sheet was left to dry and you can once again see the lines that held up best were written with the carbon blacks.

Feathering

To conclude this exercise I drew three lines in each ink next to each other not only on my trusty Clairefontaine paper but also on a more absorbent piece of Doane 20lb. The latter paper is typical of what you find in most pads (minus the grid/line layout, of course) and while not ideal for fountain pens it’s good for this test. The results look to me like feathering is minimal on the carbon inks although the Platinum seems to show a bit more than the Sailor. The traditional J. Herbin ink feathers a good deal on the lower quality paper. You can also see the relative blackness of these inks in these samples and Perle Noire most certainly is darkest, like being in a locked closet, compared to the others which are only dark in a waning crescent moon at night way.

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So what?

What did we find out? The biggest negative is that Sailor and Platinum carbon black are not as dark as traditional dye based inks. However, this might be made up for by a number of strengths they show such as quick drying time, good permanence in moist conditions, and little feathering. At least they function like a normal ink in the pens I’ve used so I won’t be staying up at night with nightmares of clogged feeds in my head. One last item is that I found Platinum listing a pigment based blue ink on their website. I don’t know anything about it or where it can be bought but it is intriguing and I’d love to give it a try in the future.

The question that the title of this post refers to is: “What was Han Solo encased in for his delivery to Jabba the Hutt?” Was it worth the wait or did you skip down to look at this out of curiosity?

December 15, 2009

There Can Be Only One (Winner)

The not-so-gigantic ink giveaway is over and the winner has been decided. I’m not going to tell you till I go over how the choice was made. This is a blatant attempt to increase the anticipation and totally ignores the fact you can skip ahead a few lines and find out.

I went through the comments and removed my responses. In one case someone had two comments but the second one was more in keeping with my loose requirements so I removed the first. That gave me 29 people who entered and could win. I then went to a random number generator site and set the range from 1 to 29 and generated said random number. That number was 6. I wonder if I can be more verbose about this simple procedure?

Anyway, click on the scan at the left to enlarge it and see the order and names. The winner (and I know you’ve just skipped to this part to find out) was Pennednpapered. Congratulations (but not a big one since this is only a bottle of ink and not the lottery)!

I was really happy to see many people I don’t know enter and write a bit about ink. Thanks to everyone who took the time to come over here to try their luck. I liked this so much that maybe I’ll do this again in a month or so. I do have this bottle of Omas ink that I’m not fond of and never used beyond a test and…

December 8, 2009

Gigantic Ink Giveaway!!

Well, it’s not that big. In fact it’s only one bottle but if you get really close it looks quite large. In celebration (well, in something) of my second consecutive mention in the (5th) Carnival of Pen, Paper, and Pencil, hosted this time by Goldspot pens, I’m playing Santa and offering up some Montblanc Racing Green ink. I’ve heard the folks at the white snow-cap brand are discontinuing this ink so I grabbed a bottle on my trip to Art Brown in NYC. Now it’s your chance to own it (minus a tiny little bit I used for the sample).

The rules:

Post a comment telling me your favorite brand and color of ink below. In one week on 12/15/09 at 2pm EST I will use a random number generator and pick a winner. It’s that easy! I’ll contact the person via their email address with the happy news. I’ll ship this international too! Just keep in mind how slow the mail is to some countries, please. Oh, pen in picture is not included, nor is the pad for that matter.

Since literally tens of people read this blog your chances are pretty dang good! Get on it and I wish you luck!

November 22, 2009

Pen, Paper, Ink, Pugless

The idea that effort can be saved by gathering tasks together to tackle as a single unit is not something that originated with me. Being both lazy and a procrastinator I find myself afloat in a sea of topics and items I wanted to write about but never got around to. Thus I’m applying that principle here in this stitched together post that I hope will intertwine some ink, paper, and pen items sitting around here.

Pen

I single-mindedly comb the world for Sheaffer Snorkels with interesting nibs. My day races by with me obsessively hunched over a monitor, a phone in my hand, utilizing a chip in my cerebral cortex that gives me a direct uplink to the Internet. OK, most of that isn’t true but I do look more often than the average person to see if I can find something cool.

A little while ago I got lucky and found myself a pretty good deal on a Sheaffer Snorkel with a traditional open nib. Not a run-of-the-mill example this had the FM3 marked nib (medium point flexible). These are hard to find (proverbial hens teeth, needle in a haystack, or bit of food a pug won’t eat rare) and when I was the happy owner the bill came to an astounding $22. Lucky? No…it was skill! OK, I got lucky. I thought I was the Baron of Penfindia until a friend found something similar for $11. Descent from smugness is sometimes so rapid you skin your knees.

What is odd is that this nib has less flex and a slightly narrower line than the other FM3 nib I have. It’s still flexible but not as giving as the predecessor nib in my collection. I have a feeling these specialty nibs were more handwork than the vast quantities of fine and medium nibs turned out by Sheaffer and that might explain such variances. Once I did get this pen restored I filled it with Private Reserve Supershow Blue ink and happily doodled away on the next topic of this post.

Paper

Once again Karen at Exaclair was nice enough to send me a few things to give my hasty and subjective opinions on. One of them was a pad of G. Lalo Vergé de France white paper. I’m used to using the smooth Clairefontaine paper when I need something to make ink form shapes on so this was a nice change. This is laid paper and the factors you immediately notice with this substrate (otherwise known as fancy-schmancy stationary) is it has visible watermarks, a bit of a tooth, and a substantial heft.

What is laid paper? Well, making paper is a lot more complex than most people think. It’s not just like you chop down a tree or mash up some recycling and you have a sheet of the white stuff. There are a number of steps that takes the raw materials through slurry, gets it flat, and then smoothes and dries it. The end product differs depending on the way these procedures are done. The part that we need to look at involves what is called a screen which is for capturing the pulp slurry creating a thin skin and allowing water to drain out of it. As the fibers rest they take on any pattern that is held in the screen like a watermark, for example. Most modern paper is made on a screen of a fine mesh of filaments and imparts a uniform, opaque look to the paper (except for the aforementioned water marks). Laid paper is a more old fashioned method where the screen is made of parallel filaments and the final product shows a ribbed texture when light passes through it.

I like laid finish quite a bit and in fact the boarder around this blog is my scan of some Crane laid note sheets I had on hand. The pattern in the fiber seems to enhance the paper’s attractiveness because it creates visual interest. Writing on this paper is a different experience from my typical papers since while not extremely rough you do feel the nibs contact on the sheet more. The act of writing somehow feels more formal and special. When I use it I feel all my words are profound and meaningful even though in reality they are incoherent scribbles that I don’t understand a few hours hence.

Specifically the Vergé paper is excellent in all areas. It’s 100gsm with 25% cotton fiber content so isn’t lightweight and shows almost no feathering. At first I thought there was bleed through on the paper but I quickly realized that these sheets are quite translucent and it what was written on the sheets could be seen as light passed through. When placed face down on a table it was less noticeable. That’s not a problem for me and since there are a number of available colors it might not be the case with those. Click on the images below for further enlightenment (or just boredom).

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Ink

Along with the paper came ink I’ve been wanting to try for a long time. I like black inks but I hate ones that aren’t dark, dark, dark. Also some seem to have a reddish-brown cast on the edges that I really don’t like. I certainly have not tried every black out there but there have been a few on my desk over the years. Knowing that some of the J. Herbin colors aren’t too saturated I wondered how the Perle Noire that arrived would perform. Happily I can report that it is a nice opaque dark black that I’ve not noticed any negatives to yet. There are a lot of black ink comparison reviews in blogland that are quite thorough so I’d recommend taking a look since this is just a quick impression.

Pugless

So we come to the end of my omnibus post. There’s a still a lot of items I need to get to but at least I’ve removed a few from my list. The pugs wonder why they aren’t pictured in this post due to the growing number of fans they seem to have. Maybe next time I’ll see what input they might have but for now the puga donnas will just have to keep snoring.

OK, I gave in. Here’s Mr. Puggy’s reaction to the Snorkel. He tells me it’s beneath his notice.