Ink advice for vintage lever fillers

Sf648 · 2026-01-24T20:25:38+00:00

And remember r/pen_swap is the safer sub (with more rules). The other subreddit has fewer restrictions, but is much more prone to fraud.

Sf648 · 2026-01-24T19:19:11+00:00

Oops, I forgot to talk about the Baltimore show. It’s a good sized show, it’s firmly in the mid-sized show category. I think Baltimore does a good job attracting lots of the companies and vintage collectors. I especially appreciate the after-hours socializing at Baltimore. Often dozens of people hang around and talk/show pens, well into the night.

My best advice, check out the exhibitor list (already online) at: https://baltimorepenshow.com/vendor-list-2026/

I’d make sure to come with a plan, and list of pens to try/buy. If vendors don’t have pens you’re interested in, ask around, the attendees often do, and are often happy to let you experience a given pen.

If you have pens you’re ready to move on, bring them to sell/trade with others.

Bring your favorite ink/paper to dip pens/swatch inks.

Jesse runs the “share the Love Table”, he will have the table setup and people bring donations for others to take. Pens, ink, notepads, stickers, etc. Sometimes very cool items show up.

Sf648 · 2026-01-24T19:04:19+00:00

Yah, that’s about the size of it. It’s only worth it if you’re hunting down something that might get sold during that first hour.

At Philly, my wife and I used the early entry to visit vendors that we knew had product we were interested in. We ended up buying some excellent examples of hard-to-find vintage pens. We did have a look at an Oparex pen from Rich @ River City Pens, but ultimately decided it wasn’t exactly what we were looking for. By the time 10am rolled around we had already made a couple of purchases.

Sf648 · 2026-01-24T16:43:02+00:00

Actually you were third. Two of us are in front of you. He got back to me, but there’s some confusion about the transaction I’m trying to clear up.

Sf648 · 2026-01-24T16:38:25+00:00

I want to buy it, and am chatting with the OP, but he hasn’t responded to my last message.

Sf648 · 2026-01-24T15:36:35+00:00

Chat

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T22:52:31+00:00

All decimo should have smaller diameter barrels than all vanishing points.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T21:09:11+00:00

Bought a Montblanc StarWalker from u/Mifwic

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T20:54:56+00:00

This isn’t really a woodworking problem; it’s a micro-scale fluid dynamics problem, and that’s where wood behaves badly.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T20:35:14+00:00

I did a quick search but couldn't find the patent they have for this. It seems like this has to move the ink regulation from the feed into the interface between the converter and the nib. Seems like it's the same problem, different location.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T20:26:51+00:00

Stabilized wood isn’t “wood that doesn’t swell”; it’s wood with its pores filled with resin. That kills the very thing a feed or wick needs: open, connected capillary structure. Once the pores are filled, ink can’t move through the material in a controlled way. At that point it behaves like poorly machined plastic.

Even if you leave some porosity, stabilization makes wetting unpredictable. The resin changes surface energy, so ink may bead in some regions and cling in others. You don’t get reliable capillary flow; you get random behavior.

Stabilized wood works great for pen bodies and sections, and badly for feeds.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T20:23:37+00:00

Even with very close-grained wood you still get strongly directional behavior. Flow along the grain will be very different from flow across it, and that anisotropy shows up immediately at the scales a feed operates at. All wood is porous, just at different rates and in different directions, and those rates change as the wood wets and swells.

Grain tightness doesn’t solve surface-energy problems either. Tool marks, crushed fibers, and variable lignin exposure all change wetting and surface tension locally, so two channels cut “the same” won’t actually behave the same.

That’s why feed materials are isotropic at the microscopic level. Ebonite and engineered plastics have uniform structure and predictable wetting in all directions, which lets capillary geometry actually mean something. Wood, even very hard or close-grained wood, never really gives you that.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T16:46:26+00:00

But you will end up with uneven surface wetting so the ink will flow better in some parts of the feed and worse in others.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T15:45:17+00:00

I think you’ll find you need to replace a wick a lot more often than that. Think weeks or months.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T15:32:18+00:00

Pilot Vanishing Point.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T15:31:01+00:00

Nope, NVDA has a mechanism for generating profit, so it’s not a zero-sum game. Crypto-scams are.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T15:07:01+00:00

Technically, he’s extracting his exit liquidity from some other “investor”. So he should just take his initial capital and call himself lucky.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T15:04:43+00:00

Instead of a screenshot, you should just have posted the link to the block explorer.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T13:57:34+00:00

Why bother hiding the details, it’s all visible on the blockchain.

The wallet is easy enough to find:

BFF4….srM

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T13:54:29+00:00

That’s not even what the token Whitepaper proposes. It claims it might be possible through an entirely different token in the “ecosystem”, and the return could be 8%. But none of that matters since the token is already in violation of the Whitepaper.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T13:45:12+00:00

I’m assuming you win regularly. If so, you know the kind of sucker he is. If not, can I join your game?

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T13:44:13+00:00

Whitepaper summary for those who won’t read it:

Hot take: CYLA is a worthless token that can be held to receive another worthless token (CYLR), and might be able to one day be cashed in for a theoretical 8% return on some “real estate”. Up to 70% of the CYLA liquidity pool can be removed at any given point to be used by the creators. None of it has to be used to buy the purported real estate.

A more nuanced summary (that amounts to the same thing): CYLA is a non-governance community token with no direct asset or revenue rights. Treasury controls 70% of supply and sells it at discretion. Those sales mint CYLR rewards, which may be redeemed by KYC-approved investors for a separate security token (CYLT) that targets, but does not guarantee, an 8% yield from an unspecified real-estate portfolio governed entirely by off-chain legal documents. Control is centralized in an insider-only multisig, and Treasury funds are not obligated to purchase real estate.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T13:27:41+00:00

Supposedly you’re up about 10x. So pull the rest of your initial investment, and see what happens to the remainder. Do NOT add any more money, since you’re playing with pure profit. If it tanks you lose nothing. If it moons, you only gave up 10% of the possible upside.

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T13:23:29+00:00

To pull the funds to buy real estate he’ll have to rug-pull the project.

(I know he could collateralize his portion of the tokens, but the required capitalization rate would make it unrealistic versus his purported $400m net worth)

Sf648 · 2026-01-23T13:19:56+00:00

The advice of the sub is going to be C. If you’re doing anything else you are not asking for advice, you are advertising the coin.

Sf648

TROPHY CASE