Yesterday was Friday the 13th – a day which is to some people unlucky, to others lucky, and to some more others, just another day. I had thought I would fall into the “just another day” category, when I received a tweet from @PilotPenUSA that I had won their Twitter contest, and I would receive a Pilot Pen Pack from them! I still don’t know what’s inside the pen pack, though, but I’ll blog it out when I receive the prize! Just hoping that they won’t tell me later on “Oops we are sorry but we forgot to mention that this contest is open to U.S. residents only…”
That was the first surprised I received this morning. The second surprise was that I was told by Edison Pen Co. on Twitter that my Muji post was being featured on their paper.li page! Whoa, that was QUICK. I feel so honoured to be up on that list of articles! And besides, thanks to all these publicity (including that of other sources), I have finally crossed the 1000 clicks mark!
Thanks for everyone’s support, I’ll be rolling out more ideas and ways to make this blog more interesting, do check back once in a while!
Because of my good mood, I had a sudden inspiration to draw stuff on paper. I didn’t know what to draw, but I just wanted to. So I tried drawing fountain pens. Then I started to wonder about some pens’ filling mechanisms, and how some of them actually have space inside the barrel to keep a spare cartridge. Why do they do this? Why not fill up that extra space with a bigger converter or a fatter cartridge so that more ink can be stored inside? I then came up with an idea to have a “double-converter” system, and then started drawing… and this was what came out:
My silly drawings of a silly idea. Drawn with a Parker Urban and a Lamy Vista.
I am not a fountain pen expert. Nor a product designer. Nor an architect. Nor an engineer. Nor a physicist. So I have no idea whether this will work or not. But firstly, does this mechanism exist? If it does, which pen uses it? If it doesn’t, why not? Not feasible? Patent issues? It’s probably a combination of a few kinds of filling systems and I feel kind of silly to put up something like that to showcase my ignorance, but I just thought, oh well, why not just blog it out…
Anyway, just to describe the drawing from left to right:
1) Fountain pen with no ink
2) Fountain pen with upper rubber sac compressed and lower rubber sac squeezed, then dipped into ink
3) Lower rubber sac desqueezed, ink fills it
4) Upper rubber sac released, ink gets sucked up from the lower sac to fill it up
5) Lower sac squeezed again and dipped into ink
6) Lower sac desqueezed, filled with ink
7) When the ink from the lower sac has been depleted, upper sac can be compressed to fill the lower sac with ink
And voila, you might be able to use twice the amount of ink than an ordinary converter would provide.
I searched around online and found that Visconti has also a double-reservoir system which looks awesome. Another reason for me to invest in a Visconti pen some time…
I am the founder of this website.
Chemist by day, slacker by night, fanatic of stationery all the time.
I write with my left hand, but can also do the same with my right hand – it just won’t look very pretty.
Lol Wayne, you're really quick! I just posted this, mulled around the house for a while and you commented already. I'm glad you like my drawings, but do note that they are not accurate to scale nor are they accurate drawings of the real insides of fountain pens! 😛 Thanks for dropping by~
I love your drawings Maybelline. I am a product designer and is interested in the design of fountain pens therefore just joined the group. I am a new user to these pens, one day I hope to design a fountain pen. Thanks for sharing your thoughts =)