A magnifying glass of about 3x to 5x is a big help when tuning up a fountain pen. The drawings below are a little out of proportion for the sake of illustration. They show a fountain pen as viewed from the end of the nib. The left portion shows a pen with properly aligned tines. The two halves of the iridium ball are aligned and the pen will write smoothly. The pen on the right may have been dropped or mishandled. For whatever reason, the halves of the iridium ball at the tip of the nib are out of alignment. The pen will scratch as it moves across the paper. With your fingernails press down on the high side and upward on the low side. Check your progress often with your magnifying glass. If the nib is stamped from steel, it should respond well to pressure from your fingernails. If it is a springy steel, it is designed to flex with varying pressures from your hand and add expression to the varying width of your strokes. Springy steel is also more difficult to press into a new shape. (The blue center is ink waiting to flow.)



Any fountain pen will write more smoothly as you use it and the nib becomes more polished through contact with the paper, as well as wearing in to the pattern of your hand and your writing. Exceptions are attempts to write on poor paper ill suited for a fountain pen and some cheap pens with poorly constructed nibs.



If the pen is hard to start writing and needs extra pressure, but then writes pretty well with normal pressure, the problem may be that the slit between the tines is uniform until the area at the iridium ball. If the nib is bent so the tines spread from one another at the ball, ink is not available to the paper where the ball touches the paper. Examine closely with a magnifying glass. Carefully squeeze the two halves of the ball with a thin nose pliers until the slot between the tines is uniform again.

