Earlier this year, there was a post on the r/fountainpens subreddit, and I was immediately hooked. So I fired off a message to John Albert, then in his early days of pen turning, and reserved a rod of his quasi-Tibaldi vintage celluloid. Though I wanted to make a Pelikan clone at first, I decided after a little deliberation that an elder sister to my Namiki Impressions would be more interesting.

And so:

It’s quite a wonder to behold, isn’t it?

I ended up asking for a clone of the Pilot Custom 74, in silver trim. I also wanted a soft fine nib and so I ended up ordering a Custom Heritage 91 to be delivered straight to John so he could use the section and nib immediately.

While I’m currently using it with a CON-50, the pen can also take a CON-70, as with the similar pens from Pilot and Namiki. The cap bands were placed in the same spots; the clip was the part that took longest to make, and I’m very happy with (and impressed by!) how well it turned out.

Since the nib itself is a Pilot soft fine, it writes as one would expect: excellent feedback, a surprising amount of bounce, and a decent amount of line variation — nothing like the FA nib or the the soft nib on the Falcon/Elabo, of course, but admirable in its own right, and easily controlled. It goes over the paper easily, and is exactly how wet I like my pens to be: not a gusher, but not as dry as some Pelikan nibs can be. The Iroshizuku ink helps as well, of course.

Here’s another photo, since I’ve been carrying it around with me all week: