Rotring Fountain Pens 

While tidying up part of my desk yesterday morning I found a couple of Rotring 400 (F) nibs rolling around, along with a rather battered looking cartridge converter. They’d probably been there for years and I had no idea what I’d intended to do with them in the first place, so I just had to flush, soak, clean, dry and install them in a pen and see how they worked.

One of the nibs turned out to be squeaky-clean (at least on the outside), the other had traces of Parker Quink Blue Black in it, and the converter was completely inoperable and a total write-off.

I put the first nib into the pen and installed a full converter. No ink flowed. I shook the pen. No disaster happened. Nothing.

The same thing happened with the other nib.

And then I remembered the disastrous experiment in the early ’90s I had conducted with technical pen ink, when I’d come to the conclusion that while the fountain pen was the perfect writing instrument, the inks available at the time left much to be desired because they were neither saturated nor waterproof - and while Rotring Black technical pen ink was the best thing ever, the pens it lived in were much too fragile and scratchy for daily use. So why not use the Rotring technical pen ink in the Rotring fountain pens?

Well, I soon found out why not. And I’d filled two Graphite 400s which were now clogged. And then I compounded the error by putting the sections into Rotring Technical Pen cleaning fluid. Two badly corroded pen sections later, I wrote to Rotring in Germany with my story of woe, admitting that the screw-up was mine and offering to pay for replacement sections and nibs.

A few weeks later I had a letter from the Rotring agent in Singapore, offering to replace the buggered-up parts for free. I accepted with gratitude, offered to pay again, was refused, and soon had a couple of working pens once more.

I eventually stopped using fountain pens because of the ink issue and switched to using the Pentel Sterling ballpoint pen. The Pentel ballpoint refills were superior, in my view, to the Parkers, and when the Sterling and its refills disappeared off the shelves in Australia I switched to Parker and Penline Gel refills and use them to this day. There is still an ink issue - not waterproof - but these pen-and-ink combinations write pretty well (with other ballpoints my handwriting turns into shaky fowl scratches).

In January this year I discovered a whole new world of “bulletproof” inks when googling “waterproof fountain pen ink” and now I’m come full circle to fountain pens. I use the Rotring 400s and a couple of new black Parker Sonnets with Noodler’s Bulletproof Black, and am waiting for a shipment of Rotring Esprit (Graphite) pens to arrive. The Esprits appear to be the 400?s successor, with harder looking lines.