What's your favourite refill ink brand.

I use only fountain pens, and I try to match the ink to the pen, to the nib and to the wetness I want.

For flex nib pens, I like Pilot, Noodlers and some Diamines. Otherwise, my ink drawer is almost as eclectic as my blade and razor drawers. Looking in there, I see Herbin, KWZ, Waterman (Blue Serenity my favourite), Oster, Aurora, Sailor, Dominant Industry, L'Arisan Pastellier and several different Diamines. The only ink cartridges I use are the ones for Kaweco Sport pens.

There are two ink things that I don't do. Firstly, I don't use inks with glitter etc. in them, as they can ruin a decent pen. Secondly, I never use green ink, as more than 50 years ago I worked for the Leo Burnett-LPE advertising agency, whose eponymous founder always signed in green ink, and we couldn't use green out of respect (fear?).
 
Pilot Iro Shizuku range of inks for my fountain pens. As a school kid used a Waterman with Parker blue ink.
Waterman inks are still good, but I'm not sure about latterday Parker Quinks. I love the Iroshizukus, especially tsukushi, ina-ho, yama-budo and asa-gao, and these are my favourites for modern Italian flex nib pens. The only drawback is the need to take out a mortgage to buy even the 15ml size.

Another consideration in choosing inks is the type of pen/filler. Some of the modern inks don't play nicely with older pens, especially the lever fill-vacuumatic-ink sac types, and a couple of mine have had to have new replacement sacs as (probably) using the "wrong" sort of modern ink has caused the sacs to harden or perish. I also think they can affect some older feeds and nibs adversely. For these reasons I mostly stick to Waterman and Diamine in older pens (Swan, Mentmore etc.).
 
Back
Top Bottom