A Fistful of Conklins

Cue the Ennio Morricone music.

Thanks to some very dear friends in the pen pal world, I'm now the proud owner of four different Conklin pens, so I figured I'd show them off. From left to right, they are:

1. My Conklin "Mark Twain" Crescent Filler, so named because it was a favorite of Mark Twain himself. He is said to have claimed that he preferred it to "ten other pens".

2. My gorgeous Conklin All American, in the "Old Glory" special edition: a birthday gift last year from The Amazing Dayna. You don't get the rest of her name, for privacy reasons. She has super powers and lives on a space ship over Area 51, where she secretly monitors your thoughts with telepathy.

3. My equally gorgeous Conklin Limited-Edition Duraflex; #1837 of only 1898 made, in this mesmerizing deep-blue & black marbled resin with rose-gold trim. It came with a bottle of 120th Anniversary Blue ink.

4. My absurd little Conklin Minigraph, in the "Purple Dunes" color, with a #5 factory original nib that barely works. More on that in a bit.

Yafa, the parent company from Asia who bought & revived the old "Conklin Pen Company" (they own Monteverde, as well), makes the Mark Twain Crescent Filler largely in the same style as the 100 year old originals: it has a crescent-shaped filler button on the side which does not interfere with your hand at all when the pen is in use. That button squishes down an internal ink sac when you press it. There's a safety ring to keep you from doing this accidentally and spraying ink all over yourself. The sac then expands back into it's natural shape when the button is released, allowing you to fill it with ink. I'm pretty sure most of you already know that, though.

I hope you don't mind the "Old West" theme. I was in a mood.

I bought the Crescent Filler from an eBay vendor when the one I really wanted, in black & rose-gold trim, simply could not be had for under $150.00. I felt this was too expensive for a steel-nib pen and a filling system that can leak if the sac wears out, so my 2nd choice was this fire engine red one with gold trim. It came to $50 + shipping. I don't know why... maybe the red ones are less popular? As soon as it arrived, I saw it in person and decided I'd made the right choice. I found the bright red, chased-patterned pen & shiny gold trim to be very striking.

Unfortunately, there's that "obsolete" filling system. I'm NOT judging, here. Fountain pens themselves are already "obsolete" compared to modern roller-ball pens, disposable ball points (yeechhh...), or for Pete's sake, just using a mobile device or email for sending messages. (Did you know that email itself is considered so dated, that some younger people don't know what the "e" in "email" even means? No joke!) So if you're a fountain pen aficionado, then "obsolete" doesn't bother you; it just translates to "nostalgia".

That being said, the ink sac in my Conklin Crescent Filler was toast upon arrival... the very first time I inked it up, ink oozed out of the slit in the pen barrel where the crescent button sticks out and got all over my hand & all over the pen. And...the CHEAP pot-metal nib in it didn't write.

At all.

Disappointed, I sent it to Yafa for warranty repair, and was without my shiny new toy for almost 3 weeks. It came back with a new sac, but hadn't been cleaned in any way that I could tell, and it had the same scrap metal nib in it! That nib was un-salvageable and ended up being tossed in a trash can. A Goulet Pens #6 medium nib took it's place, for a while. I tried a Goulet fine nib in it first, but it wrote so dryly that I put a Medium one in it instead, to lay down more ink. My thoughts are that the Goulet nibs are a fraction of a millimeter thicker than the original Conklin nibs, given how hard it was to install or remove the things from the Conklin nib unit, possibly restricting ink flow. (That's been fixed, though... read on.) The cap posts very nicely & is well balanced while posted. You look like some sort of pulp fiction-era hotshot while writing with it.

The second pen in the list is the Conklin All American, in the Old Glory special edition. This pen belongs in your pocket every Fourth of July, I tell you! It came with an Omni Flex nib which didn't work any better than the nib in my Crescent Filler did. That nib went from laying down an immense, triple-broad style line for perhaps one or two words, to hard starts, to no ink at all by a sentence or two...and that was without flexing it.

I emailed Goulet Pens from whence it came about this and asked if the nib could be fixed. Their response was to offer to sell me another of their own #6 nibs to replace it with. Gee, "thanks". I already have a few of those lying around, so a Goulet #6 medium nib lives in it now. After I replaced the nib, my Old Glory writes very nicely. No hard starts or skips, and of course those Goulet nibs are from Jowo, so they're quite buttery-smooth, if a bit stiff.

One thing Conklin does with their converter-style pens that I wish all other pen makers would do, is they thread their converters! A huge "plus", right there. It won't let slip your entire grip section to plunge into the bottom of an ink bottle when you're filling it. This has happened to me before, and it will make you use ugly swear words.

Third from the left in the photo up there is the Pen Chalet limited edition Conklin Duraflex. You can see from the writing sample here in a moment that it does indeed flex, but if you do it for too long it will railroad on you. It's also got a somewhat softer feel than the flex nibs found on Noodler's pens, which is nice! This was a gift I received recently from my wonderful pen pal from Down Under, who we'll call Mystery Lady to protect her secret identity. She also has super powers. She fights crime with her sidekick (a fearless cat who has a cape, and can turn invisible) by night, and monitors online fountain pen forums by day to make sure people behave themselves.

The bits of white fiber on my green felt pad there are stray dog hairs. I eventually gave up trying to "pluck" them all off of the green felt.

This pen also has the threaded converter, and it has magic powers: people who see it are hypnotized; they stand there staring at it going "Ooh" and "Aaah" like they'd never seen a pen before, while you cut ahead of them in line at the grocery store checkouts.

The wonderful Mystery Lady also sent it with a spare Conklin medium nib unit, just in case the Duraflex nib didn't work. (Those Omni-Flex nibs have earned a certain negative reputation online. Yafa seems to lack quality control in their nib department. But, I digress.)

Fortunately, that wasn't the case this time, but then it occurred to me: those Conklin nib units are more or less universal between the different Conklin pens that accept a #6 nib, so I ended up putting the extra nib she sent into my Crescent Filler instead! "Voila!" the ol' Mark Twain Special now writes with style and aplomb! The new nib works much better than the original one did; I swear, it somehow feels even better than the Goulet Jowo nib. How did THAT happen? It's made in Asia, so the "medium" nib writes closer to a fine, but this only served to elevate my Crescent Filler back to it's original retro-glory. Thank you SO MUCH, Mystery Lady from Down Under!

Here is a photo of the first three pens, sitting alongside a Lamy Vista, to give you an idea of their size:

Do people buy Lamy Vista pens just to use as props in "pen size comparison photos"?

And remember that grey ink comparison I did from last week, with the painfully shoddy photography? I ended up liking that Monteverde Smoke Noir ink so much that I ordered a whole bottle of it. That's going to be my go-to ink for that Crescent Filler, now. Monteverde Smoke Noir is more of a light black than a flat grey, and I feel that it adds a certain "vintage-y" touch to an already "vintage-y" pen. Plus, the Noir inks are lubricated... that may be why that newer Conklin nib works so well, compared to the Goulet #6 it had when I was just using ordinary black ink in it. I seem to have found the pen-ultimate (see what I did there?) combination of pen, nib & ink. I wonder if the fact that Conklin and Monteverde are owned by the same company has anything to do with that? Any thoughts?

Finally, there's the pen I bought on a lark: the Conklin Minigraph. Annoyingly, it came in the very same sized box as the other, bigger pens, which makes it look absurd. Well... I'm probably judging too harshly, but the box does seem to dwarf it.

I got it from eBay as well, back before I knew what a bad reputation the nibs in Conklin pens had from the early days of ownership by Yafa. I didn't realize how small it really was until it arrived. It can only use Standard International Short cartridges; it currently has a Kaweco Palm Green cartridge in it. And...of course...it did not write.

At all.

This one, I didn't bother sending to Yafa, which is silly of me, because I paid good money for it, right? I eventually got around to pulling the nib & feed out of it (friction-fit this time; no nib collar) and I found a bunch of yellowy-orange gunk inside the grip section. It had an appalling resemblance to ear wax. Yuck! No wonder it wouldn't write! What on Earth...?? Some kind of adhesive? Packing/storage goop, like the nasty Cosmoline stuff that the Russians used to use for long term rifle storage? "This pen will be on a shelf for a while, unloved, so let's protect it from Armageddon by dropping it into a sealed drum of Cosmoline." Sounds legit, right? Seriously...what was that crap?

I cleaned it out, cleaned the feed & nib, etc...and tried again, with that Kaweco ink cartridge. I figured that maybe if I can get it to work, it'd make a decent pocket pen. It eventually did, but writes dryly, and the nib feels like it has no tipping material on it at all. It's not that pleasant to write with. I tried swapping the nib out with another #5, but the only other #5 nibs I have lying around are from Fountain Pen Revolution, which I'm afraid had no better quality control than the older Yafa ones. They didn't write any better. (FPR...that was yet another learning experience. Sigh...) So I put the original nib back in it. It's okay; I can try smoothing it out later, and it's tiny size does make it useful for packing around with my Midori passport-sized Traveler's Notebook.

Don't get me wrong; this little pen does indeed have potential. I just wish Conklin paid better attention to their nibs. Here's a photo of it next to a Kaweco Sport (both capped and un-capped/posted), to give you an idea of it's tiny size:

Those are standard sized poker chips, to give you an idea of how small that thing is.

The Minigraph is so small that it'll fit in your wallet. If you need a pen that small, which can have it's uses, and you can't be made to stoop to using a ball-point pen (and let's face it, who could blame you), then it does have potential, if the nib issue could be resolved. For now, here's that writing sample from all four of them. The Duraflex pen is the only one with any appreciable line variation. Actual natural sunlight was involved in the photography, this time.

Assistant Editor Maggie contributed moral support to the making of this article. She says to tell you that the Quick Brown Fox is a ridiculous poser, and would not enjoy life as her personal chew-toy.

Thank you for visiting!