Smoky Quartz and Jungle Volcano

Allow me to show off a couple of new inks! First...Jungle Volcano!

"Jungle Volcano 2" by Krishna, plus a couple of other orange-ish ones, for comparison.

I figured after my angry tirade about my lost love...Orange Hi-C...leaving me all heartbroken and stuff, thanks to those soulless oligarchs who pull the puppet strings at McDonalds...that a happier article about something orange-related was in order.

A new ink company from India called Krishna Inks recently landed on my radar when I heard about their “Jungle Volcano” ink. It combines two of my favorite ink colors, dark orange and deep green, into one sheening masterpiece that is unlike any other ink I’ve ever seen. I’m hardly the first fountain pen nerd who has expounded on this stuff online, and past reviewers have done this with far better camera equipment than I have, so your mileage may vary.

It’s called “Jungle Volcano 2” now, because it seems that serious floods in India where the ingredients for it come from have forced the company to change how they formulate it, but they are said to have also improved it’s drying time when that happened. This is basically a dark “lava orange” ink (some say it’s more of a reddish-brown), that sheens out in a “jungle green” color, hence the name. Here’s a writing sample, such as it is with my old Samsung digital camera, with two other orange inks I have for comparison (click the photo for a larger image):

The closest ink color I’ve seen to this is Sailor Shikiori “Okuyama” (or, “Remote Mountain”), which looks anywhere from a russet orange to a plum color, depending on the paper you use, and it too has a slight green sheen. At $15.00 for a small 20ml bottle of Okuyama, Sailor's ink is more expensive than the $8.00 USD + shipping I paid for the small bottle of Jungle Volcano.

However, drop-for-drop, I suppose that’s still a bit pricey…which brings me to my only complaint about this excellent ink...because this is easily the smallest bottle of fountain pen ink I’ve ever seen! I suspect there are bigger bottles of nail polish out there than this... Although I wouldn’t know for sure. I don’t buy nail polish. (Insert dumb jokes here.) I’m told that these do come in a slightly larger 30ml bottle now, however.

I put Jungle Volcano 2 into my clear demonstrator Nemosine Singularity with a 0.6mm “re-entry” stub nib, which is as close to a medium italic stub nib as I happen to have, just to see how it performed on a “smaller yet not too fine” nib. I’m not sure that my camera picked up the green sheen perfectly; sorry about that. However, my little Samsung camera *did* pick up the stains it left on the inside of my converter. That pen is now soaking in a gentle bath of homemade pen-flush, in the hopes that it will soak out of it. (Update: it did indeed remove the staining, without any fuss.) The ink is so saturated that it also left a sort of orangey-green residue on the pen’s feed, after I’d had the pen inked up with it for a couple of months.

(I know…"clean your pens more often, John!")

Next, here’s another outstanding ink that a dear friend and pen-pal in Orlando, Florida kindly just sent me: Pelikan Edelstein Smoky Quartz! What a fun surprise!

This is one of Pelikan's famed Edelstein Inks of the Year, and it lives up to the name. On both Clairefontaine and Tomoe River paper, it reminds you of smoky hand-blown glass from some Venetian glassblower's shop. And just look at that gorgeous ink bottle! One day, once it's empty, it will double as a reusable ink well.

I could not resist showing it off here. I put it in my newest pen: another Nemosine. This one is an all-metal Nemosine "Fission", in the Gunmetal Grey color. (Poor Nemosine…they are going out of business, and are selling their pens on a final closeout sale at this time, which is how I got mine so affordably.) Here's a writing sample; click the photo for a bigger image:

The ink is WONDERFULLY smooth! It also dries quickly. I don't do those complex ink tests; I'm afraid that there are better pen & ink reviewers than me out there who have better video camera gear, and who make actual YouTube videos of ink water resistance & other tests. I just want to "blog"; I'll leave ink videos to the pros. :-)

One thing I like about this pen is the thread-to-post thing. You can see the threads on the end of the pen barrel, there. However, I had a little trouble getting the pen I wanted when I ordered that Fission from Nemosine's website. See these nibs in the following photo? Both of these are supposed to be Nemosine's 0.8 mm nib. The new Fission pen they first sent me...along with my unsightly fingerprints on it's grip section...is the one on the bottom of this photo:

You can click the photo to see a larger image.

I’d had good luck with that particular Nemosine nib before; it currently sits in that Jinhao pen you see there. However, when this one arrived on my new Nemosine Fission, it had…I don’t know what you’d call it. A broad nib, maybe? But only enough of the nib surface would touch the paper so that it barely wrote like a Fine nib. Maybe it was mis-ground at the factory? No harm done; I simply emailed Nemosine and told them they'd sent me a “busted nib” (heh…) and could they please remedy this. They apologized and sent me a whole new nib unit, complete with a spare converter! Quite kind of them!

However, when it arrived the second time... it was the same nib, again!

Close-up ofClick the photo for an even bigger image. These are BOTH meant to be a Nemosine 0.8 mm nib.

The second one I got was a little smoother than the first one, but as you can see by the close-up shot of the other 0.8 mm Nemosine stub nib I have from a year or so ago, they do not look at all alike at the nib tip. Now that I've received this nib from them twice, I can only assume that something has gone awry over at Nemosine, and with them going out of business, we may never know exactly what it was. As I mentioned, I have my original 0.8 mm nib I'd bought a year or so ago stuck into a Jinhao Shimmering Sands pen there, and here’s a writing sample with it to show you the difference in how it looks against the new “sorta-0.8 mm”  nib I got from them…twice.

Click the image for a bigger picture, and a closer look.

Here's another, more close-up "nib writin' test" with these two versions of it, along with a Goulet Pens Medium nib I have stuck in my Conklin All American pen, to show off that nice Conklin pen--er, I mean, for comparison:

It may be a bit hard to see the difference in the width of those pen strokes; I apologize for that. You can click that picture for a bigger version of it to appear on your screen.

Having said all this...I do like my Nemosine, and this is not an insurmountable problem. These are standard #6 size nibs that can be replaced, if all else fails. And I love these two inks! :-)

On to a slightly different subject. Remember my absurd trip to the zoo this past summer, whereupon I got robbed at horn-point by a devil-possessed goat bandit? THIS arrived, seemingly at random, in the mail the other day, "oh, har har har". To my wonderful pen pal who sent this... you know who you are. :-)

It's now pinned to my fridge with that epic fridge magnet. :-)

See you at the mailbox.