Jules Jones

I took the the week off after Worldcon earlier this month, and one of the things I did was maintenance on a handful of my fountain pens. This included a Paili 013 vacuum filler. The resulting thread in the #fountain-pens channel on the Anonymous Claire Discord server is under the cut. I also took photos of the dismantling and promised to put them on Dreamwidth. There are no photos of the writing sample, in part because I don't post photos of my handwriting where it could link fannish name with wallet name, but mostly because the thing didn't actually like writing. I don't know how much of that was because I didn't really know how to use a vacuum filler properly - there is a thing where you have to unscrew the blind cap slightly in order to let ink out again when you want to write. But even when I tried that it wouldn't do a lot of writing. From the reviews I've seen there seems to be a quality control issue, and I obviously got one of the duds.

I bought this because I don't have a vacuum filler fountain pen, and I wanted to play with one, and this was a whopping £6 including p&p for one, or even cheaper per pen if you bought three. That's not a lot of money lost if it doesn't work. Alas, it didn't do the writing part of the job, although I did get to play with the filling mechanism. It's a demonstrator and I deliberately bought the clear one rather than one of the coloured transparent ones so that I could watch what it did. That was fun. :-)

This one went in the bin, partly because there was a crack that was probably my doing in the effort to clean it out. At that price I'd definitely consider getting another one in the hope of winning the quality control lottery, but I already have a lot of other cheap pens to play with first.