What is your favorite pen brand?

[papertowels@lemmy.one]

If you want to ball on a budget, you can get a steel f701 pen from zebra for $10, slap a fisher space pen refill in it, and call it a day. It's what I use.

[papertowels@lemmy.one]

You can chuck a fisher space pen refill in the f701 if you want to spice it up

[papertowels@lemmy.one]

I commented this elsewhere, but I figured it deserves it's own top level comment.

You can take an affordable stainless steel zebra f701 and swap out the ink with a fisher space pen refill for a solid, utilitarian pen for less than 15 bucks.

[papertowels@lemmy.one]

I'm not familiar with the pilot refill, what about that swap do you enjoy?

[crabandbroom@lemmy.ml]

I have a Plaisir Platinum fountain pen that's awesome. It was pretty cheap as far as pens go but it writes really nicely and has a good solid feel to it.

For day-to-day disposable pens I like the Zebra Sarasa ones, or the Pilot P500 for drawing. I bought a big box of the P500s to keep in reserve in case they ever stop making them lol.

[hallettj@leminal.space]

Pilot Hi-Tec-C is a gel pen with refills that happen to fit in the Space Pen. It puts down a crisp, fine line.

The problem with the stock Space Pen is that it's a messy ballpoint. I might be getting worse-than-typical results due to being left handed, but in general I find ballpoints don't write crisp lines, and the ink smudges on my hand much more than gel pens do. But with the gel swap I do lose the feature of being able to write upside-down.

[papertowels@lemmy.one]

I'll have to try it out! I currently use fisher space pens, and while the pen is reliable, I definitely notice that it's not guaranteed to write evenly.

Was there any hacks you had to do to fit the refill?

[ohvenus_baby@lemmy.ml]

This kind of intrigues me. I may give it a shot. What is a good decent pen for say 20 dollars. Smooth, thin line. Say. 5 or so.

[ohvenus_baby@lemmy.ml]

What price range would this fall under in comparison to some of the moderate levels of pen craftmanship?

[papertowels@lemmy.one]

I have no clue, I'm more utilitarian than fancy. I've tried fountain pens but found them to be too high maintenance.

The f701 is 8 bucks, a space pen refill is another 9 dollars or so.

So for 20 bucks you have a stainless steel pen that will last forever, while writing in damn near all conditions. Looks snazzy enough to trigger the "I better not leave this" for me, too.

[hallettj@leminal.space]

Yes; first pull the black plastic piece out of the end of the refill. I read that there needs to be a little airflow into the refill for ink to flow, and when the back of the refill is jammed into the pen that can cut off airflow so you might cut a little notch in the end of the refill where the black plastic piece was. I also sometimes trim about 4mm off the end of the refill, or put a tiny bit of wadded paper in the pen for spacing. But I do this a little differently every time I put a new refill in.

[papertowels@lemmy.one]

Thank you kindly!

[daytonah@lemmy.ml]

I have a bright orange with carbon fibre trim kaweco sport. The opus88 I have is demonstrator so transparent, so I wanted something different. And maybe because it was the last one at the pen show.... Lol.

[meowzedong@lemmygrad.ml]

I've seen those orange ones, but was never much of a fan. The demonstrators are beautiful though. There's nothing quite like seeing a beautiful ink sloshing around inside.