Teardown Tuesday: Fountain Pen

The subject of today's teardown is a pen that is designed to be torn down. In fact I need to do it more to tune it to my liking.The pen is the Noodler's Ink Ahab:This pen a flexible nib pen that can be used to make some interesting script. It's also cheap at $20.The main components of a fountain pen are the body, the section, the nib and feed, and the cap. You also need some mechanism to load the ink into the pen and store it in a way that doesn't get all over you when you're using it.The body is the easy part: it's the big thing on the right side of the picture above. It houses the ink-storage system -- in this case a plunger mechanism.The section is what you typically hold onto when using the pen. It also attaches the nib and feed to the pen. In this case the section attaches to the plunger feed system which you can also see in the picture.One of the key things that people look at in a fountain pen is the nib. This is the flashy part. Many times this is made of gold -- both for flash and flexibility. Oftentimes it has a chunk of iridium bonded to the tip to provide a long-wearing point.In this case it's just steel.The nib rests on the feed:The feed is what capillaries the ink the the nib. Additionally it has fins to catch excess ink that might slip by.The cool part of a flex nib (though I have yet to finish adjusting it) is you can really alter the line widths you can get![smugmug url="http://photos.vec.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=20466039_K4DpCx&format=rss200" imagecount="100" start="1" num="100" thumbsize="Th" link="lightbox" captions="false" sort="false" window="true" smugmug="true" size="L"]