Quill Fountain Pen – Orion Blue

Name: Quill Fountain Pen – Orion Blue
Brand: Good Made Better
Price: 350.0 USD
Availability: InStock

$350.00

THE STORY OF THE QUILL PEN

The aspect of our pens that makes them most distinctive when in hand are the engraved textures. This is an aspect caught in photos but only experienced physically. The Quill pen takes the tactile feel of said textures and ramps it up with a fully hand sculpted pen meant to resemble it's namesake.

These are solid ebonite with solid brass sections, and due to the nature of the shape these can only be used with short international cartridges – or dipped if you prefer. The nib is a Jowo 6, and as the nib sections don't align with the feather equally, included are a series of shims for the section to make alignment adjustments if you choose to swap out the nib on your own.

The Quill is capless and includes a stand to use and store it as a desk pen. The stand features an O-ring seal where the section meets the stand so as to quiet the pen as it's docked and also to help keep the nib from drying out. The base of the stand is solid brass and has anti-skid bumpers on the bottom.

The Caveats to Using Natural Materials (i.e. a Disclaimer)

We’ve chosen to primarily work with ebonite because of its unique warmth and the historic provenance it enjoys. Ebonite is technically a trade name for vulcanite, a hard rubber product made through vulcanization. The raw latex material used to make ebonite comes from the rubber tree, and while it requires human input to get it to the state in which I receive it, it is considered a natural material. Ebonite has been used for pens for many decades, as well as for other common items like musical instrument mouthpieces, tobacco pipe stems, and hockey pucks.

While it is a very lovely material, a couple of things about the product should be noted. When freshly machined it has a sulfuric smell to it, but this dissipates rather quickly in the open air and is temporary. It’s also best to keep it out of direct sunlight as colored ebonite will brighten with UV exposure, some colors being more prone to this than others. Black is much more stable in this regard, although it’s still recommended to keep the material out of direct sunlight.

With those caveats in mind, we use ebonite over more resilient man made materials for a number of reasons. I would argue no other material offers the richness and depth of ebonite—it’s simply one of the most beautiful materials to make pens from and one of the most satisfying materials to have in hand. To me, the fact that it changes over time is less a fault than a proper indication that it’s a tool being put to use. Everything we make is designed to be useful, durable, and beautiful—and in that order. Our hope is that the honeymoon period of our products doesn’t wear off and that they last you for many years, all the while taking on the marks and character of a well used tool.

The brass components are left raw and will darken and develop a unique patina with use. While we work to keep the brass clean and bright so it’s as fresh as it can be when you receive the pen, it may already show signs of oxidation from the time of our final handling to your initial one. This is natural to the material and is nothing out of the ordinary.

We try to incorporate an understated elegance into the products we make, and to that end most of our ebonite pens feature a matte finish. With time and use the pens will take on a bit of a natural sheen from handling, but they won’t ever achieve a high luster as is common with many polished ebonite pens.