Nib adjustment on my Pilot Metropolitan

Published on 04/26/13

This post is a cautionary tale.

I’ve loved how my Pilot Metropolitan writes. It is buttery smooth and very consistent. However, it has a medium nib and the ink flow seemed to be a little too wet. I tried adjusting the tines of the nib a little, but it didn’t help. In fact I had a feeling I made it worse.

I read a post somewhere about bending the feed of a pen after heating it up in almost boiling water. By bending the feed closer to the nib, you can slow the ink flow down. So I tried doing that this morning, and I broke the feed in half.

I fixed it by “gluing” it back together with some J-B Kwik. I wouldn’t recommend this, but in my case it worked (thank you, Lord). Not only does the pen still write, but the ink flow is now slowed down considerably, and it is writing more like I thought it should. The line doesn’t seem as consistent as it was before. And we’ll see how it starts up after sitting for awhile, but for now I think I am ok.

So the moral of this story is only do adjustments on junk pens unless you know what you are doing. I’m a starving freelance designer with a family and a mortgage. I can’t afford to spend $13 on a pen and not keep it in service for a good long while.

(Sorry I didn’t shoot a pic of the broken feed and the fix :).

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