I use fountain pens for two reasons:

(1) Comfort. A fountain pen trains you to write with light pressure and is much less tiring than a ballpoint, rollerball, or pencil.

(2) Low cost. Fountain pens need not be expensive, compared to other usable pens. (I exclude disposable ballpoints that require super-hard pressure and produce ugly writing.)

A cheap but serviceable rollerball or ballpoint pen costs at least $2, and you're likely to lose it or have it wander away within a month or two. That means that in two years, you'll spend perhaps $25 on pens. That same $25 will buy you a quite usable fountain pen and enough ink for several years.

Even a high-end fountain pen, allowing $200 for pen, ink, and possible repairs, is cheaper over its useful life (20 to 40 years) than cheap ballpoints. After all, $200 spread over 20 years comes to 19 cents per week.

Repairs and troubleshooting :-
Fountain pens are repairable! The nib (point) is unlikely to wear out in one person's lifetime. Everything else is fixable. Actually, so is the nib...

Here are a couple of easy repairs:

Cleaning: A pen that is left unused with ink in it for several weeks will probably become clogged. Flushing with water will clear it. In difficult cases, the nib can be soaked in water, but do not soak parts of an old pen that are not normally in contact with ink, because some early plastics are not waterproof. A small amount of ammonia or liquid detergent can be added to the water.

I have also found that highly soluble inks, such as Sheaffer Skrip red, will tend to clean out a pen as you write with it. Every so often I run a cartridge of Sheaffer red through each of my pens.

Increasing ink flow: If ink does not flow freely enough (i.e., you have to press down hard to write), and cleaning doesn't fix the problem, then the tiny gap between the two tines of the nib probably needs widening or unclogging. I've done this several times by carefully inserting a razor blade into it from the tip, then withdrawing it equally carefully. Proceed slowly; a small change, too small to see, is generally enough.

Scratchy pen: First look at the tip under a magnifying glass and see if one of the tines is bent up or down relative to the other; if so, correct it.

If nothing is obviously wrong, you can generally smooth out a pen by writing a few words or sentences on 1500-grit sandpaper, varying the way you hold the pen as you do so.

Sac replacement: If you can get to the rubber ink sac easily, you can replace it. (Complex disassembly is best left to an expert.) Sacs are available from The Pen Sac Company. The traditional cement for sealing the sac to the rest of the mechanism is shellac. Do not get wet shellac directly into contact with ink, since wet shellac instantly becomes very gooey upon contact with water. Frank Dubiel recommends clear nail polish or rubber cement.

Making do: A pen that you can't fill (because of a broken sac, unavailable cartridges, or whatever) can still be used enjoyably as a dip pen.

Inks :-

Not all inks are fountain pen inks. In particular, drawing ink or India ink designed for dip pens or drafting pens should not be used in fountain pens, since it will clog then pen and its residue cannot be removed.

Fountain pen inks consist of water, one or more soluble dyes, and a small amount of a wetting agent (detergent) both to clean the pen and to help the ink adhere to paper that may be slightly oily.

For more than 75 years, virtually all fountain pen inks have been based on soluble aniline dyes. Sheaffer Skrip "writing fluid, the successor to ink" was one of the first brands to prominently advertise the fact that it is soluble and noncorrosive.

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