The pen arrived. I flushed it with water multiple times, drained the feed's water, by touching the nib on a soft napkin, waited for a while before I filled it with the wettest ink I owned. It wrote really rough (and not scratchy, there's a difference)—at the angle I write, and at all others. Ink's flow was scarce—it came out, and that too not properly, only after pressing the nib too much. I was devastated. I rummaged through the internet to find what might be happening. I found a lot of people who've had the same experience, but didn't find what exactly was wrong and how I could fix it. I gave it some days of non-stop writing, tried it with all the water-based inks I owned, but nothing improved.
After a week I went to Makoba's store in Bengaluru and regaled Ansh with my predicament. He tried it out and confirmed that it indeed was rough. He tuned it on an 8000 grit micro-mesh. He ran a few eights on it, tested, and repeated, until he felt the roughness lessen, and asked me to try. It felt much better. He asked me to write with it exclusively for a couple of weeks, because it takes time for a nib to get attuned to the writer's hand, angle and grip. I wrote for a couple of weeks. It became much better, but there were still these friction and ink-flow issues across different papers—Midori MD, Midori MD Cotton, Kokuyo Campus Flat Notebook paper (their neutral base paper), Roda Notes Notebook, Clairefontaine—both regular and ivory, and Rhodia.
Not knowing what to do, I researched more. While I was already aware of the Lamy Safari EF nib's notoriously temperamental sweet-spot, it was only during this recent revisit that I truly processed just how precise it requires you to be. You have to tilt it slightly towards the right for the ink to flow properly. I tried it and it worked. This is not to say that the fine-tuning didn't help—I had tried ALL writing angles in the first week, before the tuning, and none had worked, but after the tuning I stopped trying different angles and mostly stuck to my natural one. I felt this sweet-spot angle awkward to hold, but I endured to see if I could get used to it. After writing with it for a week more, I did get accustomed. It's not a big deal anymore. The caveat to this is that, I love that different pens and nibs lend my handwriting different flavours, styles, alphabet size, slant and speed. For me, adapting to that sweet-spot angle worked because I loved how my handwriting came out with it, which was definitely different than, say, how it comes with a Waterman Carene, or a Click Aristocrat. Unfortunately—as is the case with all fountain pens—there's no way to know if it'd work for you without writing with it for a while. I am embarrassed to say (but not really) that I watched a lot of videos, each multiple times, to get a sense of the writing experience as the content creator wrote with it; but it didn't really help much, because all of us have a unique hand to our writing.
My Lamy 2000 EF is writing well. My favourite ink with it so far—thanks to Ansh's suggestion—is Iroshizuku Yama-Budo.
I bought an EF (my first), knowing that German nibs, especially Lamy EFs, work more like Japan's Fs. If I knew about the sweet-spot and the peculiarity of EF nib, I would have, for this particular pen, gone with the F nib, even though it would not have exactly served a special purpose I bought the EF nib for—to be able to write long form content like essays, stories, sometimes letters, in short sized alphabets and edit them—take notes on the margins and in-between lines.
After this churn and figuring, it's working well for that purpose so far, after a month long acclimatisation.
My favourite papers to write on with it so far have been
Muji ("Notebook Paper", sourced from Japan, other Muji papers might not be as fountain pen friendly, discovered this from Doodlebug's youtube channel, and experimented myself). This is a more affordable option. It is surprisingly cheap for its quality and fountain pen friendliness.
Again on Ansh's suggestion, Nakabayashi Yu-Sari fountain pen friendly notebook (you can buy it from Makoba now!) He let me test-write in his personal notebook. Thanks Ansh! Yu-Sari costs along the lines of Midori MD, etc.
Thank you for reading the script of my TED talk.
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