Before You Blame the Pen: A Tuning Bench Manual for the Scratchy Nib

# Before You Blame the Pen: A Tuning Bench Manual for the Scratchy Nib There is a particular quality of sound that tells me everything I need to know in the first half-second. A good nib moving across 52gsm Tomoe River makes a sound like a whisper — directional, deliberate, intimate. A bad nib — or rather, an untuned nib — announces itself differently. It catches. It drags. It produces a sound less like a whisper and more like a thumbnail drawn across a window screen. Most people, at that point, box the pen up and return it. Or worse, they write it off entirely: *that's just what this pen does.* I've spent enough time at the bench to tell you: that sound is almost never the end of the story. It's usually the beginning of about two hours of work. --- ## The Loupe Comes First. Always. The single most destructive habit in the fountain pen community is reaching for an abrasive before reaching for a loupe. I understand the instinct — you're frustrated, the pen skips, the paper is being punished — but going straight to Micro-Mesh is like taking a belt sander to a piece of furniture before you've figured out whether it's the joint or the grain that's the problem. Sit down. Put the loupe to your eye. What you're looking for, first and foremost, is tine alignment. Hold the nib at eye level, perpendicular to your line of sight, and look at the tip straight on. In an aligned nib, the two tines meet cleanly at the tip — the tipping material (that tiny ball of iridium or rhodium alloy at the end of the slit) forms a single, unified dome. In a misaligned nib, you'll see one tine sitting higher or lower than the other. Sometimes it's dramatic enough to see with the naked eye. Usually, it takes the loupe. This matters enormously, because a misaligned nib that gets polished is not a smooth nib. It's a misaligned nib with the edges worn off. It will still write badly. You will have spent twenty minutes on Micro-Mesh accomplishing nothing except removing material you can never get back. Alignment first. Abrasion second, if necessary at all. --- ## What the Loupe Actually Reveals Under 10x magnification, a fountain pen nib stops being a small metal object and starts being a landscape. You'll see things that explain everything. A common culprit: a tiny burr at the tip. It's not a manufacturing defect so much as a finishing artifact — a fragment of tipping material that didn't get cleaned up before the pen left the factory. It can be as small as a flake of metal polish residue that hardened in shipping. Under the loupe, it looks like a chip in a car windshield. Against the paper, it feels like dragging your nib through gravel. Another common culprit: asymmetric tipping. The iridium ball is not a perfect sphere, and when it's been ground unevenly, you get a nib that writes beautifully at one angle and scratches at another. This is why you'll sometimes hear people say a pen "writes fine at 45 degrees but scratches when held lower." They're not wrong. The tipping just hasn't been finished evenly across its surface. Mind you, these are not the same problem, and they don't have the same solution. A burr may clean off with minimal abrasion. Asymmetric tipping requires a more deliberate progression. Knowing which you're dealing with before you start will save you from over-working the nib. --- ## The Brass Shim: Misunderstood and Misused If you've spent any time in fountain pen repair circles, you've heard about the brass shim. A thin strip of annealed brass — typically around 0.001 inches — that can be slid gently between the tines. The community's relationship with this tool is, to put it charitably, complicated. Used correctly, a brass shim is a diagnostic instrument. Slide it gently between the tines and you can feel whether the slit is clogged with dried ink, whether there's mechanical resistance at a particular point, or whether the tines are making uneven contact with the feed below. It tells you things the loupe can't, because it gives you tactile feedback rather than visual. Used incorrectly, a brass shim is a way to permanently ruin a nib in under thirty seconds. The incorrect use is this: inserting the shim and then *levering* it — applying lateral or rotational pressure to force the tines apart. I've seen the results. What you get is a nib with the tips splayed outward while the slit near the breather hole has not widened correspondingly, producing a Y-shaped channel that will never, under any circumstances, deliver consistent ink flow again. The nib is trash. Buy another. The shim goes in gently. It moves up and down, with minimal side pressure, to clear debris and check contact. It does not pry. It does not force. Treat it the way you'd treat a surgeon's probe: with the full understanding that the margin for error is very small. --- ## Vertical Misalignment: The Finger and the Table When tine misalignment is vertical — one tine higher than the other — there is a correction technique that requires no tools at all, just patience and a light hand. Hold the pen as you normally would to write. Position the nib tip against a hard surface (a glass surface works well, or a firm piece of card stock on a desk). Apply gentle, even downward pressure — not a stab, a press — and rock the nib slightly side to side for five or six seconds. The goal is to coax the tines into alignment through mild, even pressure rather than through force. Check the loupe again. Repeat if necessary. The tines often respond to this well, particularly on softer steel nibs. Mind you, this technique can occasionally cause the nib tip to flex slightly away from the feed. If you press the nib and then notice that ink flow has become inconsistent, check the underside: the feed may have lost contact with the nib. A gentle press with a fingertip on the underside of the nib, pushing it back into contact with the feed, usually resolves this. The moment you feel you're "fighting" the nib to get the tines to move, stop. There's structural resistance, and you are at the edge of what amateur correction can accomplish. Send it to a nibmeister. --- ## Micro-Mesh: The Progression That Matters Assuming the tines are aligned — confirmed under the loupe — and the problem is surface roughness at the tipping, you can now begin abrasive smoothing. And I want to be precise about this, because the advice you'll find online ranges from useful to actively dangerous. Start at 12,000 grit Micro-Mesh. Not 3,200. Not 6,000. 12,000. The reason is that Micro-Mesh grits are not equivalent to sandpaper grits — a 12,000-grit Micro-Mesh pad is a finishing abrasive, not a cutting abrasive. It is gentle enough that you can make a dozen passes and remove very little material. This is what you want, because the tipping material on a fountain pen nib — iridium, ruthenium, or whatever alloy the manufacturer has used — is not thick. You do not have unlimited material to work with. The technique: hold the pen at your normal writing angle. Place the 12,000-grit pad on a firm surface. Make eight or ten figure-eight strokes with minimal pressure — the weight of the pen itself is nearly sufficient. Pull the nib *toward* you on the downstroke. This is how you write, and this is the direction that matters. Test on paper every ten strokes. Write a few words. Feel the difference, or the lack thereof. If 12,000 grit isn't making progress after thirty strokes, then — and only then — step back to a coarser grit: 9,000, or at most 6,000. Work your way back up through the progression. Each step coarser is a step you will need to reverse, because you're introducing more scratches that need to be polished out. And if you are working on an inked pen, which I prefer, the ink acts as a mild lubricant and also helps carry debris away from the tipping. The pad won't be clean afterward. That's fine. The ink washes off. --- ## Mylar Paper: The Final Whisper I want to be clear about the goal here, because I've written before about the pathology of over-polishing. We are not chasing a baby's bottom — that glassy, frictionless, characterless surface that skips across the page like a water drop on hot steel. We are removing a defect. The tipping material should still have presence. The nib should still speak to the paper. Once the Micro-Mesh progression is complete and you're happy with the smoothness, there is one more step that I consider non-negotiable for any pen I plan to write with seriously: a final polish on Mylar paper. Mylar paper — at 1-micron or 0.3-micron — is not really an abrasive in any meaningful sense. It is a surface conditioner. A few strokes on 0.3-micron Mylar and the nib tip goes from "smooth" to "present in the writing" — there's a quality that is hard to describe except that the line becomes more consistent, the ink deposits more evenly, and the sound of the nib on paper takes on that quality of a purposeful whisper I described at the beginning. Not silence. Presence. The technique here is straight strokes, not figure-eights. Light pressure. Consistent angle. Three or four passes and then test. The test you're looking for is the free-weight test: hold the pen with only the lightest grip and let its own weight drive the nib across the page. A properly tuned nib will write without any assistance from your hand. If you need to apply any pressure at all for ink to flow, the tines may be too tight, or the feed may need adjustment — but that is a subject for another day at the bench. --- ## When to Stop (And When to Call Someone) There are two clear signals to stop and get a professional involved. The first: the scratching changes direction. If your nib was scratchy only on the pull-stroke and after thirty passes it is now also scratchy on the push-stroke, you have introduced new irregularities. Stop. You have done what you can. The second: visible tipping damage under the loupe. Chips, cracks, or a noticeable flattening of the tipping dome mean the tipping material has been compromised. No amount of Micro-Mesh will fix this. What you need at that point is a re-tip — a procedure that is possible but requires specialized equipment and skill. Nibmeisters like those at The Nibsmith or regional pen show tuning benches can handle this, and the cost is almost always less than a replacement pen. There is no shame in recognizing the limit of what the bench can accomplish. Knowing when to hand a pen off is itself a form of craftsmanship. --- ## A Note on Which Pens Are Worth This Every pen that writes is worth the effort of a loupe inspection. Every pen. Beyond that, I'll offer this: a pen that is frustrating you is doing so for a reason. Before you assume the pen is wrong, spend twenty minutes with the loupe and a piece of test paper. The problem may be the tines. It may be the ink. It may be the paper — Rhodia and Tomoe River reward even a reluctant nib in ways that office copy paper will not. The Trinity of pen, ink, and paper is a system, and the scratchy nib may be the symptom of a mismatch rather than a flaw. And if after the loupe inspection, the alignment correction, and the 12,000-grit Micro-Mesh you still have a pen that won't cooperate — well. You've learned something about what it feels like to work on a nib, and you've eliminated all the variables you could control. That's worth something. The bench teaches patience whether the pen cooperates or not. --- ## Current Inking - **Pen:** Lamy 2000 (Makrolon), Medium Nib — custom tuned for a wet flow - **Ink:** Iroshizuku Shin-kai (Deep Sea) - **Paper:** Tomoe River 52gsm (Old Stock) *Also on the desk today: a vintage Sheaffer Snorkel in Burgundy (currently soaking after a restoration), carrying Diamine Oxblood. The Snorkel's steel nib arrived in good alignment — one of the pleasures of working with the vintage pieces is that the nibs often had more hand-finishing than their modern equivalents.*