Sometimes you can’t find or afford a device that fully meets your needs. With a little bit of tinkering, however, you may be able to modify an existing device to meet your specifications. Last week I wrote about making modifications to an off the shelf keyboard with off the shelf parts. This type of tinkering works well for a lot of different projects where all you have to do to make modifications is swap between a variety of different parts with different attributes. In other cases, tinkering requires more extensive and sometimes irreversible modifications. Such was the case with one of the fountain pens I tinkered with. 

The pen in question is called the Opus 88 Koloro, and while I liked its high ink capacity, standard-sized nib that could be easily swapped, and feel in my hand, I found the nib a bit boring, the grip section very slippery, especially during long note taking sessions, and the cap, which required more than two full revolutions to remove, impractical. 

An interesting nib

Nib with Architect Grind

In a blog post last semester, I wrote about the different types of nib “grinds” as features of tinkerability for fountain pens. One of my favorite grinds is called an architect nib, which has very thin down strokes and very thick cross strokes. While I have begun to grind my own nibs, this one was done by a nibmeister, Kirk Speer. The grind makes the exact same nib much more interesting and fun to write with.

A grippy grip

Sand-papered Grip Section

The stock grip section, which is shiny, textureless plastic, was slippery to hold. To fix this, I used some sandpaper to scratch up the grip section and make it tackier in the hand. I made horizontal circles, perpendicular to the length of the pen, so the rough ridges would create better grip. Though the aesthetic cohesiveness with the rest of the shiny plastic on the pen was all but gone, its usefulness, which is my priority, was improved.

A one twist cap

Ground-down threads

The last change I made was to reduce the number of rotations it took to unscrew the cap. To do this, I physically removed about half of the length of threads on the pen barrel. I used a dremel tool to remove the threads, then I smoothed the transition between the threads and grip with the same grit sandpaper I used for the grip. 

Concluding thoughts–technique

Some of these modifications do not require a high level of precision; it is hard to over-sand the grip section. But others are very delicate. The two main “subtractive” processes–grinding down a nib and reducing the threads–are permanent. If you go too far and remove too much, there is not much you can do about it. This is a lesson I learned through my own mistakes; it’s very easy to take a look at something, think you know what you need to do, and just keep working at it. By the time you check it again, you’ve irreparably changed it. So it is important to work very slowly and check often. You can see and track the changes on a smaller scale, and adjust before the changes are permanent. 

Many tinkering projects require making permanent changes like I made to this pen. The stakes are higher when the tinkering is irreversible, but when you get it right, the results are rewarding. In addition to the satisfaction of a device that works exactly the way you want it to, you will have the joy of tinkering it yourself.