Nib Metallurgy Primer

You might be wondering right now. What is nib metallurgy? How does that even affect anything? There are only two (or three) different materials that nibs can be made of right? Well, there are quite a few different factors that will affect the writing experience of your pens. Understanding some of these different effects on your pen can allow you to tailor your nibs to get some different effects. Whether that’s stopping a nib from singing or adding flex to a pen.

This is going to be a two-part article, the first one this week will cover the metallurgy and the second next week will cover the actual shape of the nib.

Flex Flex Flex:

Nibs can range from hard as a nail Platinum music to the softest wet noodle Waterman #2. So what gives? (literally) Nibs with bounce can be a pro or a con for different users but the mechanics that are behind why nibs do what they do are contained in two different factors: the material and the shape. On the surface, this seems obvious but there are some important nuances to understand if you want to experiment with nibs, perhaps making a nib flex or fixing a nib that was bent out of shape or had its tines sprung.

Nakaya music nib, one of the hardest nibs I’ve ever used.

Mechanics of Materials:

If you are a mechanical engineer you have most definitely been in a class called Mechanics of Materials or something similar (I won’t bore you with the details or the calculations as that might be an article for another day). What you need to know about is the difference between elastic and plastic deformation. I’ll use a graph to explain what I mean by this:

Full credit to Wikipedia for this picture.

I’ll break this graph down into sections to make it easier to digest and I’ll tie it to what happens in a nib when you flex it and then spring the tines. To break down some of the terms here “Stress” means how hard you are pushing or pulling the material. “Strain” is how much the material stretches as a result of the pressure you are putting on it. 

The Straight and Narrow:

The first section there, which has the straight line that says Run and Rise on it, is the section that encompasses the most normal usage of fountain pen nibs. When you are using a fountain pen nib (even a flex nib) 99% percent of the time you are in this range. In this range, you can have the tines move, but they will bounce back. This is why it is called elastic deformation. It is like a rubber band, when you stretch it the band always comes back to the same shape that it was before. 

When making a flex nib your goal is to stay in this range or you will spring the tines. This is where the different materials come into the picture. You want a material that when flexed stays inside of the '“elastic zone”. That way when you flex the pen it will come back to the shape that it was before. Some types of materials are better than others. Metals are very good at this type of elastic deformation hence their use in flex nibs.

This nib has nothing do to with this part its just a cool looking nib by Jim Crawford

In terms of materials, you don’t want anything too soft or too hard. It's all a balance of making sure that the “elastic zone” line is both as long and also flat as possible. The longer that line is the more force you can put on the nib without springing the tines. The flatter the line is the more flex you can get without having to push too hard. 

Let's take this out of an abstract discussion of graphs and give a concrete example of what this means. Let's take two different extremes to show how we should meet in the middle. The first example is of a ceramic mug. A mug is hard and no matter how hard you press on the mug it won’t budge. You can imagine how making a flex nib out of ceramic would be impossible. It's harder than a nail. The ceramic has a steep “elastic zone” line which means that it does not flex even if you put a great deal of force on it. 

Okay then well, ceramic is way too hard so let's go with something softer. Right? (I know, I know, a bit much with the rhetorical questions) 

From Springy to Sprung:

So we want something soft so that we can avoid the problems that a ceramic nib would have with not being able to flex. So we have to go softer than ceramic. But how soft can we go? Metal is a good idea for a start, it's much softer than ceramic (as the astute readers may have guessed). But to go to the extremes again let's say we made a nib of gum (unchewed you sickos). 

Chewing gum wouldn’t make a good substitute for a nib for a few reasons, but the main one is that it's easy to push it out of shape. It's too soft, any amount of pressure that you put on it would bend it out of shape. This is what is called plastic deformation and it is the next section of the graph. It's all of the curve from when it says Yield Strength to Fracture. All materials do this when you put too much pressure on them, they will bend out of shape. The main thing with chewing gum is that the first “elastic zone” is very short and therefore it gets to this “plastic zone” without much pressure on the nib. 

This the zone where a nib will be sprung. You put too much pressure on it and it will go past elastic deformation and go straight into plastic deformation. This is the splayed nib and the bent tine that everyone dreads. 

So if you are here looking to repair a bent tine there is some good news and some bad news that you have to be aware of before going forward (also Godspeed). Repairing a bent nib or a sprung tine is a relatively simple matter of bending it back into the correct shape. The bad news comes with two words in the graph above: Strain Hardening.

This is an example of a Parker nib that has some damage. Taking out that damage would be difficult as the damage caused strain hardening.

I don’t want to go into a long explanation about grain size (mostly because it's kinda boring), so suffice to say that as you bend metal it becomes harder to bend back because the metal becomes brittle. The more it becomes brittle the more likely it is to break. This process is also referred to as work hardening. You might have noticed this when bending a wire or a paper clip back and forth. It gets harder and harder until eventually, it breaks. This means that just because a nib is bent but not cracked doesn’t mean that it can be saved. Sometimes you will bend back but sometimes it will just break because of that brittleness. This type of fracture brings us to the last part of the graph: Necking and Fracture. 

Tearing a Tine:

This last section is fairly self-explanatory, so I won't waste too much time on it. Once you get a tear in the nib there isn’t very much that you can do about it. Some success stories have been shown on by John Mottishaw here. He has welded some nibs together quite impressively but I’m not sure to what degree the nibs will be the same as they were before as welding also often changes the properties of the metal that is being worked on. 

The Goldilocks Problem:

This is part of the reason that there are not many good modern flex nibs. You are balancing two things that are fundamentally at odds with each other. A material's ability to bend and a material's ability to return to its shape. This is what makes the Waterman nibs so impressive. They can flex very far and come back to their shape. 

I don’t subscribe to the idea that this technology is somehow lost and can never be done again. I just think that modern companies researching to do flex nibs that they would then have to tune and worry about are more than they want to deal with. It just takes time and maybe someone is experimenting with this technology now that there is a renewed interest in flex.

 All that’s Gold is Gold:

Shifting gears a little here I want to talk about the composition of the metals that we make fountain pen nibs out of. I’ll start with gold as that is the more sought-after material.

You most likely already know that pure gold isn’t used for fountain pen nibs. Gold (and any nib made out of it) is graded on its purity. 14k, 18k, and 21k are the most prevalent. And as the gold content gets higher the nib will get softer, this is something that is pretty well known. But then why are the Sailor 21k nibs so much harder than the 14k Pilot ones? There are a few answers, but one that I want to talk about now is what is called annealing or heat treating.

This is the process of making metal harder or softer by heating it or cooling it down. This can be done either rapidly or slowly depending on the effect that you want to get. You might have heard this referred to as “heat treating”. This process dramatically changes the properties of any metal. It could make the material extremely hard and brittle or very soft and mailable.

Each manufacturer will have their methods for doing these heat treatments and thus each of them can make their nibs harder or softer without having to worry about the gold content of their nibs. So if Sailor wants to have a hard nib but also wants to have the prestige of offering the highest gold content nibs they can. And because of the strain hardening that can occur from forming these nibs, the thinness of the nib doesn’t matter. Often the thinner that gold is rolled the harder it is due to that strain/work hardening.

What each company mixes with their gold to make the alloys they get are different as well. Someone has informed me that the US often uses nickel for alloys which I thought was standard around the world, but apparently, it is illegal in the EU. The EU manufacturers use palladium instead. This will also change everything between the two nibs with the same gold content. I don’t know what they use in Japan. Some alloys will be stiffer and some will be softer. It will also change how work hardening affects the nibs as well.

Other Materials:

Some of what I was talking about can be seen in the other two prominent nib-making materials: steel and titanium. Steel is harder than gold (most of the time) so it does not bend as easily as gold does, making for a much harder and more rigid experience. Titanium on the other hand is different in that it is fairly soft and bounces back (or at least the Bock ones do), but it has the drawback of springing much more easily than either gold or steel. This will vary greatly between different types of nibs and different brands. While Jowo nibs have shown themselves to be well suited for making flex nibs it doesn’t mean that every steel nib will be. 

There are many many different types of stainless steel and they all have different properties. Stainless steel can become incredibly hard when treated in a certain way so there are not hard (ha) rules when comparing nibs.

Where the Nib Hits the Paper:

So at this point, I want to give a few examples of what I am talking about when it comes to certain nibs and how these principles apply to them.

Pilot #10 FA Nib

This is (in my opinion) the best modern flex that you can buy and rivals the vintage flex nibs for softness and flexibility. I would guess that aside from the cutouts (that will be covered in next week's article) on the Pilot FA the reason for the success of this nib is dependent on metallurgy. 

First, the pilot FA nib is a 14k gold nib which all the experts agree will allow for some softness and some snapback that makes it ideal for a flexible nib. The nib is plain and unstamped with patterns and I suspect that this is because the stamping would strain harden the metal and make it less flexible. Both of these will make the nib better suited for flex than another pen that had the same shape.

Waterman Ideal #2

This is one of the greatest nibs of all time. The Waterman #2 can be an amazing wet noodle nib that can be one of the most responsive nibs ever made. Even though smaller nibs are usually harder to flex this nib can be extremely soft while holding its shape for over 70 years in some cases. 

This particular Waterman has seen better days.

I don’t think that it's exactly a mystery what these nibs were made of, as that is easy to determine (it involves vaporizing the nib and looking at light waves). The difficult thing that makes them hard to replicate is how they were heat treated and how they were stress hardened. If modern manufacturers knew how to do that we would be able to figure out exactly how to make Waterman #2 vintage flex nibs. 

Visconti 23k Pd Nibs

This was a risk to take for Visconti to try and make a nib out completely new material.

This nib had its fair share of problems with QC but it seems as though they worked well and were very soft. The nibs were soft to a fault and were fairly easy to bend out of shape. Adjusting the tines on these nibs was difficult because any amount of small movements and adjustments could make vast changes. This nib would plastically deform very easily and it could sometimes be a problem for the nibs. 

Metallurgy

The metallurgy of nibs is a fascinating thing and well worth looking into further. I am going to try a few different experiments in making flex nibs and possibly trying to anneal some nibs and alter their properties to make them more conducive to flexing. 

Next week I’ll look into how the shape of the nib can affect the writing experience, from how a nib sometimes will “sing” to how Noodler’s altered their music nibs in the Triple Tail to make them better at flexing. I hope you’ll take a look at that as well as some of the other articles that I have up. 

As always thanks for taking a look at my articles, if you have any suggestions for articles or things that you’d like to see as well as corrections or just general feedback feel free to email me at minabekopens@gmail.com. And if you like what I do here and want to support me you can head over to my Patreon page and sign up to be a patron, it helps me pay for the fees for keeping this website up. 

I hope that you have a great day!

-Minabeko