Lao, I thoroughly enjoyed your answers. Thanks for sharing!

Really enjoyed your Video productions...Your B-film inserts of your previous Journalling/Bujo works are brilliant.

how fun.. can't wait to watch.. but first, coffee.. ; )

I enjoyed hearing your answers to these questions. Thanks for sharing!

that was a super nice chat Lao. We've had kinda similar fountain pen journeys and reached pretty much the same conclusions too lol. 😃 I think that I will do a VR to the ladies and answer the 8 questions at some point too. Thank you so much for sharing, and yes that Leonardo is fabulous. I'll check out your Pineider vid too, as I have seen these on Cult Pens. My Grail pen is the Homo Sapiens Tuscan Hills.... 😍

Thank you for sharing your journey Lao! I too love Leonardo pens, also Aurora. My thoughts are similar before buying pens. It’s quite the process before I actually buy one 😅.

I got into fountain pens in 2022 as well. I enjoy watching your videos! I’ve also am mesmerized by the Italian aesthetic with fountain pen design and have been falling into looking at Leonardo quite often.

Wow, it’s a joy to listen to your enthusiasm and love for fountain pens and inks! I also love teals and turquoises and envying your foray in Leonardos! Confirmation that my next pen will be a Leonardo! Thanks for sharing!

Love these questions as a relative newcomer to fountain pens. I have 16, all pretty low end of the price range…… I always think those Leonardo type pens look too chunky for my small hands, though they are beautiful. I don’t have a grail pen yet as I don’t know enough about them but I am looking at Sailor Pro Gear slims… 😀🤪🤓

Love Pelikan Apatite. When I'm considering a pen I always try to wait a little while and then I search for youtube videos about the pen to see if 1 its good to write with out of the box and 2 if its scratchy 3 if its affordable 4 if one of the presenters has a discount code and last if it comes with the emenities cartridge converter, ink, warentee, things like that. I hope this helps

I am new to your channel and I enjoyed your video. I have wanted the Sailor Spring Rain since it first came out. But I don't like the Pro Gear Slim (prefer the full-sized Pro Gear) and the MF nib is way too fine for me, so I tell myself I'd just be buying pretty plastic. The fact that Sailor released many cool pens with an MF nib only has saved me countless dollars.

I loved the answers to the questions. They are very insightful.

Love your answers Ken!!! ♥

Where is that 5 pen walnut box from?

The Homo Sapiens is an awesome feeling pen. It still blows my mind that the pen is made from lava. Bear in mind that Visconti gold nibs generally write wetter and therefore a bit broader. Now onto Visconti QC. Visconti was using palladium nibs on their higher end pens. When the nibs were working, they were absolutely fantastic. They were soft, juicy and just a dream to write with, hence the name 'Dreamtouch". More often than not though, the nibs were a disaster for Visconti, so a couple of years back they switched back to 18k gold nibs, at a horrible cost to their reputation. If you're looking to get a brand new HS, I doubt you'll have any nib issues, but if you want you can try for a second hand HS with a Pd nib, but ensure that it works inked up, not just dipped, and you could get a great pen without breaking the bank. The SF pen show might be a good place to look for one.

That simply is not true about the Visconti Homo Sapiens nibs. Visconti did have a problem with nibs for a time, but even then bad nibs were very, very rare. I know because I've seen the actual numbers. And never, ever, not once has anyone had to have a Visconti nib tuned. If there's something wrong with a Visconti nib the company will bend over backward to make it right. On top of this, just about any company the sells expensive pens will test a nib before shipping the pen. KZfaq, and people who simply spread tales, make one bad nib on one pen sound like ten thousand pens had ten thousand bad nibs. KZfaq is horrible about this. I've seen estimates based on sales numbers, locations, and from research in other ways that up to ninety percent of people who say they got a Homo Sapiens with a bad nib have never even owned one. I'm a Visconti lover and collector, and over many years I've known dozens of other collectors who have every Visconti pen made, including all the Homo Sapiens pens. I also have talked to at least eighty people I know own a Homo Sapiens. Total number of Homo Sapiens pens about four hundred and fifty. Total number of bad nibs? Seven. Just seven. There are cerrtainly many more than four bad Homo Sapiens nibs out there, but the percentage is EXTRENELY low. But people love to talk, even when they don't know what they're talking about. Brown nosing is a human frailty, and when someone says they got a pen with a bad nib, many will say the same thing in the comments, even if, in fact, they have never even seen one of the pens in person. Really, think about it. A company would be out of business overnight if large number of customers received bad nibs, and had to pay someone to fix them. It does not happen. Companies fix or replace bad products, and Visconti guarantees this. Period. End of story. This said, EVERY brand of production pen is going to let a pen slip through with a bad nib every once in a while. It's foolish to think otherwise. The alternative is to triple the price of the pens so every pen can be inspected and tested by a real person. If you want to get anywhere near perfection, you have to buy very expensive custom pen, not production pens. I've never even heard of a Namiki-Maki-e that had a problem, but even here I'd bet one exists somewhere. I have a Namiki Maki-e with a street price of $12,000. It cost this much for two reasons. Reason one is because it is hand painted, and the artist had to work for nearly two decades before being trusted to paint a pen. Such artists do not come cheap. Reason two is because of aspect of these pens is inspected by a human, and everything possible, including the nib, is tested by a person. All this said, yes, you can get a bad Homo Sapiens nib, or a bad Conway Stewart nib, or a bad Pilot nib, on and on. If you do, the retailor will almost certainly handle the problem, though you should have asked the retailer to test the pen before shipping it. If the retailer can't fix the problem, the parent company will. All that said, however, if you have the money, it is often worth have the nib on an expensive pen tuned and ground just for you, even if everything about the nib works well. A lifetime pen should have the exact flow you like, the nib should have just the softness and line width you like, and the nib should not only be as smooth as you like, but should also have the grind you prefer. It really doesn't cost very much to have this done, and if you're going to invest in a Grail pen, why not take the extra step and make it a pen you'll love until the day you die?