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Titan Pens Bottle Pen – Model Diamine 30

There are two problems most of us face. Ink bottles that are hard to get pens through narrow necks and ink bottles where the ink level is now too low. Both preventing the filling of some of our favourite inks. The solution, convert the bottle to be part of the pen. Such was the result of the research of William Shakour, he of the Titan fountain pen plus the OMAS parts creator for Stephen Brown.

Additionally, find yourself running out of ink too quickly when writing your magnum opus, fed up with leaking and failing converters, or just unhappy with over complicated filling systems, then this pen is designed for you.

Now bare in mind this is a prototype, though may be offered in this charismatic wabi sabi finish. There is talk of models matching the colour of the glass and plastic bottles these pen sections will be attached to. And that is what we have here. A pen section designed to convert an ink bottle in to a full fledged fountain pen.

By itself the TPBP-MD30 can look a bit like a medical implement, else for those not sitting comfortably, like a large pen cap, especially with the visible threads at the bottom. It is on a par with a pocket pen being a similar length to a Gravitas Dinkey or Namisu Nova Pocket Pen, and not much shorter than a Kaweco Sport.

Attaching the bottle to this specific pen results in a writing implement of a decent size with the flat of the bottle sitting comfortably on the crook of the hand. I can see this also working well for round bottles such as those from Robert Oster, TAG (Kyo-Iro/Kyo-Noto), Dominant Industry, etc. I suspect those with more girth may make things somewhat uncomfortable.

To make this work there you will see there are a few gaskets at play, though Williams also suggests liberal use of silicone grease.

The nib is William’s adaptation of their standard Bock #6 steel unit, with his branding on the nib and the feed replaced by a 3-D printed one, I believe of his own design. It is smooth and quite firm to write with, but also provides a wet experience, partly through the weight of ink behind it.

Being effectively an eye dropper type pen with a very large capacity there is one issue I have encountered. If you invert the pen too quickly to start writing, or move the pen too hard, you can force too much ink in to the feed, saturating it with the result that as you start to write you get ink drops. I would suggest that unless you are in a hurry you make a few scribbles on scrap paper first to catch the ink, for after that there is no issue with flow or splatter. Perhaps in a future version William could engineer in a second chamber which the main one drips in to, thus restricting the floods of ink.

So what do I think. It is a genius idea and I am sure more models will be in the works, after all for those who really want a large ink reservoir there could be the Model Lamy 60 or even the Model Graf von Faber Castell 80, however with the round bottle I suspect the Model Robert Oster 50 may be the sweet spot, else the Autora Premium Reserve Italian Legacy 4001.

Writing Sample:

Comparison Photo:

Here with (L-R) Gravitas Dinkie, Gravitas Quark, TPBP-MD30, Gravitas Pocket Pen, Kaweco AL Sport.

Finally here is a short video of me writing with the TPBP-MD30: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ