Goodbye Nakaya
I remember the first time I held a Nakaya fountain pen. It was from the personal collection of my fellow Hoosier Pen Club member, Kerry, who owns a few pens of this beautiful brand. I immediately loved everything about the pen: the warmth of the urushi lacquer, the balance, the visual aesthetic (11/10), the nib and the writing experience. The seed was planted.
Roughly one year of shopping and six months of saving later, I headed out to the 2019 Ohio Pen Show exclusively hunting for my first Nakaya. Luckily for me, Rick Liebson was there with forty-some stunning Nakayas, each one as beautiful as the next. I drooled a little, stared a lot, and pondered feverishly. I walked around the whole show pretending to be interested in the thousands of other pens, but truthfully I was only thinking about Rick’s table. On my third stop at the table that had consumed my thoughts, I picked up a few of the pens to inspect them more closely, pondering if any of them might be “the one.” And then, I picked up The Nakaya Piccolo Writer in Aka-Tamenuri. I dipped the nib, wrote a page, and had zero question that this specific pen would be mine.
Nakaya
Piccolo - shape
Writer - with clip
Aka-tamenuri - finish
Fast forward a few days. I had inked the pen with a Platinum Blue-Black cartridge, and had written a bit with it, but out of nowhere the pen began to write quite dry and then stopped writing completely. Typically, this would be only mildly frustrating, but for a pen of this cost that I had been waiting for for months, the frustration was at an extreme high. I moistened the nib a bit and with some patience the pen wrote again, but only a few words before drying up and stopping.
Step 1: try a different ink! I pulled out the cartridge, tossed it into the trash, and inked the pen up with Pilot Iroshizuku Fuyu-Gaki. I wrote a few sentences, but then it started to write dry again, and then it stopped!
Step 2: try different papers! I wet the nib with some water, got it to write again and tried it on Rhodia, Tomoe River 52 gsm, cheap copy paper, and a few others. Guess what… the pen continued to dry up and stop writing.
Step 3: contact the seller! I reached out to Rick to explain the problem. He was immensely kind and sorry about my frustration. He offered to pay to have the nib tuned as it seemed that the likely issue was that the tines were too tight together or too tight against the feed. I ended up shipping the pen off to Gena of Custom Nib Studio in Los Angeles and explained to her the issue that I had been having. After a few short weeks, the newly tuned pen arrived back in my hands.
I inked the pen up with the Pelikan Edelstein Star Ruby and wrote a few Christmas cards, several envelopes, and did some grading of school papers. Success it would seem! And then, after a few days of consistent joyful writing, the pen started to write a little bit dry and then it stopped… again. Without crying, I switched papers, switched inks and hoped for the best. After more of the same process, I lost hope. I reached out to Gena who had tuned the nib and she suggested that I check the converter to see if there was a seal issue of any kind. I bought a new converter and tried several inks in it with several papers, and the issue persisted. I reached out again to Rick, asking for any guidance whatsoever. He offered for me to send the pen to him for some trial time and if he had the same issue that I had been having he would transport it with him to the Los Angeles pen show and have the USA’s only authorized Nakaya dealer - John Mottishaw of nibs.com - take a look at it. By this point, we assumed the issue was the feed.
And now for the twist - Rick used the pen with a 100% success rate, no matter how hard he tried. He tried highly saturated inks, various papers, leaving the pen overnight, and even left it uncapped for an hour with zero issues!
I have never felt crazy until he told me that. For some reason, this exquisite piece of craftsmanship simply didn’t work for me.
Rick continued to be the greatest customer service I have ever experienced and offered a full refund for the pen after 3 full months of attempted use. And so, goodbye Nakaya.
What did I learn: just because a pen (or any thing) is expensive and you dream about its perfection, does not mean that it will be right for you. Furthermore, if it isn’t ‘write’ for you, accept it and move on. After all, it is just a pen!
So what do I buy with my returning pen budget? Leave your suggestions in the comments!