Nakaya
Nakaya Piccolo Cigar Ishime-Kanshitsu Black
Nakaya Piccolo Cigar Ishime-Kanshitsu Black
Nakaya Piccolo Cigar pens are available in a range of colors. Hand turned from solid hard rubber rod stock, they are then lacquered with multiple layers of natural resins.
If simplicity is the highest form of elegance, this is it. Nakaya pens achieve greatness by virtue of its streamlined design, excellent materials, flawless surface and saturated colors. Shown here is the Piccolo Cigar fountain pen in Ishime Kanshitsu (Stone Finish) Black.
This Nakaya fountain pen is made of a Stone Finish urushi, a material made from the sap of a Japanese lacquer tree. The process of collecting the Urushi (sap) and applying many layers of lacquer to this fountain pen takes three months to complete. The craftsman sows Urushi powder onto the body, which makes a lot of grains on the surface due to surface density. After settled, he varnishes the body with lacquer several times to make the body harden. He sharpens these grains with charcoal and finishes with a lacquer. It is truly an artistic craftsmanship to decorate a stone-like appearance on a pen true to its name ('Ishi"" means a stone in Japanese).
The Urushi tradition is historic and profound in Japan, where lacquer ware has adorned utilitarian objects for centuries. This technique, though painstaking, gives this fountain pens its deep lustrous sheen and subtle color shift.
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Customization Guide
Stub
 
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Above is the same size nib after a regrind to Stub. A regrind to Stub is often a good place to start for your first customization. Â A Stub nib provides broad down-strokes and narrow cross-strokes while writing, and is less position-sensitive on the paper than the crisper and slightly more demanding cursive italic.
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Cursive Italic
 
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More demanding, but also providing crisper edges and more line-width variation, is the very popular customization to Cursive Italic. This also provides broad down-strokes and narrow cross-strokes, but is also more position-sensitive in terms of how the pen is held and requires more skill on the part of the user. This is a common customization for artists and calligraphers, but is still smooth enough to make for a good everyday writer.
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Formal Italic
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Formal Italic is an even crisper and more demanding customization than either cursive italic or left oblique, and is usually utilized for calligraphy and by the most experienced users. This provides broad down-strokes and narrow cross-strokes, with even crisper corners and edges than a cursive italic - this is an extremely position-sensitive customization.
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Left Oblique
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 Commonly used for signatures and correspondence, the Left Oblique customization provides broad diagonal strokes and narrow cross-strokes, and like a cursive italic, is more position-sensitive and demanding than a stub. The whole pen must be rotated to the left in order to write smoothly, without skipping. The "Left" in Left Oblique refers to the cut of the nib itself, and does not refer to the handedness of the writer. |
Architect's Point (Also for Arabic and Hebraic writing)
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A more exotic regrind is that to Architect’s Point. Named after the style of writing used by Frank Lloyd Wright, this regrind is the opposite of cursive italic, and provides for broad cross-strokes and narrow down-strokes. This also tends to be a particularly useful customization for those practicing Arabic or Hebraic calligraphy. |
Spencerian
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Perhaps our most popular customization, but also one of the most advanced, the Mottishaw Spencerian Customization has gained special attention from being featured in a customer's YouTube video which has now received over twelve million views! The Spencerian starts from a semi-soft 14k nib and adds additional flex and a regrind to needlepoint to create a specialized writing point used for copperplate calligraphy. For more details, visit our special Spencerian page.. |