Ranga shipped the pen within a few weeks, and it arrived with some of the most unusual packaging. This is amazing! Imagine creating a group buy for a Plymouth Barracuda in 1970! Everybody can converse with each other and with the people who make the pens, talk about the product, improving both the pen and the experience.
Basically, that means a hundred or two hundred obsessive-compulsive pen people, each of whom probably know each others’ tastes and preferences, and all of whom really like the same pen. But they’re made to order in a specific edition created only for Fountain Pen Network members. The pens are not numbered, and group buys are not technically limited or even special editions. I bought the Ranga Model 8 in a group buy organized by FPN contributor Vaibhav Mehandiratta, as well as MP Kandan of the Ranga company in Chennai, and I consider group buys to be the most special of limited editions. One centimeter longer than the Pilot Metropolitan, but barrel is about the same diameter. Size comparison with the Pilot Metropolitan and the Airmail Wality 69eb. Or maybe the pen’s true habitat is a bowling alley in Miami. In this case, an inexpensive silver-plated dolphin protects this swirly, ocean-like pen from the depths of gravity. This pen came without a clip, because I usually carry pens in a case, not in a pocket, and I like the way roll-stoppers personalize a pen. Maybe the ebonite feed should go on a diet, or maybe, like John Goodman, it just doesn’t care. It doesn’t – drag on the paper, that is - but the feed certainly makes its presence visible. In profile, the feed is all chin, like, I don’t know, John Goodman in ‘The Big Lebowski.’ It’s so chubby that I keep expecting it to drag on the paper, like one of those sweepers with brooms on Canadian curling teams. The aesthetics of the feed are a little chubby. Posted or unposted, it’s well-balanced in the hand. It’s about the size of a Pilot Metropolitan, in the Goldilocks category of not too large and not too small. I inked this pen with Rohrer & Klingner Königsblau, thinking that a somewhat dry ink might help counteract the wetness of an eyedropper, and I was right. They’re better off with the Model 8 versions equipped with Jowo or Schmidt nib units. The eyedropper version is not a pen for beginners. But after pulling the feed, playing with it, adjusting its position with the nib, re-inserting it, and heat-setting it, this German Bock nib now slides across paper like white-soled shoes on waxed maple, baby. Initially, this pen’s nib and feed were seated in the section in such a way that the nib was a little ‘spongy,’ pushing back from the feed under pressure. The Model 8 also taught me something about ebonite feeds and eyedroppers. I bought the nib partly to learn more about Bock and partly to have enough tipping material to be ground into an italic, and succeeded on both counts. The nib on this pen is so broad and so well lubricated that I might as well be writing with a really slick bowling ball, and I mean that in a positive way. The imprint says ‘Conklin.’ I assume that means Bock manufactured a whole lot of nibs that didn’t get used by some iteration of the Conklin company and Ranga picked them up for clearance sale prices. This pen uses an eyedropper filling system, a black hard rubber feed (now that I think about it, writing ‘hard rubber’ is kind of tedious, so I’m just going to stick with ‘ebonite’), and a Bock broad nib. Like ceramics, like wooden boats, like anything made by human hands, they are imperfect and completely unlike each other, and that is what makes them spectacular. One other thing about hard rubber pens - as FPN contributor Sandburger so eloquently put it, they are gloriously inconsistent. (On a curmudgeonly note, why are the tires on performance cars now so low-profile and skinny? They look like the wheels on Conestoga wagons. If I stick my nose close to the pen and sniff hard enough, I can smell burnt rubber, like the tires on my older brother’s 1970 Plymouth Barracuda. Beyond the fact that the Ranga Model 8 writes smoothly and well, and that it displays charming hand craftsmanship, for me, the defining characteristic of this pen is the material. Bowling balls haven’t been made from hard rubber since the 1970s.īut the blue, orange, and green hard rubber of the Ranga Model 8 is so evocative of time and place that it reminds me of going to the Fireside Lanes in Wichita, Kansas, with my Cub Scout den in the late 1960s, lacing on soft leather shoes with red, ivory, and green panels and a great big number on the heel, and picking out a swirly Brunswick bowling ball. Now it’s the name of a company that makes bowling balls, mostly from polyester, polyurethane, or reactive resin. We love pens made with ebonite, but ebonite was originally a brand name for hard rubber. I do not think it means what we think it means.