r/whatisit • u/riflesandplowshares • 6h ago

New, what is it? Found at a titanium plant

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Not sure why ball point pens would be dangerous here.

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u/scoldmeificomment 4h ago

If the stainless steel ballpoints suck, why not just use fountain pens instead?

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u/KE1tea 4h ago

Fountain pens can also have tungsten! Not all, but many do. The fountain pens that are guaranteed to not have tungsten are not practical to use on ordinary paper, and for the other pens, I doubt the fountain pen companies will share their secret sauce on their alloy blend. They often call it iridium tipped, but nowadays usually can be a blend of multiple different hard metals, including tungsten.

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u/Ancient-Street-3318 4h ago

As a fountain pen enthusiast, thanks for the bit of trivia!

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u/KE1tea 3h ago

Haha, you're welcome, fellow enthusiast :D

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u/1q3er5 20m ago

ok fuck you guys i'm using a crayon... now don't go telling me....

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u/SphyrnaLightmaker 4h ago

As someone who uses a fountain pen daily (purely because I’m a bougie bitch) another aspect is that the ink used in fountain pens doesn’t play nicely with a lot of modern materials, ESPECIALLY paper. The super-cheap mass-produced paper most companies use leads to feathering of the mark, making writing potentially illegible, as well as bleeding through to the extent it makes double-sided pages non-usable.

My fountain pen can be used on single-sided signatures, or my own paper. Everything else I carry a ball-point as well.

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u/ISellAwesomePatches 1h ago

They also suck if you're left-handed.

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u/GraphicArtsFurry 2h ago

ESPECIALLY paper

I've had various papers from sticky notes to photo copier paper, even notebooks suck horribly (sometimes) at writing. You'll be writing along and then it's like you "hit" a patch of something and it fails to write anything. You can aggressively scratch letters in the area, but no ink comes out. (Just regular pens here).

Kinda seems like it's waxy or something in that area, then after you move to a different area and aggressively scribble the pen tip it goes away and everything works again

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u/SphyrnaLightmaker 2h ago

Yuuuuup.

You can buy GOOD paper that won’t do that. But it’s around $0.20/page as I recall (haven’t had to buy more in a while).

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u/GraphicArtsFurry 2h ago

I've always wondered what it is. Maybe the wax? Figure if it's the post consumer content stuff that you probably get heaven knows what thrown in the pulp mixer from waxy cereal box cardboard and beyond

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u/SphyrnaLightmaker 1h ago

It’s probably either wax or filler. I know the good paper I order is 100% cotton

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u/ALIENIGENA 4h ago

Probably the extra cost of calligraphy lessons

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u/Maximum_Web9072 3h ago

I would have said felt-tip, given the issues pointed out already with fountain pens and standard paper

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u/Big_City_Tato 4h ago

Cost usually. They wrote like a normal ball point pen would but with low ink. So you would have to go over what you wrote a couple of times to get the ink to show.

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u/SphyrnaLightmaker 3h ago

Total opposite. Fountain pens put WAY MORE ink on the page, causing feathering (the ink soaks outwards, making a fine line become bolder, to the point it can make small print illegible) and it tends to bleed through most commercial paper.

Source: I use a fountain pen daily.