Waterman Carène Stub Nib: Initial Thoughts
It’s been a bit of a roller coaster of impressions and feelings since I got my Carène stub nib yesterday. First of all, I’m impressed at how quickly Pen Heaven, a retailer in the UK, sent the nib and the Waterman ink (more on that in a different post). I ordered a few hours after midnight on Tuesday and the package arrived Thursday night, originally scheduled to arrive next week. Now that’s how a retail experience should be. The only thing that annoyed me about the experience was that the nib unit was only in a plastic sleeve with a thin plastic cap over the nib. And there was one sheet of bubble wrap around the receipt, bottle of ink, and nib. When I slipped the nib out of the plastic sleeve, it came out without the plastic cap. 😒 Luckily the nib arrived unscathed.
I was excited to have a more unique nib for the Carène since it is such a fancy pen deserving of one. And when I first wrote with it on a blank sheet of paper, it seemed fine to me. I automatically adjusted my handwriting size to accommodate the stub shape.
But then I wrote my daily journal entry in my Hobonichi Hon and realized how incompatible this nib size is with the small grid of the pages, and my small handwriting in general. I was disappointed and thought that in my haste to buy a stub nib that I forgot that stub nibs don’t have a standard width and Waterman maybe produce wider stubs than I expected. I have been surprised before when I bought a Leonardo Momento Zero with a stub and saw it was a 1.5 stub (yikes).
The next day I compared the Carène’s stub to my TWSBI ECO’s and Kaweco’s 1.1 stub nibs and realized they’re the same size. So why did this feel so wide to me?
Well, part of it was because I just haven’t written with a 1.1 stub in a long time and forgot how wide they are, full stop. The other part you’ll see in the macro pictures below.
The first nib is the Carène, then the TWSBI and Kaweco stubs. They have varying shapes which affect how they write. The Carène’s has extra tipping that the other two don’t.
In these super close-up shots for the Carène and TWSBI nibs, you can see the Carène’s nib is quite thick which really affects how the pen writes compared to the TWSBI and Kaweco for me. I know that my small block letter writing is a bit unfair to the Carène, or stub nibs in general, but that’s my situation. The Carène does write quite smoothly, as you’d expect from such a thick, rounded nib. I have, however, experienced some skips as if I didn’t have the nib positioned on the page quite right. Not sure what that’s about.
The TWSBI’s thinner nib tip makes it feel and write a bit more sharply than the Carène, so it feels a little more comfortable for me to write smaller, but not by a huge amount.
If you select the image below to open at a larger resolution, you might be able to see more clearly the minor differences in the lines made by each nib. The ends of the lines from the Waterman are more rounded than the TWSBI lines, and look softer. When I write a lot, the words end up looking somewhat sloppier, especially if I write smaller, so it forces me to write bigger for legibility.
Below you can see that the TWSBI’s writing sample is slightly shorter on the page because I feel more comfortable writing the teensiest bit more condensed using the crisper nib.
Looking at the writing samples below, upon a quick glance they do not look that different. But if you look closer, the sharpness of each pen’s line becomes more apparent. The Kaweco’s stub feels the most sharp to me, and looking at the nib shapes above, it makes sense.
I am super spoiled by the fine stub on the collaboration pen between The Pen Addict and BENU. It is a nice, smooth stub that’s small and well-suited for my writing. Apparently Damien Alomar did the custom grinds for the Pen Addict anniversary pen. I’m tempted to reach out to see if all of my wider stub nibs including the Carène’s could be reduced in width to better fit my handwriting.
While I’m glad I was able to get this stub nib at a reasonable price and with fast shipping, it’s not going to work that well for writing in my Hobonichi Hon, so I am going to switch back to the fine nib for now. Hopefully some time I can have some work done on the stub to fit it better to my style of writing. I’m still happy to have the choice of nibs for this pen. I might even pick up an extra fine nib unit in the future, since I now have more of an appreciation for finer lines with fountain pens.
