on saleNoodler's Neponset Ebonite Flex Fountain Pen - Black

It's a nice pen .... with a music nib. That may be a little broad for everyday writing. There are other Noodler's flex nibs for that. The material is ebonite, so it does not have the 'small' of the cellulose/acetate/butyrate Noodler's pens. These faintly small of 'tires' (vulcanized rubber).A very nice pen. But if you don't know why you would want a music nib, this may not be your best choice for a flex pen.

Wanted to use it for Calligraphy but I find it's hard to 'lighten up' on the flow once you get it started and thus is always in darker mode.Just put a 1.1mm stub nib in it to try using it for something else.

It took several days of fiddling with the nib and feed to get consistent ink flow, but it was worth it. This is the real thing, if you want to write or copy music parts legibly and efficiently. I had, many years ago, a vintage music writer, but when it started leaking, I stopped using it. Software now does the best job in producing music copy, but if you want to try your hand at manual music copying, this is the best there is at the job.Value... It's expensive for a Noodlers pen, but for music writing, this is significantly better than my Platinum music nib pen. Quality...what you expect from a Noodlers pen.Just a note: getting the flow to keep up, I washed the nib and feed once with windex, and then again with dish detergent and a toothbrush. I also replaced the pump filler with the refillable cartridge. I don't know for sure, but this last seems to improve the flow of ink, although I can't explain why.

So happy with anything Noodlers, this is my second Neponset. The Neponset music nib is amazingly fun!Makes me feel like I can actually write artistically!Use Noodlers inks; why settle for anything less!

This pen is quite the mixed bag, but there's one thing it does better than any other pen I've seen and that's lay down a TON of ink. When this thing flexes out you get lines so big that you have to worry about gravity on a sloped surface, yet when you flip it over you get lines equivalent to a medium or German fine. Most of my best examples of variation writing came from this pen and it's pretty much unbeatable without getting a custom grind or a vintage wet noodle pen. I say this as someone who also owns a Pilot Justus and Falcon, both unmodified. The Neponset can easily double their output on fat lines and on thin lines the Justus is a medium and achieves the same thickness as the reverse side of the Neponset, and the Falcon is an EF, so it achieves smaller lines but neither gets 60% of the ink to the paper that this one does. Also comparing this to my Noodler's Ahab, it's way less finicky and obviously has a better feed for keeping up with the huge demand. Also as an added bonus, it doesn't smell like butyric acid (aka human vomit)!The downside of this pen is unfortunately bad enough to take off a star, and that's the insane amount of nib creep this pen has. It's not just from it around in a pocket (although it leaks from that too), it will allow ink to flow to the very edge of the grip so without any touching of the nib it's still possible to get your hand covered in ink. Inside the cap is an even worse story because it seeps into the threads which are very close to the grip and it's hard to remove with a simple tissue wipe. It feels a little petty for knocking off a star for getting my hands all dirty, but it's every single time I use it whether I'm careful or not and more importantly, none of my other pens have this issue despite treating them far worse. Put simply this pen is a horrible idea for a pocket pen as it will leak into the cap just from stepping into a car. The saving grace I guess is that when it leaks it does contain it well in the cap at least, but cleaning that is quite the pain in its own right if you don't want inked up thread lines all over your fingers.Your experience may vary, I may even have a defective one, but all that being said if you want a big fat juicy ink line where you can pull ink from the first letter to finish the rest of the word and to show off the true oil-slick appearance of your favorite ink the way a dropper would, then this is really the best way to achieve that without voiding a warranty or a risky used vintage purchase.