51
L-R:
- Platinum Prefounte (M)
- Montblanc 146 (M)
- Pilot Capless Decimo (M)
- Hero 330 (Parker 51 demi clone) from circa 2000 with a 1.3-ish stub I ground myself back in the day as a college student with a dremel and wet-dry sandpaper. Actually writes like a dream as long as you keep it in its sweet spot
- Lamy Safari Demonstrator with knockoff 1.1 stub (wife bought me two of them a couple of years apart, so the second one got the experiment)
That's a great spread!
EDIT: Whoops, replied to the wrong comment, LOL. Oh well, I'll leave it. :-)
You know what, I wish it were the Pilot, but the rest of the design just doesn't seem to match the "go anywhere" ethos of the capless function. This one is nowhere near as leaky as the faceted VP I had twenty years ago, but it still gets ink all over the inside and is generally a pain to clean.
These are only part of the collection I've accumlated over the decades, just the last five I've inked, and a couple of them have sat for a few months waiting for a cleaning day. Recently, I admit that the MB has seen a couple of refills, and damned if it isn't actually a super nice pen. My wife got it about a year ago during Les Soldes while on a work trip in Paris, so I like to imagine it wasn't THAT expensive, but it's DEEP into diminishing returns territory. Overall, that little Hero has seen more ink sent through it than any of them, but that's mostly down to sheer age; still, its XF friends I got in the same purchase don't get nearly as much use.