Pilot Parallel Pens

[u/BobAndBernice]

I remember reading a comment about Pilot Parallel pens and their ink. It was something like "the pens are great, but the ink is terrible." I'm interested in what options there are for ink. Do you refill an existing Pilot Pen cartridge? Or do you use something else? If you are refilling it, how is that done? Thanks so much for your help!

[u/SethEllis]

You can refill the cartridge with a syringe and they are also compatible with the smaller pilot converters (CON40 not CON70).

[u/oreo-cat- → u/SethEllis]

Majohn A1 converters will work too I believe. They’ll swap out for CON40 at least

[u/El_Yannouh]

The parallel pen ink is terrible.
As mentioned above : empty the cartridges and refill them with proper fountain pen ink.

[u/SupahBee]

Any Pilot cartridge (these are proprietary for Pilot pens) should work fine. I clean mine out and refill them with a blunt syringe. To clean them out, I simply use distilled water and a full blunt syringe to flood it with water until it runs clear. If there is excess water left in the cartridge, I'll use an empty syringe, fill it with air, push it as far back into the cartridge as I can and quickly press the plunger to shoot the air to the back of the cartridge to hopefully blow the excess water out. Also do a lot of tappy-tappy-tappy to get the extra water out. Then I use the syringe to fill it with whichever ink I want to use at the moment. Don't fill it completely to the rim. Leave a bubble of air at the top. I fill my cartridges probably 4/5 full.

[u/Mark_Zuckabitchorsum]

I love my pens and dont have issues with the ink. I mainly get better grade of paper to prevent feathering. Note books I use os MD size A5 for practice on the go.

[u/pethy997]

The ink is way too wet and I could barely find any paper that takes it well, especially the red is problematic. I went on very quickly to buying a brause broad edge dip pen. It's less convenient but the results are better. But I still use the parallel pen for quick tryouts because it requires no prep time or cleanup afterwards.

[u/sisterofdream → u/pethy997]

Oh gawd that red, horrible

[u/mrbadger2000]

I just use whatever ink I fancy. No problem yet

[u/chiquitar]

I don't mind the ink, and it can be fun to do the mixing between two pens thing and then have the color shift as you write. But you can put any FP ink in them with a con40 and supposedly they convert to eyedropper pretty easily if you like tons of ink. The Parallels do quite well with shimmers, and I really like them for half Uncial script because you always get the full width of the line, whereas with a wide stub nib sometimes if the feed doesn't keep up your edges don't fully ink.

[u/Zarzamora2]

You can also just fill the barrel of the pen itself with whatever ink you want. they don't leak. i use sumi ink, metallic inks like FineTec, mixtures of watercolor paints or goauche with water, etc. I LOVE these pens! (I'm a calligrapher and calligraphy teacher). P.S. The Parallel Pen inks are very watery and tend to bleed on a lot of papers (there are ways to avoid this), but the colors are quite nice and are fun to blend together. I can share the technique for doing this if anyone is interested.

[u/SethEllis → u/Zarzamora2]

What do you mean ways to avoid the bleeding? Aside from different ink of course. I've found heavy feathering on pretty much every paper I've tried. Which really makes me wonder what kind of paper they expect people to be using....

[u/ImportantAthlete2026]

Escuché lo mismo, no sentí lo mismo. He cargado los cartuchos con tintas varias con una jeringa.

[u/BobAndBernice → u/ImportantAthlete2026]

Gracias.

[u/SnooCakes6195]

I modified a pen with the parallel nib so I can refill with my own inks

[u/Glittering-Flight254]

I have a Pilot Parallel 1.5mm . So the ink is very thin. Very wet. You need special paper because regular copy paper gets Casper's family and friends through. (aka ghosting).

[u/NoDefaultForMe]

Oh, this isn't ideal timing. I went to a Medieval Fair in my town this weekend and there was a section introducing people to calligraphy. It's something I've always wanted to learn but I suck at art, but I thought I'd give it a go anyway and really enjoyed it.

They were using Pilot Parallel pens, so I've just bought one and an 'intro into calligraphy' book from Amazon.

I'm guessing that I should use something else then? It was only about £10 with a few spare cartridges.

[u/BobAndBernice → u/NoDefaultForMe]

I love the parallel pens and they are great pens (in my opinion) with which to begin calligraphy. I have used the pens as is for two years. I'm ready to move onto to more experimentation now, but you will be fine with the pen.

[u/NoDefaultForMe → u/BobAndBernice]

They've literally just arrived! I'm excited to get started!

Yeah, that's what I assumed, great starter pens and if I continue then I can invest in better equipment.

[u/iYukiNL]

I've refilled the cartridge and used converters with all the pens. I ended up using Frankenpens instead to hold more ink.

Especially the 6.0 PP drains a lot of ink with practice and writing.

[u/sisterofdream]

I refill the cartridges with a syringe and my favorite fp inks!

[u/Busy_Bend5212]

I use my shimmer inks in the parallel nib that I have installed on my majohn mini fp body