Noodler’s Britannia’s Blue Waves

And here’s the second of 4 British exclusives 🙂

This one is very turquoise – more saturated than Monkey Hanger or North Star Liberator. It looks a bit like a paint.

(Unfortunately, I forgot to do a comparison on Oxford paper and I run out of the sample…)

Flow – the biggest issue – at first, I used it in Jinhao (it looks weird in a bottle – like a waterish paint, dense as if it had some particles in it). It wrote very bad, skipped very much, just didn’t flow well. Then I inked up my Lamy – it had hard starts almost every time, but then wrote well – wetly and smooth. It didn’t like the Kaweco – skipped as much as in Jinhao. So only wet, broader nibs can cope with it.

Saturation – very good – the biggest of blue/turquoise bulletproof Noodler’s inks that I used.

Plano Universal 80g/m2 copy paper

Herlitz Rainbow notebook

Double A 80g/m2 copy paper

Bleeding – little stronger than usual, bled pretty badly on Herlitz.

Feathering – minimal on a crappy paper

Tomoe River

Shading – very low

Dry time – very good, about 10s on Rhodia

Waterproofness – absolute – only a little bit of dye dissolved in a water.

Comparison:

I’m very disappointed with the flow… I liked the colour the most of the British four and I thought that if it writes well, I’ll buy a bottle, but it doesn’t. The hard starts were very frustrating to me – after those few words it’s very good, but I don’t want to have to write a line of circles each time I grab the pen. Other properties are good – it bleeds a bit, but I would stand it. It doesn’t feather as Monkey Hanger does. It’s a shame that each of them has some major issue.

Pluses:

• nice, saturated colour
• doesn’t feather
• waterproof
• except for the hard starts, it writes well in wet nibs

Minuses:

• hard starts
• bleeds a bit
• doesn’t cooperate with drier or finer nibs