Noodler’s Bad Belted Kingfisher Ink Review
12/07/2013Last week Gentian sent a sample of Noodler’s Bad Belted Kingfisher along with a chocolate bar, a pad of pen-friendly paper, a sample of Platinum Carbon Black, and some other bits and pieces. Wanna guess what got sampled first? The chocolate bar of course!
Now that the bar has been reduced to a wrapper, it is time to play with the ink. BBK is a bulletproof ink. An application of water smears enough color to prove the ink was assaulted, but the writing remains legible. That is useful for noting when your signature has received an unwanted attempt at tampering. It can also be used to create a wash of color when the water is applied with a brush. It is not a waterproof ink, but it will get you through a casual coffee spill.
The color is dark blue, very dark blue. Flow and lubrication are excellent. BBK could make a stingy nib perform better, but it might be too enthusiastic for a wet nib. It was a little stubborn rinsing from the nib and suffers from mild nib creep though in line with comparable Noodler’s inks. The small degree of shading might be more attributable to how I use a pen rather than being a characteristic of the ink. Drying time is around ten seconds on Rhodia.
The writing samples show varying degrees of feathering. The dip pen on Rhodia shows the most, but the flow is more copious than a fountain pen. Performance on Moleskine is quite impressive considering there is no feathering along paper fibers, something common on Moleskine paper. The third sample is from an old notebook that is fountain pen-friendly. The feathering is only noticeable with a loupe, but there are very clean outlines with Waterman Florida Blue in adjacent writing. Some bulletproof inks do exhibit a degree of feathering. BBK gets good marks in comparison.
Noodler’s Bad Belted Kingfisher is well-suited to Japanese pens with very fine nibs. Right now there are two Pilots and a Platinum clamoring for a fill. The nibs are so fine that this free-flowing ink might be just the one to make them happy. Me, too, for that matter.
An Inkophile's Blog 
Tell me more about the stubborn rinsing. Would I be sorry if I put it in a piston filler impossible to disassemble?
LikeLike
The nib took longer than expected, but it did rinse clean. A converter would be safer and easier. I stick to easy to rinse inks in piston-fillers and aero fillers because my hand goes into protest over repetitive motions. In other words, I’d rather soak than squeeze or pump. That’s one of the reasons my Pel M400 gets Waterman Florida Blue over any other ink. J Herbin inks are good in that regard, too. Don’t you use a lot of JH?
LikeLike
Not so much since the EU regs changed the color & performance on me. Lately I’m rotating between DeAtramentis, Diamine & Iroshizuku while saving the JH for my white resin or demo pens.
LikeLike
There certainly are a lot of Diamine inks from which to choose and the price isn’t outrageous either. I just used BBK again and found it very acceptable in the Prera F, but I think I’d be less happy with the potential for feathering from a wide nib. That it makes the Prera useful is a decided plus. That pen hasn’t seen the light of day in years. No feathering and clean margins in the Apica 6A10 notebook. Yea!
LikeLike
Your samples here show some very nice shading, although you said that might be how you use the pen. How is it that you use the pen to achieve increased shading?
LikeLike
It’s an unconscious thing. I’ve noticed that I tend to use less pressure and make less contact with the paper at the top of a stroke. Some inks and pens turn this into shading as the ink pools at the bottom of a letter. Pens with strong flows produce greater coverage and less shading. So pens that write dry can shade better. This Prera and my Waterman Carene have less flow than other pens, but are decent at shading with non-shading inks. It’s a trade-off.
Paper is a factor, too. There is no shading with the Prera and BBK on Apica 6A10 paper. A paper that absorbs ink quickly will not produce the pooling and shading that results from pen manipulation. On that kind of paper, an ink that shades naturally works better.
Does that make sense?
LikeLike
Yes. 🙂
LikeLike
[…] Noodler’s Bed Belted Kingfisher (via Inkdependence) […]
LikeLike