As you may recall, I have a 1.1mm stub nib in my Vac Mini, and I ordered a flex nib to replace it. I received the nib a couple of days ago, and it looks fine. This morning I decided to replace the stub nib with the flex nib.
I emptied the ink from the pen back into the bottle – no reason to waste perfectly good ink. I rinsed the pen out and then pulled the stub nib along with the feed out of the pen. I washed the new nib with soapy water, as some nibs have oils on them that cause problems when writing. Inserting the nib took about 10 seconds. I refilled the pen with ink, and began writing.
My first impression is that the line width is thicker than I expected, but this could be me subconsciously using downward pressure on the nib while writing. I can get line width variation easily by adding pressure on the downstroke, so the flex nib is doing just what it is supposed to do. The loose cannon in this mix is my writing style. I’ll work on it and see if I stay with the flex nib or go back to the stub.
That’s just one of the nice things about fountain pens – you can easily make changes and find a combination of pen, nib, ink, and paper that you like best.