Combo of the Week #3 - Franklin-Christoph Model 65 Medium Cursive Italic with Krishna Jungle Volcano Ink

American author John Shedd is credited for the saying, "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." The fountain pen equivalent of this adage is the Franklin-Christoph Model 65 in antique glass acrylic. The infamous "Coke bottle" pen is a demonstrator that, while being supplied with an international converter and disposable ink cartridges (bah!), it was built to be eyedroppered. Why? Who doesn't love watching a volume of ink slosh around the insides of the textured barrel?

Since I've come into ownership of the Model 65 Stabilis back in 2017, I've only used it once as a cartridge/converter pen. For a comparatively brief time, it was inked with J. Herbin Amethyst de l'Oural. After that, I loaded up a few milliliters of Sailor Souten, followed by Organics Studio Nitrogen, then, to come to the present, Krishna Jungle Volcano.

Today, I will be discussing the most recent adventure in eyedroppering with Jungle Volcano. An adventure it was - more like an Iron Man Triathalon - a test of endurance over the span of several months.

Prior to inking up with Jungle Volcano, the F-C Model 65 was no stranger to super sheening ink. It was writing with Nitrogen in the previous fill and lived to tell the tale (without any permanent stains!). Jungle Volcano should be a walk in the park by comparison!

A bit of background info on the ink itself - In late December, Krishna Ink (from India) held a crowdsourced contest on Instagram to name their latest ink - a reddish orange color with green sheen. Naturally, I threw in my two cents and left a comment with a name suggestion. A few days later, the comment was shortlisted, voted on, and won out to become the official name of this neat color.

At this point in time, InkJournal already completed the December Ink Flight that featured Krishna Inks. Work already began on preparing the new Flight for February. There weren't any intentions of placing another new order for ink so quickly, but since I had a hand in naming the color, I felt compelled to stock some. Besides we were going to exhibit at the Philadelphia Pen Show in January. Little did we know it would be a big hit and sell out that weekend.

After we restocked it, I filled up my Franklin-Christoph Model 65 with its Masuyma medium cursive italic nib and got busy writing with a load of this sheeny ink.

Despite the fact that the cursive italic doesn't lay a wide downstroke (probably equivalent to a 0.9mm), a fair amount of shading and sheen is present. The effect is pronounced on Tomoe River paper (see photo below) the most but is still apparent on Rhodia, Clairefontaine, Life stationery, 20lb copy paper, and HP 32lb laser paper.

In contrast to the O.S. Nitrogen, Jungle Volcano dries relatively quickly and has no issues with dry out in the nib while the pen was uncapped. Nitrogen would constantly hard start if the pen was left uncapped for more than 10 seconds. Jungle Volcano dries at a fairly normal rate across all papers and doesn't smear later on, whereas other super-sheen inks tend to resist drying (at all) and will smear if you casually thumb through journal pages that the ink was written on.

Jungle Volcano has next-to-no water resistance. It washes out with a bit of water to create a reddish-orange wash of ink. It would be neat to use in an illustration, as the range of values this ink can express could easily describe a 3-dimensional object and look spectacular as well. Just nothing permanent.

Overall, I am most pleased with this combo. It flows nicely over the long haul. It doesn't give a hard start or display skipping issues. It burped only two times while I had it capped. As I carry my pens to and from work, it could have been a temperature change or a jostling of my bag that caused the slight leak. Thankfully, since it is a demonstrator pen, I could see the inky mess that awaited for me without having to open the cap to find out.