Pens and Ink: Omas Lucens with Omas Sepia

Returning to an Omas pair up this week.  This pen was one of my purchases at the Tilburg Penshow last year. The pen is a vintage Omas Lucens and has an amazing stub nib on it. Even though it did cost me a pretty penny, it simply had to go home with me. 

I paired it with Omas Sepia, a gorgeous vintage looking brown with a lot of character, just what this pens needs! First some more info on this pen.

 

The pen has a beautiful black and amber transparent body and the engraving for such an old pen is pretty crisp on it. I found a vintage Omas booklet where these pens were described and I'll share the pages here.

The Omas Lucens has a cylindrical shape and the Omas Lucens Extra has facets as you can see below. My pen doesn't have the art deco ring band on the cap so it means it's from a later production.

The arrow clip sure does look a lot like a parker pen, doesn't it? The nib also has an arrow on it, but I can tell you that these Omas nibs are really not comparable to the parker ones!

There was a wide assortment of nibs on the Omas Lucens fountain pens. You can say the nib I have on mine is "extra Grosso" seeing the line variation it can produce, it's definitely larger than the width shown here. It's a vacuum filler pen, so it does take a bit of fiddling to get the pen working properly. But when it does, oh such lovely writing!

The pens surely does have some start up issues, but I got it fully working and wrote a page in my loving kindness metta meditation journal with it.

The wide stub nib shows a nice line variation and the shading of the ink pretty well. It's got a gorgeous coffee brown color to it. This pen lays down a lot of ink but Claire fontaine paper is a trooper, held up really well!

The nib is pretty difficult to whield I must say. Even though it flexes, perhaps it's not what you're supposed to with it. When I flex the nib, the ink flow just stops completely, but when you write normally, without too much pressure, the ink flow keeps up pretty nicely. Maybe I need to reset the feed (I heat set it a few times but still didn't work) but I am hesitant taking this pen apart seeing everything else works well. And vacuum fillers are fickle pens to fiddle around with!

About the ink, it's a beautiful vintage brown color with great depth. I'm glad I snagged a bottle of this at akkerman with Omas Turquoise when I had the chance!

I like to experiment with fountain pen inks in my art so it's fun to test and try different things with the ink. And with this ink I noticed that when you let it dry naturally it's dries up a reddish brown, as you see the ink smear above. When you apply a heat gun to the ink to dry it, it becomes a more burnt umber color, as you can on the writing below. That's pretty fun to see the different characteristics to an ink!

It's definitely a gorgeous pen and such a beautiful writer (when you can get it to work properly) but it's not a daily carry due to it's fickle filling system and start up problems. I think this is the first pen that I actually got because I wanted it in my collection and not necessarily to write with. But it's fun to take it out once in a while and take her out for a drive :) 

Hope you enjoyed this week's pairing. Next week an iconic Bauhaus style fountain pen and some great news on a returning ink company! 
Thanks for stopping by & have a great day!

namasté