I have a great pen from lamy that I used for a could have years and really enjoyed. I found it a delight to write with and found it more consistent than ball point pens. Then I ran out of the prefilled ink cartridges it came with. I grabbed a refillable cartridge and some waterman ink and it has been downhill from there. I have two pens, not sure what the other one is, but neither seem to be able to write at all with the refills. They leak more often, constantly seem to dry out, and I have ended up going back to sharpie sgels because I need my pens to write when I need to write.
What am I doing wrong? Do I need better refill cartridges and if so can you recommend one, or are the cartridges really so much better? Or is there maintenance I am supposed to preform on the nib that I have neglected that could be causing my issues? Thanks for any advice, I would love to get back to using these pens.
I prefer to just refill cartridges rather than try to use the converters. I have a small mountain of converters for all kinds of pens, all of them originally pack-ins with the pens themselves, and I've never used any of them.
Converters are full of seals, gaskets, and moving parts. All potential points of failure. A cartridge isn't. You can just refill it with a syringe and be on your way. For me, at least, I have the luxury of never being in a situation where I'll conceivably ever do enough writing in a day to completely run a pen dry, so I don't have to carry spare cartridges and thus don't need to jigger some kind of way to reseal them.
Many of my pens still have the same cartridge in them they originally came with. Some, like my Sheaffer Targa, have a cartridge in them that's easily decades old. No sweat.
Also, it's usually a good idea to flush out your nib and feed when you change brands of ink. It's possible, albeit unlikely, that some combination of ingredients in ink A could react poorly with ink B, and gum up and cause a clog.