fountain pens→nib tuning→that stage of getting into a hobby after you dedicate furniture to it

I definitely need to try to adjust some of my pen nibs.

• silver EF Kaweco Brass Sport nib and silver 1.1 mm stub Kaweco Skyline Sport nib both have the same slow-start, skipping, dry flow problems reported in a bunch of threads across fountain pen communities and attributed to oversmoothing of the nibs at the factory leading to frequent baby’s-bottom nib syndrome which... is a thing. A bad thing. Thanks now I have to kinkshame the fountain pen community.
  



• 3 Hero 616 extra fine nibs that all worked perfectly and had great flow out of the box but are, as everyone at fountainpennetwork said, basically not smoothed at all; I understand that under magnification the tip of the Hero nib looks basically like a square, and the sharp edges can make for scratchy writing and cause the nib to have an unwarrantedly small sweet spot.
  



• Noodler’s Ahab nib which, like, has been working since I got it, more or less, but has the same typical problems with railroading and blotting that other people talk about, and apparently the consensus is that all Noodler’s nibs need tuning, at least among people who tune nibs
  



• Lamy Safari M, which might not need tuning, but probably does, because to a lesser extent, it acts pretty much like the silver Sports

(Shoutout to the perfect nibs that need no attention or worry whatsoever:

• the incredibly cheap and incredibly well-performing Preppy 03 Fines
  


• the juicy Shaeffer pop M
  


• The cheap Jinhao 599 Safari clone M: never gave me a lick of trouble, cost less than 10 bucks
  


• Lamy Safari EF
  


• Kaweco Sport Classic demonstrator EF, with the gold nib which might be why it’s better than the other ones)

The problem with this is that, besides the various sanding and smoothing materials I can get from pen shops, I need some magnifying lenses and I’m not even sure what kind of store magnifying lenses are sold in. Or, in fact, what they’re called in Finnish: who knows, it might be a different word for the little pocket ones than the big ones, since for some reason the people at FPN are calling them “louches”, not “magnifying glasses”. And not “hand lenses” like my geologist dad.