• After filling piston pen drop 5 or so drops back in to bottle, turn the pen up and pull back the remaining ink. Your pen will be filled but there won’t be much excess ink to wipe off. Not only are you saving ink you are also reducing chances of getting any ink on your hands;

• When flying with your pens keep nibs pointing up. That way air expanding due to pressure can’t push any ink out.

I never buy samples but I always decant some ink in smaller containers so I don’t contaminate the bottle with dirty pens (some inks are too annoying to wash out completely as well), your trick sounds good to me. If ink dries though, usually you can go back to the previous level by topping it up with distilled water, it might need some vigorous mixing and/or a day to go back to a solution close enough to the original.

I’ve had moderately good results with ink that’s 50 years old doing this.

I always wipe the hand section of the barrel on the back of my hand before using a fountain pen, if a small amount of ink got out into the cap I find that in a pinch oddly the best place to wipe it off where it won’t get on something else is the back of my hand.

Blunt nosed syringes are super useful, get some!

A Wing Sung 698 fits Pilot nibs perfectly from a metropolitan or other similar price range pilot fountain pen. Get the italic stub nib on a Pilot pen and then get a Wing Sung 698, swap the nibs and you have a brilliant but affordable piston filler.

Get some cheap pens, fuck the nibs up, mess around with figuring out how to re-align the tines. Once you learn the skill fountain pens are way less frustrating especially when ordering online without the ability to try them. One great way to “gently hammer” a nib back into shape is to get a thick book with lots of pages that you don’t care about. Take the nib off the pen and slip it in between the pages up to where the bend or crease is. Now you can adjust how many pages to cover the nib with so when you make a hit with a hammer or mallet you can adjust how acutely focused the force is. This is important because if a bend is very sharp you might want to only cover the nib with a small amount of pages to focus the hammer hit on the precise spot of the bend, but if the bend is broad and smoothly distributed you can bury the nib with a lot of pages and make sure that even a firm hammer hit doesn’t focus a bunch of force on bending the nib along a crease and make a new problem. It goes without saying, don’t do this with an expensive nib unless you are confident, but you can repair quite ridiculous nib bends with this method if you are careful.

Get a jewel magnify glass, learn what it looks like up close in terms of tine alignment when a fountain pens feels perfect for you.

Gold fountain pen nibs are special because they are jewelry, they aren’t softer or superior to a well designed steel nib. This holds true for flex nibs and they were plenty of flexible steel nib fountain pens in the past. Look at FPR’s Himalaya flex-iest steel nib for the best modern example.

You can tweak ink into your own colors and they can’t stop you! If you like an ink but it is too light/dark you can add a few drops of water or black or dark brown ink, respectively, to tweak it several shades in either direction without significantly changing the characteristics or hue of the ink. I suggest pipetting a bit out onto a nonabsorbent surface (I use takeout container lids) and adding 1-2 drops at a time and testing until I get my desired shade.