Left Hook Pens

It’s Saturday the 14th, and on this special day I would like to present a cursed frankenpen that I’ve named the L’Ahab. It’s a Noodler’s Ahab with a Lamy Safari nib and feed. The Ahab is a flex pen with an ebonite feed and Noodler’s stock flex nib. The body and cap of the pen is made of vegetal resin that smells pungently earthy, to put it nicely. Since ebonite feeds can be heat set as needed, and since the grip section is able to take a wide variety of nibs, the Ahab is a good model for creating your own Frankenstein’s monster of a fountain pen.

The L’Ahab happened somewhat by accident; I had a spare Lamy feed that I had gotten from Vanness and I decided to shove it into my Ahab section to see if it would fit. Lamy feeds are designed to fit perfectly in the section of a Safari or AL Star, and they will get stuck if you don’t put it in just right, and it is now permanently stuck in my Ahab. As you can see, the feed is roughly 3/4 of a centimeter too long for this section, but the cap is roomy enough that it’s not an issue. If the exposed feed bothers you, it should still work if you cut off the extra at the bottom with a Dremel.

I have a Medium Kugel nib on right now, which works well for left handed overwriting. If you like the easy swappability and performance of Lamy nibs but don’t like their grip sections or their pens in general, the L’Ahab might be a nice solution for you. With the vacuum piston converter that the Ahab comes with, this pen has far more ink capacity than any Lamy. Maximum ink capacity can be achieved by eyedropper converting your Ahab with an o-ring and silicone grease. However, I have seen an eyedroppered Lamy Vista where the open ink window fountain pen body was replaced with a fully enclosed Vista rollerball body.

The L’Ahab has about the same ink flow as a standard Safari with a Medium nib. I inked up this pen with Diamine Nutcracker, and it writes smoothly with some light sheening on Tomoe River paper. The L’Ahab does hard start if you set down the pen for a few minutes, but that tends to happen with the Medium Kugel no matter what.

In the middle of writing this post I switched to a 14k gold medium nib. Lamy’s medium gold Safari nibs (in my experience) write very smoothly, and the L’Ahab is now my favorite way to write with one. I would recommend this frankenpen if you’re left handed like me and don’t like Lamy’s triangulated grip sections. If you want to make one of these yourself, you can find an Ahab here, and a Lamy gold nib and feed here.

Disclaimer: The links in this post are Amazon and eBay affiliate links. If you click them and make a purchase I may earn a small commission.