Sharpened Untipped Italic Nibs Gone Wild. With Lamy Vista.

I’ve been using Lamys of the Safari/AL-Star stripe since the early 2000s. My first Lamy was a charcoal Safari, and my next was a grey AL-Star. I used them a lot at the time but haven’t pulled em out much since my quiver started to get a lot crazier. Sometime at some show I nabbed a Lamy Vista, because I didn’t have one and I felt like I oughtta. It’s a sharp looking pen.

Now we’ve heard over and over from everybody about this pen. The section shape works for me and I like a slip cap, so there you go. Pen review portion complete.

This one time at an east coast pen show in the early 2010s I asked a Nibneister to sharpen up the untipped steel italic nib on my Delta Fusion 88. Stay with me.

He or she declined to do it, telling me it wouldn’t stay sharp. I was skeptical but didn’t press the issue. It’s not like I was going to write for miles and miles with it anyway (I’ve barely touched that pen since!)

Fast Forward to whenever.

Hanging out with Henry every week, we tend to get impatient with boring nibs. After he put a fiercely sharp CI on an untipped TWSBI Go, we decided steel italic nibs were fair game for grinding. I brought my Vista in for the treatment. It was wearing a 1.5mm stock italic and had sat uninked pretty much the whole time.

Henry put some serious edge on that effer, then smoothed it a touch for me on the upstrokes. We juiced it with a slurp of Apache Sunset and I wrote it dry in a week.

This pen is fun to write with, and is capable of some seriously edgy performance. If you’re ever in the mood for something really crispy, arm wrestle a nibmeister until they agree to sharp up one of these suckers for you.

I like:

• The looks: Vista is one of the sharpest looking demos IMO
• The new sharp-as-eff and pretty wide writing experience
• It’s a slip cap

I don’t care for:

• The Safari form factor is a little overly familiar by now

Bang for the buck: not bad

Special out of the box: naah

Looks: like a vape

Writes: like a slice!