Who we are
RPCO Supply Co. is the trading name of RPCO Vitality Group LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company with its registered office at 1309 Coffeen Ave Ste 1200, Sheridan, Wyoming 82801. We sell fine writing instruments, ink, paper and desk goods, direct to the people who use them.
The shop exists because of a specific annoyance. A nib sold as a medium can be anything between 0.5 and 0.8 mm depending on which batch of blanks it came from and how wet the feed under it happens to run. Nobody measures. The customer finds out by writing with it.
So we measure. Every nib unit that leaves here has been ground, honed, and then written on a stated paper with a stated ink, and the card it was written on goes in the box. The number on the card is the number your nib made, not a nominal figure from a catalogue.
What happens on the bench
A nib arrives from the mill at a nominal width. Getting it to a real one takes three operations, and we do all three here.
- Grinding. The tipping material is taken down on a fine wheel to the profile the grind calls for — round for a standard width, flat for a stub, flat along the down-stroke for an architect.
- Honing. The ground face is finished on a ceramic hone and then through micro-mesh from 4000 to 12000. This is what removes the tooth a freshly ground nib has.
- Writing. The unit goes into a test body, is filled with the ink it was specified for, and is written on the stated paper until it has laid a continuous line without a skip. Then it is measured.
If a unit will not hold a line, it goes back to the hone. If it will not hold a line after the second pass, it is scrapped. We would rather lose the blank than the customer.
A nib leaves the machine at a nominal width and arrives at a real one. The difference between those two numbers is the whole job.From the bench notes
The inks
Nine inks, mixed here in small batches. Seven are dye inks at neutral pH, one is a pigmented carbon black, and one is a genuine iron gall that oxidises on the page to a permanent near-black over roughly forty-eight hours.
They are mixed here for the same reason the nibs are measured here: so that the figures we quote are ours. When we say a medium nib lays 0.60 mm on 100 gsm laid, that is this ink on that sheet with that nib.
| Family | Lines | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Dye, neutral | 7 | Washes out, safe in any pen, not waterproof |
| Pigmented | 1 | Opaque and waterproof, must not dry in the feed |
| Iron gall | 1 | Permanent once cured, flush the pen fortnightly |
The paper
We did not want to sell paper. We ended up selling it because a nib specification is meaningless without one — the same nib with the same ink lays a different line on a sized 100 gsm laid than it does on an unsized sheet, and the difference is larger than the difference between two adjacent nib grades.
So the writing papers in this catalogue are the papers the nibs were tested on. The 100 gsm cream laid is the reference sheet for every standard grind. The 120 gsm cotton rag is the reference for flexible nibs and the broad grinds, because it is the only stock here that takes a full flex down-stroke without feathering.
How we run the shop
Three commitments, all of them testable.
- Every figure is measured. No nominal widths, no marketing round numbers. If we cannot measure it, we do not print it.
- We tell you what a thing will not do. The flex nib has a limit and we state it. The pocket pen will not take a converter and we say so on its page rather than in a returns email.
- One charge, once. There is no subscription here, no stored card, and no recurring billing of any kind. You buy a thing and we charge you for that thing.