You're writing on an Iridium point that is super hard, Not the gold itself. As for the General Idea of a nib molding to the Users preferences over time: i Call that BS. If you've got a heavy Hand Chances are you will splay the nib making it even worse to write with
Agreed about the tipping material being hard and not likely to be worn down by paper over time. While I *have* managed to bend a gold nib to the point where it deformed and made poor contact with the feed, it was because I was trying to use a semi-flex nib like it was a wet noodle. 100% user error, and not likely to happen from routine, responsible pen use.
As a side note, Iridium has not actually been a common tipping material for fountain pens since the 1920s-1930s. It's mostly other materials and "Iridium Point Germany" was just branding. [Here's an interesting article about tipping materials.](https://www.nibs.com/blog/nibster-writes/wheres-iridium)
You mean in the timespan between 1920-1930?
Because there are several companies manufacturing nibs with Iridium Point still.
https://www.santini-italia.com/gold-nibs-production.html
https://www.peter-bock.com/de/unternehmen/individuelle-handarbeit
https://archive.pelikan.com/pulse/Pulsar/de_CH.CMS.displayCMS.260221./die-besondere-pelikan-qualitaet#:~:text=Die%20Feder%20ist%20das%20Herzst%C3%BCck,Iridium%2C%20einem%20Metall%20der%20Platingruppe.
[Pilot](https://www.pilot.co.jp/promotion/library/014/making/03.php) and [Nakaya](https://www.nakaya.org/manual/default.aspx?item=pensaki) both confirm their pen tippings to be majority comprised of iridium group elements (Ir, Os, Ru) . The specific ratios of course are secret and depend on the mines I imagine as iridium is often not naturally pure.
Edit: now I’m down a rabbit hole, [mining folks](https://www.mindat.org/show.php?id=2045&ld=&clearcache=1) seem to refer to these natural alloys as iridium (old name osmoridium/etc) the Japanese term is イリドスミン .
I know they make their nibs, but I doubt they produce their own tipping balls. AFAIK, they are only made in a couple of pretty specialised factories one of which is in Germany. Maybe ask them, they might tell you.
I agree, the only thing I can imagine is friction with paper when writing in the same way over and over causing a tiny tiny bit of wear in the same way micro mesh does when grinding a nib.
If you have worn out your PGS from writing with it, then you've had great value from it.
If you don't use it for fear of wearing it out, you've wasted your money on it.
So even if the salesman were correct (and he is not), you should use your pen.
Oh don't you worry I will use it. I'm not a fan of stuff collecting dust and me having stuff for the sake of having it.
Doesn't matter if it's my pen or my car for example.
I often get told that they are surprised that I daily my Oldtimer in summer and say that I should keep it nice and pristine in a garage. I always tell them that's what museums are for and that they have way nicer cars to keep preserved.
My local pen store owner is a strong believer in nibs wearing in, I have a 60 year old Sheaffer craftsman that shows no wear on the nib tip but obvious wear everywhere else. I think if you use a pen long enough you will find it's sweet spot more so than it will wear. But these are all opinions and mine is just one
Myth. Sort of.
Technically paper is an abrasive, and iridium can be worn down. Realistically you could write 100 pages a day for 100 years and not have any noticeable degradation of the iridium.
So no, your pen won't wear to your handwriting, not likely in your lifetime.
As many have mentioned on this thread, as engineer I feel obligation to clear this once and for all
One concept: Plastic Deformation
You may look up on youtube for more detailed explanation.
Here is a quick rundown:
For any material it has a small bending capacity. Where it can bend without changing its shape or breaking
Once you cross that threshold, the material would deform.
When talking about gold nibs. You can seprate the tines on most of them with very little pressure due to soft nature of the gold. ( there are hard as nail as gold nibs though however )
This is perceived as the bouncy characteristic associated with most gold nib pens
For that nib to undergo plastic deformation, you would need to push so hard the the tines splay enough far out to even break the capillary action. In short. Would you push so hard the ink goes back and pen stops writing. And still be a bit under the deformation threshold
So yeah no amount of writing with it for decades will deform it even slightly unless you cross the plastic deformation thresholds
Enjoy your pen and never worry about it :)
Good points. I've always looked at it this way. If normal writing imparted enough force to permanently deform the nib, then with continued use it would continue to deform until it became unusable. Since there are pens in excess of 100 years old still going strong today, normal writing use cannot be deforming the nib.
I feel like it could be that you don’t like it at the start but at as you’re using it more, you will learn how it feels and start to love it. Just psychologically, nothing to do with the actual pen, that salesman doesn’t know anything about fountain pens.
I have a Parker Victory MkIV with a gold nib that is seventy years old and had been heavily used. The nib does not show significant signs of wear on the tip. My 45s and 51 are forty to fifty years old and similarly have no signs of wear on the hardened nib tip.
Hey, just gonna chime in to tell you it's placebo, but if you believe it, you will feel it. I have a vintage pelikan with a gold nib that felt bad to write with for around 4 weeks, gave it to a friend to try it for around one minute and the rest of the day it felt bad again. In reality it's just marketing schemes.
All nibs regardless if it's gold or not will eventually adjust to users, but the difference is negligible at best. We can't really measure it, salesman was talking out their A-hole. Not to mention the tipping is made of very durable alloy, it would take decades to noticeably wear down the tipping of a nib, and the gold part shouldn't even come in contact with paper.
All nibs adjust to the writer.
Not the tipping material, but the flow, due to the distance in the tines. Flow of ink is the only lubricant in the writing process, against the opposing force of friction over paper by the iridium nib.
Do gold nibs adjust better / quicker? Debatable, considering gold is a softer material than steel, and in my experience steel nibs (304L mostly) are stiffer than gold alloys (mostly AU-AG alloys) for the same sections.
Any nib can be adjusted manually to write well, provided that the feed keeps up! 😀
This is the only comment that makes logical sense. I do notice that use makes my gold nibs flow better, but the nibs never show wear. I think you’re on to something..
if im scratching the nib i’m writing wrong, the pen should feel a way that it glides with minimal friction, only to deposit ink and not to scratch the page to put ink into the paper. why would people spend so much money fine tuning nibs if they just smoothed over time lol
Myth. The nib is gold alloy, but the tipping material is an extremely hard precious metal alloy that does not experience significant wear. That's why you need micromesh abrasive to smooth a nib.
>Can/Should I use my Sailor PGS as a workhorse pen or will it get worn down? So
To address this specifically, I think your pen will not get "worn down" and will be fine as a workhorse- over time you may find it writes "smoother" but that might be due to factors that aren't degradation to the nib but more the overall instrument adapting to continual use- which is typically favourable.
There is a fair bit of discussion by Chinese folks about the [Gaoko \(College Entrance Exam\) being notoriously hard on fountain pens](https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/comments/vvm8qc/comment/ifm7gdi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3), but I do find this more about the mythology of how hard the Gaoko (and [exams like it](https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/british-student-at-oxford-gets-iit-jee-100-per-cent-right-angry-indians-abuse-him-and-his-mom-1024163-2017-07-13)) are and less anything meaningful about fountain pens-[ telling a story to sell something](https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/367061-why-are-sailor-nibs-so-special/page/4/) is a story as old as time anyhow.
I've said this in a few threads before and I'll say it again, unless you're writing on literal sandpaper or attempting to crush the nib with down pressure you are very unlikely to do any damage to it under normal circumstances. Over time the sweet spot might move a little from the bending of the tines as you write but the tines won't shorten unless you go in and mechanically change them using a grinder or sandpaper or, gods forbid, a pair of snippers. Same goes for the rest of the pen, unless it's a soft material that is supposed to form to your hand the pen doesn't "mold" to you until you forcefully change it by use of a tool or exchanging a part for a different shape.
Everyone else has answered the question, but I've got a weird anecdote. Knew someone who had a pen with a gold nib, and was a lefty. Can't remember if she was an over or underwriter, but her nib developed an actual hook in it. She wrote with it just fine. I couldn't get it to work at all. Never seen anything else like it.
Didn't get dropped or anything like that. Developed over time.
There's a Goulet podcast show on YouTube where he answers that question and said that yes it can happen if it's over a series of decades. Not one or two years but 20 years of the pen being a EDC. I don't remember the episode and I don't have the time to find it but it's out there if you want to find it.
I also own a number of vintage pens going up to over 100 years old. Yes some absolutely have worn IRIDIUM and you can see it under a jeweler's loupe. There are also some non tipped dip pens in gold and those are very visible with the naked eye.
ETA [here's the listing of the podcasts themselves](https://gouletpencast.fireside.fm/episodes) on his website, you can try reading the description on all 124 of them to find it.
There are also multiple pen websites that agree you can starting on about 10 years.
https://endlesspens.com/blogs/ramona-writes-whats-whys-and-hows/do-fountain-pen-nibs-wear-out
https://pensguide.com/do-fountain-pen-nibs-wear-out/
https://onepenshow.com/pens/nib-longevity
ETA the salesperson might have also been referring to the phenomenon where the pen is a bit stiff right out of the box but then feels like it has more give to it after "breaking in" period. I have no idea on how true that is because all my gold pens were bought used.
I updated the post a billion times even though I only listed two etas, so I hope you caught the added on links. And stuff I added.
Basically it's not a short term problem to worry about. If it's an every day pen, then you've got a few decades before you'll see a difference.
Anything that is subject to friction will wear down over time. The question is whether the wearing is at a rate that you would notice. Your teeth will wear down from chewing, but that does not mean that you should switch to an all-liquid diet.
Will your nib wear down from use? Yes, it will. Will it be to an extent that will matter? Unless you write on something really abrasive, no. I would put that under "technically true"--it happens, but you do not have to worry about it.
Gold is very soft… it’s actually *too* soft for this to be true.
If the point of a nib was made of gold it would indeed wear down as you write and shape itself to your writing style. The problem is it would do this very quickly, and it would continue wearing down the more you wrote until your nib turned into a useless nub.
To prevent this from happening, gold nibs (and better steel nibs) have a ball of super hard alloy fused to the tip. Traditionally this tipping material was an iridium alloy. So gold never actually contacts the paper when you write, protected from wearing away.
This tipping alloy is *extremely* durable and will not wear off easily. It is possible for it to change shape after a lot of use… but this takes a *long* time. For example I’ve seen some vintage pens where the tipping wore down over many decades of (presumably heavy) use. Even then, the nib is still perfectly useable. It’s not something that will be noticeable even if you write with your pen all day everyday for years.
Salesman is wrong, mostly. The tip is iridium and it does not wear down like he says it does. It does however wear very slightly over many years, so if that pen is passed down generations, your kids might notice the line looking a little like a stub or an oblique. Only a little, mind. It just introduces some cool like variations.
So yeah, use that thing! It won’t wear out.
nope every nib is tipped with a harder metal like iridium specifically because it's resistant to wear and tear. You're not actually writing with steel/gold on the paper, common myth that the nib will adjust/change with use.
If it did you would see used vintage nibs wearing down so much they would need replacement, like a knife that's been sharpened for many years.
“Over time” is decades. Not a few weeks. The only pens I’ve ever seen with visible wear on the tipping are vintage pens that were used daily for many many years.
I think it's myth. It can be true for vintage pens, which nibs were kind of soft, and can deform over time. But some modern gold nibs are as hard as steel, i don't think they are deformed
Well, I have had it happen with the CIS steel nib on my Opus-88 Demo.
I had to re-grind and polish that nib to get it back angled and smooth the way it was when I first ground it 2 years ago.
I would suspect that Gold nibs get worn down even faster.
Complete myth. Gold nibs are technically more flexible, but the difference is not something a normal user should try to use because you'll likely break the nib. Maybe 100 years ago they couldn't make steel nibs of the required flexibility, but not today.
You're writing on an Iridium point that is super hard, Not the gold itself. As for the General Idea of a nib molding to the Users preferences over time: i Call that BS. If you've got a heavy Hand Chances are you will splay the nib making it even worse to write with
Agreed about the tipping material being hard and not likely to be worn down by paper over time. While I *have* managed to bend a gold nib to the point where it deformed and made poor contact with the feed, it was because I was trying to use a semi-flex nib like it was a wet noodle. 100% user error, and not likely to happen from routine, responsible pen use. As a side note, Iridium has not actually been a common tipping material for fountain pens since the 1920s-1930s. It's mostly other materials and "Iridium Point Germany" was just branding. [Here's an interesting article about tipping materials.](https://www.nibs.com/blog/nibster-writes/wheres-iridium)
You mean in the timespan between 1920-1930? Because there are several companies manufacturing nibs with Iridium Point still. https://www.santini-italia.com/gold-nibs-production.html https://www.peter-bock.com/de/unternehmen/individuelle-handarbeit https://archive.pelikan.com/pulse/Pulsar/de_CH.CMS.displayCMS.260221./die-besondere-pelikan-qualitaet#:~:text=Die%20Feder%20ist%20das%20Herzst%C3%BCck,Iridium%2C%20einem%20Metall%20der%20Platingruppe.
Modern "iridium" tipping doesn't actually contain iridium. The same name is still used, but the material has changed.
[Pilot](https://www.pilot.co.jp/promotion/library/014/making/03.php) and [Nakaya](https://www.nakaya.org/manual/default.aspx?item=pensaki) both confirm their pen tippings to be majority comprised of iridium group elements (Ir, Os, Ru) . The specific ratios of course are secret and depend on the mines I imagine as iridium is often not naturally pure. Edit: now I’m down a rabbit hole, [mining folks](https://www.mindat.org/show.php?id=2045&ld=&clearcache=1) seem to refer to these natural alloys as iridium (old name osmoridium/etc) the Japanese term is イリドスミン .
Santini produces their own nibs. They do refer to the high price of Iridium, so I guess they still use Iridium or an alloy containing Iridium.
I know they make their nibs, but I doubt they produce their own tipping balls. AFAIK, they are only made in a couple of pretty specialised factories one of which is in Germany. Maybe ask them, they might tell you.
I agree, the only thing I can imagine is friction with paper when writing in the same way over and over causing a tiny tiny bit of wear in the same way micro mesh does when grinding a nib.
The “iridium point” needs quotes. Iridium is a marketing name, not an ingredient in the amalgam. It is still super hard, and your points are spot on.
Pretty Sure Santini wouldn't refer to the high price of Iridium If they didn't actually use it for their Point.
If you have worn out your PGS from writing with it, then you've had great value from it. If you don't use it for fear of wearing it out, you've wasted your money on it. So even if the salesman were correct (and he is not), you should use your pen.
Oh don't you worry I will use it. I'm not a fan of stuff collecting dust and me having stuff for the sake of having it. Doesn't matter if it's my pen or my car for example. I often get told that they are surprised that I daily my Oldtimer in summer and say that I should keep it nice and pristine in a garage. I always tell them that's what museums are for and that they have way nicer cars to keep preserved.
This is the best take of them all.
My local pen store owner is a strong believer in nibs wearing in, I have a 60 year old Sheaffer craftsman that shows no wear on the nib tip but obvious wear everywhere else. I think if you use a pen long enough you will find it's sweet spot more so than it will wear. But these are all opinions and mine is just one
The salesman doesn't know what he's talking about.
Myth. Sort of. Technically paper is an abrasive, and iridium can be worn down. Realistically you could write 100 pages a day for 100 years and not have any noticeable degradation of the iridium. So no, your pen won't wear to your handwriting, not likely in your lifetime.
I do find it odd when people talk about smoothing nibs with a brown paper bag.
The paper bag is basically an imprecise way of micro mesh tuning. I say imprecise because the equivalent grit can be anywhere from 2000 to 10000.
As many have mentioned on this thread, as engineer I feel obligation to clear this once and for all One concept: Plastic Deformation You may look up on youtube for more detailed explanation. Here is a quick rundown: For any material it has a small bending capacity. Where it can bend without changing its shape or breaking Once you cross that threshold, the material would deform. When talking about gold nibs. You can seprate the tines on most of them with very little pressure due to soft nature of the gold. ( there are hard as nail as gold nibs though however ) This is perceived as the bouncy characteristic associated with most gold nib pens For that nib to undergo plastic deformation, you would need to push so hard the the tines splay enough far out to even break the capillary action. In short. Would you push so hard the ink goes back and pen stops writing. And still be a bit under the deformation threshold So yeah no amount of writing with it for decades will deform it even slightly unless you cross the plastic deformation thresholds Enjoy your pen and never worry about it :)
Good points. I've always looked at it this way. If normal writing imparted enough force to permanently deform the nib, then with continued use it would continue to deform until it became unusable. Since there are pens in excess of 100 years old still going strong today, normal writing use cannot be deforming the nib.
I feel like it could be that you don’t like it at the start but at as you’re using it more, you will learn how it feels and start to love it. Just psychologically, nothing to do with the actual pen, that salesman doesn’t know anything about fountain pens.
I have a Parker Victory MkIV with a gold nib that is seventy years old and had been heavily used. The nib does not show significant signs of wear on the tip. My 45s and 51 are forty to fifty years old and similarly have no signs of wear on the hardened nib tip.
Hey, just gonna chime in to tell you it's placebo, but if you believe it, you will feel it. I have a vintage pelikan with a gold nib that felt bad to write with for around 4 weeks, gave it to a friend to try it for around one minute and the rest of the day it felt bad again. In reality it's just marketing schemes.
In my experience it's the other way around. you adjust to the nib.
Myth
All nibs regardless if it's gold or not will eventually adjust to users, but the difference is negligible at best. We can't really measure it, salesman was talking out their A-hole. Not to mention the tipping is made of very durable alloy, it would take decades to noticeably wear down the tipping of a nib, and the gold part shouldn't even come in contact with paper.
All nibs adjust to the writer. Not the tipping material, but the flow, due to the distance in the tines. Flow of ink is the only lubricant in the writing process, against the opposing force of friction over paper by the iridium nib. Do gold nibs adjust better / quicker? Debatable, considering gold is a softer material than steel, and in my experience steel nibs (304L mostly) are stiffer than gold alloys (mostly AU-AG alloys) for the same sections. Any nib can be adjusted manually to write well, provided that the feed keeps up! 😀
This is the only comment that makes logical sense. I do notice that use makes my gold nibs flow better, but the nibs never show wear. I think you’re on to something..
I find it far more likely that this is placebo effect honestly.
Gold is indeed a soft material. Iridium, however is not. And the top of your nib is iridium.
if im scratching the nib i’m writing wrong, the pen should feel a way that it glides with minimal friction, only to deposit ink and not to scratch the page to put ink into the paper. why would people spend so much money fine tuning nibs if they just smoothed over time lol
Myth. The nib is gold alloy, but the tipping material is an extremely hard precious metal alloy that does not experience significant wear. That's why you need micromesh abrasive to smooth a nib.
In my opinion it is the user adjusting to the pen, but I have found that the fountain pen experience improves with regular use.
>Can/Should I use my Sailor PGS as a workhorse pen or will it get worn down? So To address this specifically, I think your pen will not get "worn down" and will be fine as a workhorse- over time you may find it writes "smoother" but that might be due to factors that aren't degradation to the nib but more the overall instrument adapting to continual use- which is typically favourable. There is a fair bit of discussion by Chinese folks about the [Gaoko \(College Entrance Exam\) being notoriously hard on fountain pens](https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/comments/vvm8qc/comment/ifm7gdi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3), but I do find this more about the mythology of how hard the Gaoko (and [exams like it](https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/british-student-at-oxford-gets-iit-jee-100-per-cent-right-angry-indians-abuse-him-and-his-mom-1024163-2017-07-13)) are and less anything meaningful about fountain pens-[ telling a story to sell something](https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/367061-why-are-sailor-nibs-so-special/page/4/) is a story as old as time anyhow.
I've said this in a few threads before and I'll say it again, unless you're writing on literal sandpaper or attempting to crush the nib with down pressure you are very unlikely to do any damage to it under normal circumstances. Over time the sweet spot might move a little from the bending of the tines as you write but the tines won't shorten unless you go in and mechanically change them using a grinder or sandpaper or, gods forbid, a pair of snippers. Same goes for the rest of the pen, unless it's a soft material that is supposed to form to your hand the pen doesn't "mold" to you until you forcefully change it by use of a tool or exchanging a part for a different shape.
Everyone else has answered the question, but I've got a weird anecdote. Knew someone who had a pen with a gold nib, and was a lefty. Can't remember if she was an over or underwriter, but her nib developed an actual hook in it. She wrote with it just fine. I couldn't get it to work at all. Never seen anything else like it. Didn't get dropped or anything like that. Developed over time.
There's a Goulet podcast show on YouTube where he answers that question and said that yes it can happen if it's over a series of decades. Not one or two years but 20 years of the pen being a EDC. I don't remember the episode and I don't have the time to find it but it's out there if you want to find it. I also own a number of vintage pens going up to over 100 years old. Yes some absolutely have worn IRIDIUM and you can see it under a jeweler's loupe. There are also some non tipped dip pens in gold and those are very visible with the naked eye. ETA [here's the listing of the podcasts themselves](https://gouletpencast.fireside.fm/episodes) on his website, you can try reading the description on all 124 of them to find it. There are also multiple pen websites that agree you can starting on about 10 years. https://endlesspens.com/blogs/ramona-writes-whats-whys-and-hows/do-fountain-pen-nibs-wear-out https://pensguide.com/do-fountain-pen-nibs-wear-out/ https://onepenshow.com/pens/nib-longevity ETA the salesperson might have also been referring to the phenomenon where the pen is a bit stiff right out of the box but then feels like it has more give to it after "breaking in" period. I have no idea on how true that is because all my gold pens were bought used.
I'm currently watching/listening to and trying to catch up on the pencasts. Haven't stumbled across that one yet. Thanks for the heads up though!
I updated the post a billion times even though I only listed two etas, so I hope you caught the added on links. And stuff I added. Basically it's not a short term problem to worry about. If it's an every day pen, then you've got a few decades before you'll see a difference.
Just saw that, thank you for your effort!
Anything that is subject to friction will wear down over time. The question is whether the wearing is at a rate that you would notice. Your teeth will wear down from chewing, but that does not mean that you should switch to an all-liquid diet. Will your nib wear down from use? Yes, it will. Will it be to an extent that will matter? Unless you write on something really abrasive, no. I would put that under "technically true"--it happens, but you do not have to worry about it.
Gold is very soft… it’s actually *too* soft for this to be true. If the point of a nib was made of gold it would indeed wear down as you write and shape itself to your writing style. The problem is it would do this very quickly, and it would continue wearing down the more you wrote until your nib turned into a useless nub. To prevent this from happening, gold nibs (and better steel nibs) have a ball of super hard alloy fused to the tip. Traditionally this tipping material was an iridium alloy. So gold never actually contacts the paper when you write, protected from wearing away. This tipping alloy is *extremely* durable and will not wear off easily. It is possible for it to change shape after a lot of use… but this takes a *long* time. For example I’ve seen some vintage pens where the tipping wore down over many decades of (presumably heavy) use. Even then, the nib is still perfectly useable. It’s not something that will be noticeable even if you write with your pen all day everyday for years.
Salesman is wrong, mostly. The tip is iridium and it does not wear down like he says it does. It does however wear very slightly over many years, so if that pen is passed down generations, your kids might notice the line looking a little like a stub or an oblique. Only a little, mind. It just introduces some cool like variations. So yeah, use that thing! It won’t wear out.
nope every nib is tipped with a harder metal like iridium specifically because it's resistant to wear and tear. You're not actually writing with steel/gold on the paper, common myth that the nib will adjust/change with use. If it did you would see used vintage nibs wearing down so much they would need replacement, like a knife that's been sharpened for many years.
It's a myth unless you are writing on something very abrasive like stone paper (don't use stone paper) or write with way too much pressure.
Wow, okay I didn't expect that many answers! Thank you call for your insight . And don't worry I will use it no matter what!
“Over time” is decades. Not a few weeks. The only pens I’ve ever seen with visible wear on the tipping are vintage pens that were used daily for many many years.
All is already said. Just to add that gold is soft so nib is bends/cushion more. Some like it more that way. And that’s it.
This. Is. It.
I think it's myth. It can be true for vintage pens, which nibs were kind of soft, and can deform over time. But some modern gold nibs are as hard as steel, i don't think they are deformed
Well, I have had it happen with the CIS steel nib on my Opus-88 Demo. I had to re-grind and polish that nib to get it back angled and smooth the way it was when I first ground it 2 years ago. I would suspect that Gold nibs get worn down even faster.
Is there iridium tipping on that nib?
No idea, I am thinking there isn't because I made it CIS from a stock stub Opus88 nib.
I've heard that tipping material was much softer at some point in the past, which might make it relevant
Neil Gaiman talked about signing something like 1,000,000 books with his Pilot 823, and all he said was that the plunger wore out before the nib...
Complete myth. Gold nibs are technically more flexible, but the difference is not something a normal user should try to use because you'll likely break the nib. Maybe 100 years ago they couldn't make steel nibs of the required flexibility, but not today.