1) The walls of the quill are too thick and the split at the nib is too long. This commonly happens with older kulmuses that have been trimmed several times. When writing, the nib doesn’t flex in a vertical plane because of the thickness of the quill wall. Instead then, the charitz just spreads open more on the horizontal plane and you get two lines. Solution – take your knife, holding the blade parallel to the floor and hold the quill with the nib facing away from you. Very gently shave off thin slivers from the top of the nib, thinning out the thickness of the quill wall there. You want to start a little before the start of the charitz and shave all the way along to the tip of the nib. Take off only a very little at a time and test it frequently. This will let the nib flex on the vertical plane and will reduce the horizontal spreading. Just be careful to to cut off too much from the very tip – it will ruin the sharpness of the kulmus.

2) With newly cut quills you sometimes get this effect if the charitz isn’t long enough. Then the split won’t separate enough to draw ink all the way down to the tip. You only get a little there and it doesn’t fill in the space between the two halves of the split. Solution: extend the charitz only a touch, maybe barely a half-milimeter at a time, until the ink flow is better. If you overshoot the mark, then you will get big blurry amounts of ink coming out and you will have to knick the end, re-trim, re-split, etc., so use caution!

Hatzlocho rabba! And please let me know how it turns out!

Thank you for a fine description of kulmus making.

I would like to ask – sometimes when I make a kulmus the ink does not flow out from the place of the chituch but comes out in two lines from the two outer points of the kulmus. What am I doing wrong and how can I fix this problem?

Thank you.

Avraham Appel