Fountain pens – first thoughts

 

Last year I thought I’d get a cheap fountain pen (Faber-Castell Fresh), just to see what they were like these days as I had only dim and distant memories of using them at school. I was so impressed with the smooth writing that, when CultPens advertised a TWSBI Eco T to me 6 months later, I had to get one … and there I fell into yet another rabbit hole of geeky, collections of cool kit 😀 

Why use a fountain pen though? That’s what I asked myself actually because they can be messy and you have to refill them if you don’t use cartridges and the ink can smudge and isn’t always water resistant. But what attracted me, besides the fact that they are quite cool, was that the inks these days come in a huge variety of colours – some with sheen and shimmer – and they also actually force you to write more carefully. They are also fairly environmentally friendly because you don’t throw them away when they have run out of ink. 

Since hand surgery 20 years ago to fix a broken thumb tendon, and after 30+ years of being primarily keyboard bound, my hand writing has become abysmal. Even I have difficulty reading my scrawl sometimes and I’m often forced to write in capital letters just to make it legible. Writing with a fountain pen though focuses the mind and therefore writing becomes a more enjoyable pastime. Being able to choose colours and ink effects beyond the standard blue and black in a quality pen (not a felt pen or marker) gives extra creativity and enjoyment. 

As you might imagine, there’s also a thriving fountain pen user’s community on social media and so you’re always provided with friendly help and advice by fellow “penablers”! In the UK alone there are also many good companies like CultPens, PurePens, PenHeaven & ArtFromTheHeart with great service and a huge catalogue of good quality products to choose from. I have bought from all of them and from AliExpress. 

My main interest at the moment is exploring the different inks that you can use and in buying lots of fairly cheap “demonstrator” pens which show off the ink and mechanism inside. My favourites so far are the TWSBI range of pens, which are well made, write smoothly and look great! 

TWSBI Diamond 580ALR

This is the top of the range piston-filling model made with anodised aluminium trimmings – in this case Prussian Blue. It’s very comfortable in the hand and writes very smoothly with a large nib – I have inked it with Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo, a lovely smooth Prussian Blue ink. 

Early versions of this model seemed to have problems with the barrel resin cracking due to internal stresses, but they seem to have fixed this now. 

TWSBI Eco & Eco T

 

To be honest, both sell for the same list price and they both feel identical to me, to write with. They’re really smooth piston-filler pens (so no cartridges or converters needed) with a huge ink capacity and the nibs are quite wet and free flowing. The entire pen can be stripped down and serviced to replace the silicone grease on the piston but the nibs are a little fiddly to swap out. I hope to investigate this further with one of my pens and I have a few replacement metal nibs on order. The black, plastic feed, which sits under the metal nib, isn’t very easy to remove and care is needed to avoid breaking it. 

These pens are made in Taiwan.

TWSBI Swipe

This is one of the budget models – it has a push cap and a funny spring/plunger filling system but it works well and writes beautifully. I use this with a 1.1mm stub nib inked with Organics Studio Nitrogen, one of the most sheening inks ever made. 

Lamy Al Star

This is a very simple cartridge (with optional converter) pen with petal housing and a little ink window. The build is sturdy and there are a huge number of colours in the range – with more being released every year, with regional variants and limited editions. The nibs are smooth to write with and are also relatively easy to swap out of you want to get a different width of nib – this isn’t always the case with other brands.

These pens are made in Germany.

Faber-Castell Fresh

I have 3 of these lovely little cartridge fountain pens now and they write very well. They are an ideal way to try out the feel of a fountain pen or for a child’s pen. The rang of inks for cartridge-only pens isn’t huge though, if you want to give it a try, you can refill cartridges but it gets messy very quickly.

Platinum Preppy

These are a real classic amongst the cheapie pens – a lovely writer that takes converters and ideal for a child or beginner. Just be a little careful with them though because they also have a reputation for being a bit fragile and easy to break. This was inked with Diamine Aurora Borealis. 

Chinese pens

Recently China has cottoned on to the growth in the fountain pen market and has been producing a wide range of models in direct competition with some of the big names. The pens tend to be very cheap and work well but the build quality and quality control suffers a little and they’re not as refined as other brands. You will often find that if you buy a few of them most will work fine but 1 will mysteriously have flow issues or have a scratch nib. You also have to shop around because sometimes the same pen will be sold at wildly different prices. In my experience the best place to look is either AliExpress or Temu.

Interesting fact: Many Chinese pens are supplied with nibs that look almost exactly like the Lamy Z50 nib unit, used on the Safari and Al-Star models. You can also buy replacement nibs from China in a huge range of widths from EF (0.3mm) up to 2.9mm stub, which means (and yes I have tried it but do it at your own risk!) you can swap these nibs onto a Lamy pen and get a wider range of nib choices. The steel nibs themselves can be a very tight fit on the plastic feeds but the sticky-tape trick (tape on the top and sides of the nib & pull in line with the pen) usually works. 

Caliarts Ego v2

This is a make I hadn’t heard of until recently but they got some good reviews on Facebook FP groups so, here it is! It actually seems to be a really good buy – it writes very well and when left for months it wrote again first time – no stutter, no dryness! I inked it with Iroshizuku Asa-gao, which is a gorgeous bright blue (as you can see in the feed/section!) and a very well-behaved ink generally. 

Jinhao 874 (standard metal clip)

These are unusual pens in that I’ve found them in 2 versions – this is the typical version with the metal clip and black converter. They are all push-cap, not screw, and the barrel has a little window in it (like a Lamy Safari), which is a bit superfluous as the ones I have are transparent. All are really nice pens that write well and they seal well so they restart easily after being stored. They come in a very wide range of nibs too so you can get everything from an EF right up to a 1.9mm stub, which is immense! I tend to prefer a 1.1stub if I want extreme italics – anything more is like writing with a chunky felt parker!

I’d happily recommend these to anyone. 

Jinhao 874 (St. Penpps version with wire clip)

This seems to be a version of the Jinhao 874 sold by an AliExpress seller called St.Penpps and they have given it a wire clip and red converter. This was inked with Diamine Skull & Roses, a German exclusive. 

EDIT: after months of being left all versions of this pen wrote well after just wetting the nib – they didn’t lose any ink at all so the seals are all excellent too. The only problem with one pen was that it clogged while using De Atramentis Pink Rose Gold, but this ink is a pen-killer and has clogged every pen I’ve put it in within minutes. 

Jinhao 990

These are simple plastic-framed pens with integral converters. The pen feels quite small in the hand but they come in a very wide range of nibs so they make good, cheap pens for testing inks or different writing styles. 

EDIT: Despite being fairly basic pens, when these were left for a few months and tested the nib just needed a slight dip in water to restart it. No ink had dried up so the cap clearly seals well. 

Jinhao 100/Century

This is a plastic-framed pen with an integral converter, so it’s effectively like a piston-filler but the capacity is much smaller than, say, a TWSBI where the entire pen chamber is filled with ink. These pens have a size-6 nib.

Jinhao x450

This is a metal-framed pen with an integral converter and size 6 nib, as per the Jinhao 100.

Lanbitou 3059

This is the closest copy of the TWSBI Eco I have seen so far – right down to the red logo on the cap, the split clip, the wide cap-band and hexagonal cross-section. But, although it seems very similar from outside, there are significant simplifications in the design that make it cheaper and less functional.

For instance, no little spanner or bottle of silicon grease has been provided because it has a much simpler arrangement for opening the barrel up and disassembling the pen – it just unscrews if you turn the collar between the barrel and the piston winding mechanism. The feed is also transparent and I’m not sure yet whether it is removable – I suspect not because on my pen the nib is also hooded and unreachable, but there are unhooded versions, which I might try to get hold of later. 

EDIT: after being left for a few months all of these pens had dried up completely and needed flushing out. Not a great sign and clearly the caps don’t seal at all well. I can’t recommend it as it can only be used for a short period and there are better pens in this price bracket. 

Majohn Capless A1

This is a very interesting pen indeed – mainly because it is an almost direct copy of a very much more expensive pen, the Pilot Vanishing Point / Capless, but a lot cheaper. The mechanism is extremely similar to the Pilot, including the little trap-door that seals off the nib to keep it wet when retracted. One extra option that you don’t get with the Pilot is a clipless version with a small roll-stop for people who don’t like big shiny clips.

I enjoyed using it from day #1 and even months later it usually starts first time, even with Diamine Noel ink in it – a sheening ink. The only slight problem has been that it isn’t easy to see how much ink is left in it because the clear converter is almost completely hidden in the nib mechanism and the barrel is of course opaque. 

Majohn Capless A2

I haven’t inked this pen yet – just too many pens and not enough time! But on first looks it is a very nice addition to the collection. It’s a copy of the Pilot Decimo Capless but, as you’d expect, very much cheaper! It has a plastic body, which makes it a bit lighter than the A1 but not a lot lighter because so much of the internal working is metal anyway. 

Majohn C3 

This adorable little chunky pen is such a good writer and feels great in the hand. I like that the cap thread is actually the rim of the section so it seals way inside the cap. It has no clip but it does have a little silver roll-stop. I inked it with Iroshizuku Momiji which is very well-behaved and a brilliant red colour.

After being left for a few months it wrote first time! 

Majohn M2

A smallish eye-dropper, demonstrator pen that I received by accident (twice!) from a seller but which has grown on me. It comes with a free pipette and has a nice, tight seal which should keep the ink in very well. 

Majohn (Moonman) T1

This has a lovely large (#6?) nib on it but when inked with Troublemaker Doña Victorina it has persistent dry starts and often stutters. The dry starts look to be a problem with the cap sealing and could possibly be fixed with an extra rubber O-ring but I haven’t got a spare to try. I’ve dipped the nib in water and then it writes fairly well but it quickly dries up so I do suspect that there are flow issues too. 

PenBBS 309

This pen is a plastic piston-filler and the model I bought was the clear-bodied one with red cap and knob. They have a screw cap which houses a lovely large #6 nib so it is a pretty smooth writer. When my pen came the piston was jammed and when I unwound the mechanism the whole end came off, showing that, unlike mainstream brands like the TWSBI Eco, this pen uses the same thread for adjusting the piston as it does for removing the piston mechanism. That makes it simpler and cheaper but it does mean that you have to be careful to make sure the mechanism is well screwed in and that it doesn’t come undone when filling the pen. 

It writes pretty well though so the basic mechanics of it are fine and it’s a good pen – but as you’d expect it just falls down a little on the build quality. The nib makes up for this though and I really like using the pen. 

EDIT: after being left for a few months, inked with Diamine Writer’s Blood it wrote first time, with no dry start issues. Very nice to see and a good indicator that PenBBS deserve their reputation for being one of the best Chinese brands.

PenBBS 494

(work in progress)

WingSung 699 

This is a direct copy of the Sailor Custom Heritage 823 and is really comfortable to write with – a lovely pen. It has the vacuum filling system 

WingSung 3003

A simple converter-filler pen but they write well and look pretty. They have a push cap which seems to seal very well indeed as the ink didn’t dry up after months of storage and they just needed a dip in water to restart the ink. I even used De Atramentis Black Velvet Gold, which is a very shimmery ink and it hasn’t seemingly affected the flow at all. 

One nice little bonus is that the nib seems to be semi-flexible as the tines split nicely when you apply pressure. This perhaps helps the ink flow and keeps it wet.

WingSung 3008 v1 (clear)

These are lovely writers but I have one that seems to be writing dry, with a wet ink like Diamine Poppy Red. I’m not sure why this is happening but it is a bit disappointing. This one was inked with Dominant Industry Base Black though and has always been a great writer – even after being left for months it wrote first time. I think this just highlights problems with quality control. 

WingSung 3008 v1 (blue)

Again, another great pen that just needed the nib wetting to restart it after a long time in storage. This was inked using Diamine Hell’s Bells, a German exclusive. 

EDIT: I would recommend these pens but there is a third in the set with an F nib, which has consistently written dry. It dry started after storage and even after wetting the nib the flow seems to dry up and it becomes scratchy. So perhaps the moral is to swap out the nib for something broad? 

WingSung 3008 v2

The slightly larger cousin of the 3003, with a piston instead of a converter and a screw-cap instead of push fit. Looks nice and writes well but after being left I found that most of the ink had leaked into the cap and it was a ghastly mess! Not sure if I just have a leaky seal but the jury is out with this pen. On the positive side it hadn’t dried up, with all that ink in the cap!

WingSung 3013

I actually took ages to get around to inking this pen because I wasn’t sure if the vacuum filling system was going to work properly – it was a very cheap pen! But after I had had such good experiences with other WingSung pens I decided to try it and it worked brilliantly. You get a massive fill of ink and it just works first time – you just unscrew the end which frees up the plunger in the middle – you pull the plunger out and then, with the nib submerged in the ink, push down the plunger fairly quickly and this induces a vacuum in the chamber which when released at the end of the down stroke draws ink into the main chamber. Ingenious! 

This is a plastic framed pen but although the frame is plastic the guts are made from metal and so this pen feels quite heavy.

 

Last year I thought I’d get a cheap fountain pen (Faber-Castell Fresh), just to see what they were like these days as I had only dim and distant memories of using them at school. I was so impressed with the smooth writing that, when CultPens advertised a TWSBI Eco T to me 6 months later, I had to get one … and there I fell into yet another rabbit hole of geeky, collections of cool kit 😀 

Why use a fountain pen though? That’s what I asked myself actually because they can be messy and you have to refill them if you don’t use cartridges and the ink can smudge and isn’t always water resistant. But what attracted me, besides the fact that they are quite cool, was that the inks these days come in a huge variety of colours – some with sheen and shimmer – and they also actually force you to write more carefully. They are also fairly environmentally friendly because you don’t throw them away when they have run out of ink. 

Since hand surgery 20 years ago to fix a broken thumb tendon, and after 30+ years of being primarily keyboard bound, my hand writing has become abysmal. Even I have difficulty reading my scrawl sometimes and I’m often forced to write in capital letters just to make it legible. Writing with a fountain pen though focuses the mind and therefore writing becomes a more enjoyable pastime. Being able to choose colours and ink effects beyond the standard blue and black in a quality pen (not a felt pen or marker) gives extra creativity and enjoyment. 

As you might imagine, there’s also a thriving fountain pen user’s community on social media and so you’re always provided with friendly help and advice by fellow “penablers”! In the UK alone there are also many good companies like CultPens, PurePens, PenHeaven & ArtFromTheHeart with great service and a huge catalogue of good quality products to choose from. I have bought from all of them and from AliExpress. 

My main interest at the moment is exploring the different inks that you can use and in buying lots of fairly cheap “demonstrator” pens which show off the ink and mechanism inside. My favourites so far are the TWSBI range of pens, which are well made, write smoothly and look great! 

TWSBI Diamond 580ALR

This is the top of the range piston-filling model made with anodised aluminium trimmings – in this case Prussian Blue. It’s very comfortable in the hand and writes very smoothly with a large nib – I have inked it with Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo, a lovely smooth Prussian Blue ink. 

Early versions of this model seemed to have problems with the barrel resin cracking due to internal stresses, but they seem to have fixed this now. 

TWSBI Eco & Eco T

To be honest, both sell for the same list price and they both feel identical to me, to write with. They’re really smooth piston-filler pens (so no cartridges or converters needed) with a huge ink capacity and the nibs are quite wet and free flowing. The entire pen can be stripped down and serviced to replace the silicone grease on the piston but the nibs are a little fiddly to swap out. I hope to investigate this further with one of my pens and I have a few replacement metal nibs on order. The black, plastic feed, which sits under the metal nib, isn’t very easy to remove and care is needed to avoid breaking it. 

These pens are made in Taiwan.

TWSBI Swipe

This is one of the budget models – it has a push cap and a funny spring/plunger filling system but it works well and writes beautifully. I use this with a 1.1mm stub nib inked with Organics Studio Nitrogen, one of the most sheening inks ever made. 

Lamy Al Star

This is a very simple cartridge (with optional converter) pen with petal housing and a little ink window. The build is sturdy and there are a huge number of colours in the range – with more being released every year, with regional variants and limited editions. The nibs are smooth to write with and are also relatively easy to swap out of you want to get a different width of nib – this isn’t always the case with other brands.

These pens are made in Germany.

Faber-Castell Fresh

I have 3 of these lovely little cartridge fountain pens now and they write very well. They are an ideal way to try out the feel of a fountain pen or for a child’s pen. The rang of inks for cartridge-only pens isn’t huge though, if you want to give it a try, you can refill cartridges but it gets messy very quickly.

Platinum Preppy

These are a real classic amongst the cheapie pens – a lovely writer that takes converters and ideal for a child or beginner. Just be a little careful with them though because they also have a reputation for being a bit fragile and easy to break. This was inked with Diamine Aurora Borealis. 

Chinese pens

Recently China has cottoned on to the growth in the fountain pen market and has been producing a wide range of models in direct competition with some of the big names. The pens tend to be very cheap and work well but the build quality and quality control suffers a little and they’re not as refined as other brands. You will often find that if you buy a few of them most will work fine but 1 will mysteriously have flow issues or have a scratch nib. You also have to shop around because sometimes the same pen will be sold at wildly different prices. In my experience the best place to look is either AliExpress or Temu.

Interesting fact: Many Chinese pens are supplied with nibs that look almost exactly like the Lamy Z50 nib unit, used on the Safari and Al-Star models. You can also buy replacement nibs from China in a huge range of widths from EF (0.3mm) up to 2.9mm stub, which means (and yes I have tried it but do it at your own risk!) you can swap these nibs onto a Lamy pen and get a wider range of nib choices. The steel nibs themselves can be a very tight fit on the plastic feeds but the sticky-tape trick (tape on the top and sides of the nib & pull in line with the pen) usually works. 

Caliarts Ego v2

This is a make I hadn’t heard of until recently but they got some good reviews on Facebook FP groups so, here it is! It actually seems to be a really good buy – it writes very well and when left for months it wrote again first time – no stutter, no dryness! I inked it with Iroshizuku Asa-gao, which is a gorgeous bright blue (as you can see in the feed/section!) and a very well-behaved ink generally. 

Jinhao 874 (standard metal clip)

These are unusual pens in that I’ve found them in 2 versions – this is the typical version with the metal clip and black converter. They are all push-cap, not screw, and the barrel has a little window in it (like a Lamy Safari), which is a bit superfluous as the ones I have are transparent. All are really nice pens that write well and they seal well so they restart easily after being stored. They come in a very wide range of nibs too so you can get everything from an EF right up to a 1.9mm stub, which is immense! I tend to prefer a 1.1stub if I want extreme italics – anything more is like writing with a chunky felt parker!

I’d happily recommend these to anyone. 

Jinhao 874 (St. Penpps version with wire clip)

This seems to be a version of the Jinhao 874 sold by an AliExpress seller called St.Penpps and they have given it a wire clip and red converter. This was inked with Diamine Skull & Roses, a German exclusive. 

EDIT: after months of being left all versions of this pen wrote well after just wetting the nib – they didn’t lose any ink at all so the seals are all excellent too. The only problem with one pen was that it clogged while using De Atramentis Pink Rose Gold, but this ink is a pen-killer and has clogged every pen I’ve put it in within minutes. 

Jinhao 990

These are simple plastic-framed pens with integral converters. The pen feels quite small in the hand but they come in a very wide range of nibs so they make good, cheap pens for testing inks or different writing styles. 

EDIT: Despite being fairly basic pens, when these were left for a few months and tested the nib just needed a slight dip in water to restart it. No ink had dried up so the cap clearly seals well. 

Jinhao 100/Century

This is a plastic-framed pen with an integral converter, so it’s effectively like a piston-filler but the capacity is much smaller than, say, a TWSBI where the entire pen chamber is filled with ink. These pens have a size-6 nib.

Jinhao x450

This is a metal-framed pen with an integral converter and size 6 nib, as per the Jinhao 100.

Lanbitou 3059

This is the closest copy of the TWSBI Eco I have seen so far – right down to the red logo on the cap, the split clip, the wide cap-band and hexagonal cross-section. But, although it seems very similar from outside, there are significant simplifications in the design that make it cheaper and less functional.

For instance, no little spanner or bottle of silicon grease has been provided because it has a much simpler arrangement for opening the barrel up and disassembling the pen – it just unscrews if you turn the collar between the barrel and the piston winding mechanism. The feed is also transparent and I’m not sure yet whether it is removable – I suspect not because on my pen the nib is also hooded and unreachable, but there are unhooded versions, which I might try to get hold of later. 

EDIT: after being left for a few months all of these pens had dried up completely and needed flushing out. Not a great sign and clearly the caps don’t seal at all well. I can’t recommend it as it can only be used for a short period and there are better pens in this price bracket. 

Majohn Capless A1

This is a very interesting pen indeed – mainly because it is an almost direct copy of a very much more expensive pen, the Pilot Vanishing Point / Capless, but a lot cheaper. The mechanism is extremely similar to the Pilot, including the little trap-door that seals off the nib to keep it wet when retracted. One extra option that you don’t get with the Pilot is a clipless version with a small roll-stop for people who don’t like big shiny clips.

I enjoyed using it from day #1 and even months later it usually starts first time, even with Diamine Noel ink in it – a sheening ink. The only slight problem has been that it isn’t easy to see how much ink is left in it because the clear converter is almost completely hidden in the nib mechanism and the barrel is of course opaque. 

Majohn Capless A2

I haven’t inked this pen yet – just too many pens and not enough time! But on first looks it is a very nice addition to the collection. It’s a copy of the Pilot Decimo Capless but, as you’d expect, very much cheaper! It has a plastic body, which makes it a bit lighter than the A1 but not a lot lighter because so much of the internal working is metal anyway. 

Majohn C3 

This adorable little chunky pen is such a good writer and feels great in the hand. I like that the cap thread is actually the rim of the section so it seals way inside the cap. It has no clip but it does have a little silver roll-stop. I inked it with Iroshizuku Momiji which is very well-behaved and a brilliant red colour.

After being left for a few months it wrote first time! 

Majohn M2

A smallish eye-dropper, demonstrator pen that I received by accident (twice!) from a seller but which has grown on me. It comes with a free pipette and has a nice, tight seal which should keep the ink in very well. 

Majohn (Moonman) T1

This has a lovely large (#6?) nib on it but when inked with Troublemaker Doña Victorina it has persistent dry starts and often stutters. The dry starts look to be a problem with the cap sealing and could possibly be fixed with an extra rubber O-ring but I haven’t got a spare to try. I’ve dipped the nib in water and then it writes fairly well but it quickly dries up so I do suspect that there are flow issues too. 

PenBBS 309

This pen is a plastic piston-filler and the model I bought was the clear-bodied one with red cap and knob. They have a screw cap which houses a lovely large #6 nib so it is a pretty smooth writer. When my pen came the piston was jammed and when I unwound the mechanism the whole end came off, showing that, unlike mainstream brands like the TWSBI Eco, this pen uses the same thread for adjusting the piston as it does for removing the piston mechanism. That makes it simpler and cheaper but it does mean that you have to be careful to make sure the mechanism is well screwed in and that it doesn’t come undone when filling the pen. 

It writes pretty well though so the basic mechanics of it are fine and it’s a good pen – but as you’d expect it just falls down a little on the build quality. The nib makes up for this though and I really like using the pen. 

EDIT: after being left for a few months, inked with Diamine Writer’s Blood it wrote first time, with no dry start issues. Very nice to see and a good indicator that PenBBS deserve their reputation for being one of the best Chinese brands.

PenBBS 494

(work in progress)

WingSung 699 

This is a direct copy of the Sailor Custom Heritage 823 and is really comfortable to write with – a lovely pen. It has the vacuum filling system 

WingSung 3003

A simple converter-filler pen but they write well and look pretty. They have a push cap which seems to seal very well indeed as the ink didn’t dry up after months of storage and they just needed a dip in water to restart the ink. I even used De Atramentis Black Velvet Gold, which is a very shimmery ink and it hasn’t seemingly affected the flow at all. 

One nice little bonus is that the nib seems to be semi-flexible as the tines split nicely when you apply pressure. This perhaps helps the ink flow and keeps it wet.

WingSung 3008 v1 (clear)

These are lovely writers but I have one that seems to be writing dry, with a wet ink like Diamine Poppy Red. I’m not sure why this is happening but it is a bit disappointing. This one was inked with Dominant Industry Base Black though and has always been a great writer – even after being left for months it wrote first time. I think this just highlights problems with quality control. 

WingSung 3008 v1 (blue)

Again, another great pen that just needed the nib wetting to restart it after a long time in storage. This was inked using Diamine Hell’s Bells, a German exclusive. 

EDIT: I would recommend these pens but there is a third in the set with an F nib, which has consistently written dry. It dry started after storage and even after wetting the nib the flow seems to dry up and it becomes scratchy. So perhaps the moral is to swap out the nib for something broad? 

WingSung 3008 v2

The slightly larger cousin of the 3003, with a piston instead of a converter and a screw-cap instead of push fit. Looks nice and writes well but after being left I found that most of the ink had leaked into the cap and it was a ghastly mess! Not sure if I just have a leaky seal but the jury is out with this pen. On the positive side it hadn’t dried up, with all that ink in the cap!

WingSung 3013

I actually took ages to get around to inking this pen because I wasn’t sure if the vacuum filling system was going to work properly – it was a very cheap pen! But after I had had such good experiences with other WingSung pens I decided to try it and it worked brilliantly. You get a massive fill of ink and it just works first time – you just unscrew the end which frees up the plunger in the middle – you pull the plunger out and then, with the nib submerged in the ink, push down the plunger fairly quickly and this induces a vacuum in the chamber which when released at the end of the down stroke draws ink into the main chamber. Ingenious! 

This is a plastic framed pen but although the frame is plastic the guts are made from metal and so this pen feels quite heavy.

Last year I thought I’d get a cheap fountain pen (Faber-Castell Fresh), just to see what they were like these days as I had only dim and distant memories of using them at school. I was so impressed with the smooth writing that, when CultPens advertised a TWSBI Eco T to me 6 months later, I had to get one … and there I fell into yet another rabbit hole of geeky, collections of cool kit 😀 

Why use a fountain pen though? That’s what I asked myself actually because they can be messy and you have to refill them if you don’t use cartridges and the ink can smudge and isn’t always water resistant. But what attracted me, besides the fact that they are quite cool, was that the inks these days come in a huge variety of colours – some with sheen and shimmer – and they also actually force you to write more carefully. They are also fairly environmentally friendly because you don’t throw them away when they have run out of ink. 

Since hand surgery 20 years ago to fix a broken thumb tendon, and after 30+ years of being primarily keyboard bound, my hand writing has become abysmal. Even I have difficulty reading my scrawl sometimes and I’m often forced to write in capital letters just to make it legible. Writing with a fountain pen though focuses the mind and therefore writing becomes a more enjoyable pastime. Being able to choose colours and ink effects beyond the standard blue and black in a quality pen (not a felt pen or marker) gives extra creativity and enjoyment. 

As you might imagine, there’s also a thriving fountain pen user’s community on social media and so you’re always provided with friendly help and advice by fellow “penablers”! In the UK alone there are also many good companies like CultPens, PurePens, PenHeaven & ArtFromTheHeart with great service and a huge catalogue of good quality products to choose from. I have bought from all of them and from AliExpress. 

My main interest at the moment is exploring the different inks that you can use and in buying lots of fairly cheap “demonstrator” pens which show off the ink and mechanism inside. My favourites so far are the TWSBI range of pens, which are well made, write smoothly and look great! 

TWSBI Diamond 580ALR

This is the top of the range piston-filling model made with anodised aluminium trimmings – in this case Prussian Blue. It’s very comfortable in the hand and writes very smoothly with a large nib – I have inked it with Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo, a lovely smooth Prussian Blue ink. 

Early versions of this model seemed to have problems with the barrel resin cracking due to internal stresses, but they seem to have fixed this now. 

TWSBI Eco & Eco T

To be honest, both sell for the same list price and they both feel identical to me, to write with. They’re really smooth piston-filler pens (so no cartridges or converters needed) with a huge ink capacity and the nibs are quite wet and free flowing. The entire pen can be stripped down and serviced to replace the silicone grease on the piston but the nibs are a little fiddly to swap out. I hope to investigate this further with one of my pens and I have a few replacement metal nibs on order. The black, plastic feed, which sits under the metal nib, isn’t very easy to remove and care is needed to avoid breaking it. 

These pens are made in Taiwan.

TWSBI Swipe

This is one of the budget models – it has a push cap and a funny spring/plunger filling system but it works well and writes beautifully. I use this with a 1.1mm stub nib inked with Organics Studio Nitrogen, one of the most sheening inks ever made. 

Lamy Al Star

This is a very simple cartridge (with optional converter) pen with petal housing and a little ink window. The build is sturdy and there are a huge number of colours in the range – with more being released every year, with regional variants and limited editions. The nibs are smooth to write with and are also relatively easy to swap out of you want to get a different width of nib – this isn’t always the case with other brands.

These pens are made in Germany.

Faber-Castell Fresh

I have 3 of these lovely little cartridge fountain pens now and they write very well. They are an ideal way to try out the feel of a fountain pen or for a child’s pen. The rang of inks for cartridge-only pens isn’t huge though, if you want to give it a try, you can refill cartridges but it gets messy very quickly.

Platinum Preppy

These are a real classic amongst the cheapie pens – a lovely writer that takes converters and ideal for a child or beginner. Just be a little careful with them though because they also have a reputation for being a bit fragile and easy to break. This was inked with Diamine Aurora Borealis. 

Chinese pens

Recently China has cottoned on to the growth in the fountain pen market and has been producing a wide range of models in direct competition with some of the big names. The pens tend to be very cheap and work well but the build quality and quality control suffers a little and they’re not as refined as other brands. You will often find that if you buy a few of them most will work fine but 1 will mysteriously have flow issues or have a scratch nib. You also have to shop around because sometimes the same pen will be sold at wildly different prices. In my experience the best place to look is either AliExpress or Temu.

Interesting fact: Many Chinese pens are supplied with nibs that look almost exactly like the Lamy Z50 nib unit, used on the Safari and Al-Star models. You can also buy replacement nibs from China in a huge range of widths from EF (0.3mm) up to 2.9mm stub, which means (and yes I have tried it but do it at your own risk!) you can swap these nibs onto a Lamy pen and get a wider range of nib choices. The steel nibs themselves can be a very tight fit on the plastic feeds but the sticky-tape trick (tape on the top and sides of the nib & pull in line with the pen) usually works. 

Caliarts Ego v2

This is a make I hadn’t heard of until recently but they got some good reviews on Facebook FP groups so, here it is! It actually seems to be a really good buy – it writes very well and when left for months it wrote again first time – no stutter, no dryness! I inked it with Iroshizuku Asa-gao, which is a gorgeous bright blue (as you can see in the feed/section!) and a very well-behaved ink generally. 

Jinhao 874 (standard metal clip)

These are unusual pens in that I’ve found them in 2 versions – this is the typical version with the metal clip and black converter. They are all push-cap, not screw, and the barrel has a little window in it (like a Lamy Safari), which is a bit superfluous as the ones I have are transparent. All are really nice pens that write well and they seal well so they restart easily after being stored. They come in a very wide range of nibs too so you can get everything from an EF right up to a 1.9mm stub, which is immense! I tend to prefer a 1.1stub if I want extreme italics – anything more is like writing with a chunky felt parker!

I’d happily recommend these to anyone. 

Jinhao 874 (St. Penpps version with wire clip)

This seems to be a version of the Jinhao 874 sold by an AliExpress seller called St.Penpps and they have given it a wire clip and red converter. This was inked with Diamine Skull & Roses, a German exclusive. 

EDIT: after months of being left all versions of this pen wrote well after just wetting the nib – they didn’t lose any ink at all so the seals are all excellent too. The only problem with one pen was that it clogged while using De Atramentis Pink Rose Gold, but this ink is a pen-killer and has clogged every pen I’ve put it in within minutes. 

Jinhao 990

These are simple plastic-framed pens with integral converters. The pen feels quite small in the hand but they come in a very wide range of nibs so they make good, cheap pens for testing inks or different writing styles. 

EDIT: Despite being fairly basic pens, when these were left for a few months and tested the nib just needed a slight dip in water to restart it. No ink had dried up so the cap clearly seals well. 

Jinhao 100/Century

This is a plastic-framed pen with an integral converter, so it’s effectively like a piston-filler but the capacity is much smaller than, say, a TWSBI where the entire pen chamber is filled with ink. These pens have a size-6 nib.

Jinhao x450

This is a metal-framed pen with an integral converter and size 6 nib, as per the Jinhao 100.

Lanbitou 3059

This is the closest copy of the TWSBI Eco I have seen so far – right down to the red logo on the cap, the split clip, the wide cap-band and hexagonal cross-section. But, although it seems very similar from outside, there are significant simplifications in the design that make it cheaper and less functional.

For instance, no little spanner or bottle of silicon grease has been provided because it has a much simpler arrangement for opening the barrel up and disassembling the pen – it just unscrews if you turn the collar between the barrel and the piston winding mechanism. The feed is also transparent and I’m not sure yet whether it is removable – I suspect not because on my pen the nib is also hooded and unreachable, but there are unhooded versions, which I might try to get hold of later. 

EDIT: after being left for a few months all of these pens had dried up completely and needed flushing out. Not a great sign and clearly the caps don’t seal at all well. I can’t recommend it as it can only be used for a short period and there are better pens in this price bracket. 

Majohn Capless A1

This is a very interesting pen indeed – mainly because it is an almost direct copy of a very much more expensive pen, the Pilot Vanishing Point / Capless, but a lot cheaper. The mechanism is extremely similar to the Pilot, including the little trap-door that seals off the nib to keep it wet when retracted. One extra option that you don’t get with the Pilot is a clipless version with a small roll-stop for people who don’t like big shiny clips.

I enjoyed using it from day #1 and even months later it usually starts first time, even with Diamine Noel ink in it – a sheening ink. The only slight problem has been that it isn’t easy to see how much ink is left in it because the clear converter is almost completely hidden in the nib mechanism and the barrel is of course opaque. 

Majohn Capless A2

I haven’t inked this pen yet – just too many pens and not enough time! But on first looks it is a very nice addition to the collection. It’s a copy of the Pilot Decimo Capless but, as you’d expect, very much cheaper! It has a plastic body, which makes it a bit lighter than the A1 but not a lot lighter because so much of the internal working is metal anyway. 

Majohn C3 

This adorable little chunky pen is such a good writer and feels great in the hand. I like that the cap thread is actually the rim of the section so it seals way inside the cap. It has no clip but it does have a little silver roll-stop. I inked it with Iroshizuku Momiji which is very well-behaved and a brilliant red colour.

After being left for a few months it wrote first time! 

Majohn M2

A smallish eye-dropper, demonstrator pen that I received by accident (twice!) from a seller but which has grown on me. It comes with a free pipette and has a nice, tight seal which should keep the ink in very well. 

Majohn (Moonman) T1

This has a lovely large (#6?) nib on it but when inked with Troublemaker Doña Victorina it has persistent dry starts and often stutters. The dry starts look to be a problem with the cap sealing and could possibly be fixed with an extra rubber O-ring but I haven’t got a spare to try. I’ve dipped the nib in water and then it writes fairly well but it quickly dries up so I do suspect that there are flow issues too. 

PenBBS 309

This pen is a plastic piston-filler and the model I bought was the clear-bodied one with red cap and knob. They have a screw cap which houses a lovely large #6 nib so it is a pretty smooth writer. When my pen came the piston was jammed and when I unwound the mechanism the whole end came off, showing that, unlike mainstream brands like the TWSBI Eco, this pen uses the same thread for adjusting the piston as it does for removing the piston mechanism. That makes it simpler and cheaper but it does mean that you have to be careful to make sure the mechanism is well screwed in and that it doesn’t come undone when filling the pen. 

It writes pretty well though so the basic mechanics of it are fine and it’s a good pen – but as you’d expect it just falls down a little on the build quality. The nib makes up for this though and I really like using the pen. 

EDIT: after being left for a few months, inked with Diamine Writer’s Blood it wrote first time, with no dry start issues. Very nice to see and a good indicator that PenBBS deserve their reputation for being one of the best Chinese brands.

PenBBS 494

(work in progress)

WingSung 699 

This is a direct copy of the Sailor Custom Heritage 823 and is really comfortable to write with – a lovely pen. It has the vacuum filling system 

WingSung 3003

A simple converter-filler pen but they write well and look pretty. They have a push cap which seems to seal very well indeed as the ink didn’t dry up after months of storage and they just needed a dip in water to restart the ink. I even used De Atramentis Black Velvet Gold, which is a very shimmery ink and it hasn’t seemingly affected the flow at all. 

One nice little bonus is that the nib seems to be semi-flexible as the tines split nicely when you apply pressure. This perhaps helps the ink flow and keeps it wet.

WingSung 3008 v1 (clear)

These are lovely writers but I have one that seems to be writing dry, with a wet ink like Diamine Poppy Red. I’m not sure why this is happening but it is a bit disappointing. This one was inked with Dominant Industry Base Black though and has always been a great writer – even after being left for months it wrote first time. I think this just highlights problems with quality control. 

WingSung 3008 v1 (blue)

Again, another great pen that just needed the nib wetting to restart it after a long time in storage. This was inked using Diamine Hell’s Bells, a German exclusive. 

EDIT: I would recommend these pens but there is a third in the set with an F nib, which has consistently written dry. It dry started after storage and even after wetting the nib the flow seems to dry up and it becomes scratchy. So perhaps the moral is to swap out the nib for something broad? 

WingSung 3008 v2

The slightly larger cousin of the 3003, with a piston instead of a converter and a screw-cap instead of push fit. Looks nice and writes well but after being left I found that most of the ink had leaked into the cap and it was a ghastly mess! Not sure if I just have a leaky seal but the jury is out with this pen. On the positive side it hadn’t dried up, with all that ink in the cap!

WingSung 3013

I actually took ages to get around to inking this pen because I wasn’t sure if the vacuum filling system was going to work properly – it was a very cheap pen! But after I had had such good experiences with other WingSung pens I decided to try it and it worked brilliantly. You get a massive fill of ink and it just works first time – you just unscrew the end which frees up the plunger in the middle – you pull the plunger out and then, with the nib submerged in the ink, push down the plunger fairly quickly and this induces a vacuum in the chamber which when released at the end of the down stroke draws ink into the main chamber. Ingenious! 

This is a plastic framed pen but although the frame is plastic the guts are made from metal and so this pen feels quite heavy.

 

Last year I thought I’d get a cheap fountain pen (Faber-Castell Fresh), just to see what they were like these days as I had only dim and distant memories of using them at school. I was so impressed with the smooth writing that, when CultPens advertised a TWSBI Eco T to me 6 months later, I had to get one … and there I fell into yet another rabbit hole of geeky, collections of cool kit 😀 

Why use a fountain pen though? That’s what I asked myself actually because they can be messy and you have to refill them if you don’t use cartridges and the ink can smudge and isn’t always water resistant. But what attracted me, besides the fact that they are quite cool, was that the inks these days come in a huge variety of colours – some with sheen and shimmer – and they also actually force you to write more carefully. They are also fairly environmentally friendly because you don’t throw them away when they have run out of ink. 

Since hand surgery 20 years ago to fix a broken thumb tendon, and after 30+ years of being primarily keyboard bound, my hand writing has become abysmal. Even I have difficulty reading my scrawl sometimes and I’m often forced to write in capital letters just to make it legible. Writing with a fountain pen though focuses the mind and therefore writing becomes a more enjoyable pastime. Being able to choose colours and ink effects beyond the standard blue and black in a quality pen (not a felt pen or marker) gives extra creativity and enjoyment. 

As you might imagine, there’s also a thriving fountain pen user’s community on social media and so you’re always provided with friendly help and advice by fellow “penablers”! In the UK alone there are also many good companies like CultPens, PurePens, PenHeaven & ArtFromTheHeart with great service and a huge catalogue of good quality products to choose from. I have bought from all of them and from AliExpress. 

My main interest at the moment is exploring the different inks that you can use and in buying lots of fairly cheap “demonstrator” pens which show off the ink and mechanism inside. My favourites so far are the TWSBI range of pens, which are well made, write smoothly and look great! 

TWSBI Diamond 580ALR

This is the top of the range piston-filling model made with anodised aluminium trimmings – in this case Prussian Blue. It’s very comfortable in the hand and writes very smoothly with a large nib – I have inked it with Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo, a lovely smooth Prussian Blue ink. 

Early versions of this model seemed to have problems with the barrel resin cracking due to internal stresses, but they seem to have fixed this now. 

TWSBI Eco & Eco T

To be honest, both sell for the same list price and they both feel identical to me, to write with. They’re really smooth piston-filler pens (so no cartridges or converters needed) with a huge ink capacity and the nibs are quite wet and free flowing. The entire pen can be stripped down and serviced to replace the silicone grease on the piston but the nibs are a little fiddly to swap out. I hope to investigate this further with one of my pens and I have a few replacement metal nibs on order. The black, plastic feed, which sits under the metal nib, isn’t very easy to remove and care is needed to avoid breaking it. 

These pens are made in Taiwan.

TWSBI Swipe

This is one of the budget models – it has a push cap and a funny spring/plunger filling system but it works well and writes beautifully. I use this with a 1.1mm stub nib inked with Organics Studio Nitrogen, one of the most sheening inks ever made. 

Lamy Al Star

This is a very simple cartridge (with optional converter) pen with petal housing and a little ink window. The build is sturdy and there are a huge number of colours in the range – with more being released every year, with regional variants and limited editions. The nibs are smooth to write with and are also relatively easy to swap out of you want to get a different width of nib – this isn’t always the case with other brands.

These pens are made in Germany.

Faber-Castell Fresh

I have 3 of these lovely little cartridge fountain pens now and they write very well. They are an ideal way to try out the feel of a fountain pen or for a child’s pen. The rang of inks for cartridge-only pens isn’t huge though, if you want to give it a try, you can refill cartridges but it gets messy very quickly.

Platinum Preppy

These are a real classic amongst the cheapie pens – a lovely writer that takes converters and ideal for a child or beginner. Just be a little careful with them though because they also have a reputation for being a bit fragile and easy to break. This was inked with Diamine Aurora Borealis. 

Chinese pens

Recently China has cottoned on to the growth in the fountain pen market and has been producing a wide range of models in direct competition with some of the big names. The pens tend to be very cheap and work well but the build quality and quality control suffers a little and they’re not as refined as other brands. You will often find that if you buy a few of them most will work fine but 1 will mysteriously have flow issues or have a scratch nib. You also have to shop around because sometimes the same pen will be sold at wildly different prices. In my experience the best place to look is either AliExpress or Temu.

Interesting fact: Many Chinese pens are supplied with nibs that look almost exactly like the Lamy Z50 nib unit, used on the Safari and Al-Star models. You can also buy replacement nibs from China in a huge range of widths from EF (0.3mm) up to 2.9mm stub, which means (and yes I have tried it but do it at your own risk!) you can swap these nibs onto a Lamy pen and get a wider range of nib choices. The steel nibs themselves can be a very tight fit on the plastic feeds but the sticky-tape trick (tape on the top and sides of the nib & pull in line with the pen) usually works. 

Caliarts Ego v2

This is a make I hadn’t heard of until recently but they got some good reviews on Facebook FP groups so, here it is! It actually seems to be a really good buy – it writes very well and when left for months it wrote again first time – no stutter, no dryness! I inked it with Iroshizuku Asa-gao, which is a gorgeous bright blue (as you can see in the feed/section!) and a very well-behaved ink generally. 

Jinhao 874 (standard metal clip)

These are unusual pens in that I’ve found them in 2 versions – this is the typical version with the metal clip and black converter. They are all push-cap, not screw, and the barrel has a little window in it (like a Lamy Safari), which is a bit superfluous as the ones I have are transparent. All are really nice pens that write well and they seal well so they restart easily after being stored. They come in a very wide range of nibs too so you can get everything from an EF right up to a 1.9mm stub, which is immense! I tend to prefer a 1.1stub if I want extreme italics – anything more is like writing with a chunky felt parker!

I’d happily recommend these to anyone. 

Jinhao 874 (St. Penpps version with wire clip)

This seems to be a version of the Jinhao 874 sold by an AliExpress seller called St.Penpps and they have given it a wire clip and red converter. This was inked with Diamine Skull & Roses, a German exclusive. 

EDIT: after months of being left all versions of this pen wrote well after just wetting the nib – they didn’t lose any ink at all so the seals are all excellent too. The only problem with one pen was that it clogged while using De Atramentis Pink Rose Gold, but this ink is a pen-killer and has clogged every pen I’ve put it in within minutes. 

Jinhao 990

These are simple plastic-framed pens with integral converters. The pen feels quite small in the hand but they come in a very wide range of nibs so they make good, cheap pens for testing inks or different writing styles. 

EDIT: Despite being fairly basic pens, when these were left for a few months and tested the nib just needed a slight dip in water to restart it. No ink had dried up so the cap clearly seals well. 

Jinhao 100/Century

This is a plastic-framed pen with an integral converter, so it’s effectively like a piston-filler but the capacity is much smaller than, say, a TWSBI where the entire pen chamber is filled with ink. These pens have a size-6 nib.

Jinhao x450

This is a metal-framed pen with an integral converter and size 6 nib, as per the Jinhao 100.

Lanbitou 3059

This is the closest copy of the TWSBI Eco I have seen so far – right down to the red logo on the cap, the split clip, the wide cap-band and hexagonal cross-section. But, although it seems very similar from outside, there are significant simplifications in the design that make it cheaper and less functional.

For instance, no little spanner or bottle of silicon grease has been provided because it has a much simpler arrangement for opening the barrel up and disassembling the pen – it just unscrews if you turn the collar between the barrel and the piston winding mechanism. The feed is also transparent and I’m not sure yet whether it is removable – I suspect not because on my pen the nib is also hooded and unreachable, but there are unhooded versions, which I might try to get hold of later. 

EDIT: after being left for a few months all of these pens had dried up completely and needed flushing out. Not a great sign and clearly the caps don’t seal at all well. I can’t recommend it as it can only be used for a short period and there are better pens in this price bracket. 

Majohn Capless A1

This is a very interesting pen indeed – mainly because it is an almost direct copy of a very much more expensive pen, the Pilot Vanishing Point / Capless, but a lot cheaper. The mechanism is extremely similar to the Pilot, including the little trap-door that seals off the nib to keep it wet when retracted. One extra option that you don’t get with the Pilot is a clipless version with a small roll-stop for people who don’t like big shiny clips.

I enjoyed using it from day #1 and even months later it usually starts first time, even with Diamine Noel ink in it – a sheening ink. The only slight problem has been that it isn’t easy to see how much ink is left in it because the clear converter is almost completely hidden in the nib mechanism and the barrel is of course opaque. 

Majohn Capless A2

I haven’t inked this pen yet – just too many pens and not enough time! But on first looks it is a very nice addition to the collection. It’s a copy of the Pilot Decimo Capless but, as you’d expect, very much cheaper! It has a plastic body, which makes it a bit lighter than the A1 but not a lot lighter because so much of the internal working is metal anyway. 

Majohn C3 

This adorable little chunky pen is such a good writer and feels great in the hand. I like that the cap thread is actually the rim of the section so it seals way inside the cap. It has no clip but it does have a little silver roll-stop. I inked it with Iroshizuku Momiji which is very well-behaved and a brilliant red colour.

After being left for a few months it wrote first time! 

Majohn M2

A smallish eye-dropper, demonstrator pen that I received by accident (twice!) from a seller but which has grown on me. It comes with a free pipette and has a nice, tight seal which should keep the ink in very well. 

Majohn (Moonman) T1

This has a lovely large (#6?) nib on it but when inked with Troublemaker Doña Victorina it has persistent dry starts and often stutters. The dry starts look to be a problem with the cap sealing and could possibly be fixed with an extra rubber O-ring but I haven’t got a spare to try. I’ve dipped the nib in water and then it writes fairly well but it quickly dries up so I do suspect that there are flow issues too. 

PenBBS 309

This pen is a plastic piston-filler and the model I bought was the clear-bodied one with red cap and knob. They have a screw cap which houses a lovely large #6 nib so it is a pretty smooth writer. When my pen came the piston was jammed and when I unwound the mechanism the whole end came off, showing that, unlike mainstream brands like the TWSBI Eco, this pen uses the same thread for adjusting the piston as it does for removing the piston mechanism. That makes it simpler and cheaper but it does mean that you have to be careful to make sure the mechanism is well screwed in and that it doesn’t come undone when filling the pen. 

It writes pretty well though so the basic mechanics of it are fine and it’s a good pen – but as you’d expect it just falls down a little on the build quality. The nib makes up for this though and I really like using the pen. 

EDIT: after being left for a few months, inked with Diamine Writer’s Blood it wrote first time, with no dry start issues. Very nice to see and a good indicator that PenBBS deserve their reputation for being one of the best Chinese brands.

PenBBS 494

(work in progress)

WingSung 699 

This is a direct copy of the Sailor Custom Heritage 823 and is really comfortable to write with – a lovely pen. It has the vacuum filling system 

WingSung 3003

A simple converter-filler pen but they write well and look pretty. They have a push cap which seems to seal very well indeed as the ink didn’t dry up after months of storage and they just needed a dip in water to restart the ink. I even used De Atramentis Black Velvet Gold, which is a very shimmery ink and it hasn’t seemingly affected the flow at all. 

One nice little bonus is that the nib seems to be semi-flexible as the tines split nicely when you apply pressure. This perhaps helps the ink flow and keeps it wet.

WingSung 3008 v1 (clear)

These are lovely writers but I have one that seems to be writing dry, with a wet ink like Diamine Poppy Red. I’m not sure why this is happening but it is a bit disappointing. This one was inked with Dominant Industry Base Black though and has always been a great writer – even after being left for months it wrote first time. I think this just highlights problems with quality control. 

WingSung 3008 v1 (blue)

Again, another great pen that just needed the nib wetting to restart it after a long time in storage. This was inked using Diamine Hell’s Bells, a German exclusive. 

EDIT: I would recommend these pens but there is a third in the set with an F nib, which has consistently written dry. It dry started after storage and even after wetting the nib the flow seems to dry up and it becomes scratchy. So perhaps the moral is to swap out the nib for something broad? 

WingSung 3008 v2

The slightly larger cousin of the 3003, with a piston instead of a converter and a screw-cap instead of push fit. Looks nice and writes well but after being left I found that most of the ink had leaked into the cap and it was a ghastly mess! Not sure if I just have a leaky seal but the jury is out with this pen. On the positive side it hadn’t dried up, with all that ink in the cap!

WingSung 3013

I actually took ages to get around to inking this pen because I wasn’t sure if the vacuum filling system was going to work properly – it was a very cheap pen! But after I had had such good experiences with other WingSung pens I decided to try it and it worked brilliantly. You get a massive fill of ink and it just works first time – you just unscrew the end which frees up the plunger in the middle – you pull the plunger out and then, with the nib submerged in the ink, push down the plunger fairly quickly and this induces a vacuum in the chamber which when released at the end of the down stroke draws ink into the main chamber. Ingenious! 

This is a plastic framed pen but although the frame is plastic the guts are made from metal and so this pen feels quite heavy.

Last year I thought I’d get a cheap fountain pen (Faber-Castell Fresh), just to see what they were like these days as I had only dim and distant memories of using them at school. I was so impressed with the smooth writing that, when CultPens advertised a TWSBI Eco T to me 6 months later, I had to get one … and there I fell into yet another rabbit hole of geeky, collections of cool kit 😀 

Why use a fountain pen though? That’s what I asked myself actually because they can be messy and you have to refill them if you don’t use cartridges and the ink can smudge and isn’t always water resistant. But what attracted me, besides the fact that they are quite cool, was that the inks these days come in a huge variety of colours – some with sheen and shimmer – and they also actually force you to write more carefully. They are also fairly environmentally friendly because you don’t throw them away when they have run out of ink. 

Since hand surgery 20 years ago to fix a broken thumb tendon, and after 30+ years of being primarily keyboard bound, my hand writing has become abysmal. Even I have difficulty reading my scrawl sometimes and I’m often forced to write in capital letters just to make it legible. Writing with a fountain pen though focuses the mind and therefore writing becomes a more enjoyable pastime. Being able to choose colours and ink effects beyond the standard blue and black in a quality pen (not a felt pen or marker) gives extra creativity and enjoyment. 

As you might imagine, there’s also a thriving fountain pen user’s community on social media and so you’re always provided with friendly help and advice by fellow “penablers”! In the UK alone there are also many good companies like CultPens, PurePens, PenHeaven & ArtFromTheHeart with great service and a huge catalogue of good quality products to choose from. I have bought from all of them and from AliExpress. 

My main interest at the moment is exploring the different inks that you can use and in buying lots of fairly cheap “demonstrator” pens which show off the ink and mechanism inside. My favourites so far are the TWSBI range of pens, which are well made, write smoothly and look great! 

TWSBI Diamond 580ALR

This is the top of the range piston-filling model made with anodised aluminium trimmings – in this case Prussian Blue. It’s very comfortable in the hand and writes very smoothly with a large nib – I have inked it with Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo, a lovely smooth Prussian Blue ink. 

Early versions of this model seemed to have problems with the barrel resin cracking due to internal stresses, but they seem to have fixed this now. 

TWSBI Eco & Eco T

To be honest, both sell for the same list price and they both feel identical to me, to write with. They’re really smooth piston-filler pens (so no cartridges or converters needed) with a huge ink capacity and the nibs are quite wet and free flowing. The entire pen can be stripped down and serviced to replace the silicone grease on the piston but the nibs are a little fiddly to swap out. I hope to investigate this further with one of my pens and I have a few replacement metal nibs on order. The black, plastic feed, which sits under the metal nib, isn’t very easy to remove and care is needed to avoid breaking it. 

These pens are made in Taiwan.

TWSBI Swipe

This is one of the budget models – it has a push cap and a funny spring/plunger filling system but it works well and writes beautifully. I use this with a 1.1mm stub nib inked with Organics Studio Nitrogen, one of the most sheening inks ever made. 

Lamy Al Star

This is a very simple cartridge (with optional converter) pen with petal housing and a little ink window. The build is sturdy and there are a huge number of colours in the range – with more being released every year, with regional variants and limited editions. The nibs are smooth to write with and are also relatively easy to swap out of you want to get a different width of nib – this isn’t always the case with other brands.

These pens are made in Germany.

Faber-Castell Fresh

I have 3 of these lovely little cartridge fountain pens now and they write very well. They are an ideal way to try out the feel of a fountain pen or for a child’s pen. The rang of inks for cartridge-only pens isn’t huge though, if you want to give it a try, you can refill cartridges but it gets messy very quickly.

Platinum Preppy

These are a real classic amongst the cheapie pens – a lovely writer that takes converters and ideal for a child or beginner. Just be a little careful with them though because they also have a reputation for being a bit fragile and easy to break. This was inked with Diamine Aurora Borealis. 

Chinese pens

Recently China has cottoned on to the growth in the fountain pen market and has been producing a wide range of models in direct competition with some of the big names. The pens tend to be very cheap and work well but the build quality and quality control suffers a little and they’re not as refined as other brands. You will often find that if you buy a few of them most will work fine but 1 will mysteriously have flow issues or have a scratch nib. You also have to shop around because sometimes the same pen will be sold at wildly different prices. In my experience the best place to look is either AliExpress or Temu.

Interesting fact: Many Chinese pens are supplied with nibs that look almost exactly like the Lamy Z50 nib unit, used on the Safari and Al-Star models. You can also buy replacement nibs from China in a huge range of widths from EF (0.3mm) up to 2.9mm stub, which means (and yes I have tried it but do it at your own risk!) you can swap these nibs onto a Lamy pen and get a wider range of nib choices. The steel nibs themselves can be a very tight fit on the plastic feeds but the sticky-tape trick (tape on the top and sides of the nib & pull in line with the pen) usually works. 

Caliarts Ego v2

This is a make I hadn’t heard of until recently but they got some good reviews on Facebook FP groups so, here it is! It actually seems to be a really good buy – it writes very well and when left for months it wrote again first time – no stutter, no dryness! I inked it with Iroshizuku Asa-gao, which is a gorgeous bright blue (as you can see in the feed/section!) and a very well-behaved ink generally. 

Jinhao 874 (standard metal clip)

These are unusual pens in that I’ve found them in 2 versions – this is the typical version with the metal clip and black converter. They are all push-cap, not screw, and the barrel has a little window in it (like a Lamy Safari), which is a bit superfluous as the ones I have are transparent. All are really nice pens that write well and they seal well so they restart easily after being stored. They come in a very wide range of nibs too so you can get everything from an EF right up to a 1.9mm stub, which is immense! I tend to prefer a 1.1stub if I want extreme italics – anything more is like writing with a chunky felt parker!

I’d happily recommend these to anyone. 

Jinhao 874 (St. Penpps version with wire clip)

This seems to be a version of the Jinhao 874 sold by an AliExpress seller called St.Penpps and they have given it a wire clip and red converter. This was inked with Diamine Skull & Roses, a German exclusive. 

EDIT: after months of being left all versions of this pen wrote well after just wetting the nib – they didn’t lose any ink at all so the seals are all excellent too. The only problem with one pen was that it clogged while using De Atramentis Pink Rose Gold, but this ink is a pen-killer and has clogged every pen I’ve put it in within minutes. 

Jinhao 990

These are simple plastic-framed pens with integral converters. The pen feels quite small in the hand but they come in a very wide range of nibs so they make good, cheap pens for testing inks or different writing styles. 

EDIT: Despite being fairly basic pens, when these were left for a few months and tested the nib just needed a slight dip in water to restart it. No ink had dried up so the cap clearly seals well. 

Jinhao 100/Century

This is a plastic-framed pen with an integral converter, so it’s effectively like a piston-filler but the capacity is much smaller than, say, a TWSBI where the entire pen chamber is filled with ink. These pens have a size-6 nib.

Jinhao x450

This is a metal-framed pen with an integral converter and size 6 nib, as per the Jinhao 100.

Lanbitou 3059

This is the closest copy of the TWSBI Eco I have seen so far – right down to the red logo on the cap, the split clip, the wide cap-band and hexagonal cross-section. But, although it seems very similar from outside, there are significant simplifications in the design that make it cheaper and less functional.

For instance, no little spanner or bottle of silicon grease has been provided because it has a much simpler arrangement for opening the barrel up and disassembling the pen – it just unscrews if you turn the collar between the barrel and the piston winding mechanism. The feed is also transparent and I’m not sure yet whether it is removable – I suspect not because on my pen the nib is also hooded and unreachable, but there are unhooded versions, which I might try to get hold of later. 

EDIT: after being left for a few months all of these pens had dried up completely and needed flushing out. Not a great sign and clearly the caps don’t seal at all well. I can’t recommend it as it can only be used for a short period and there are better pens in this price bracket. 

Majohn Capless A1

This is a very interesting pen indeed – mainly because it is an almost direct copy of a very much more expensive pen, the Pilot Vanishing Point / Capless, but a lot cheaper. The mechanism is extremely similar to the Pilot, including the little trap-door that seals off the nib to keep it wet when retracted. One extra option that you don’t get with the Pilot is a clipless version with a small roll-stop for people who don’t like big shiny clips.

I enjoyed using it from day #1 and even months later it usually starts first time, even with Diamine Noel ink in it – a sheening ink. The only slight problem has been that it isn’t easy to see how much ink is left in it because the clear converter is almost completely hidden in the nib mechanism and the barrel is of course opaque. 

Majohn Capless A2

I haven’t inked this pen yet – just too many pens and not enough time! But on first looks it is a very nice addition to the collection. It’s a copy of the Pilot Decimo Capless but, as you’d expect, very much cheaper! It has a plastic body, which makes it a bit lighter than the A1 but not a lot lighter because so much of the internal working is metal anyway. 

Majohn C3 

This adorable little chunky pen is such a good writer and feels great in the hand. I like that the cap thread is actually the rim of the section so it seals way inside the cap. It has no clip but it does have a little silver roll-stop. I inked it with Iroshizuku Momiji which is very well-behaved and a brilliant red colour.

After being left for a few months it wrote first time! 

Majohn M2

A smallish eye-dropper, demonstrator pen that I received by accident (twice!) from a seller but which has grown on me. It comes with a free pipette and has a nice, tight seal which should keep the ink in very well. 

Majohn (Moonman) T1

This has a lovely large (#6?) nib on it but when inked with Troublemaker Doña Victorina it has persistent dry starts and often stutters. The dry starts look to be a problem with the cap sealing and could possibly be fixed with an extra rubber O-ring but I haven’t got a spare to try. I’ve dipped the nib in water and then it writes fairly well but it quickly dries up so I do suspect that there are flow issues too. 

PenBBS 309

This pen is a plastic piston-filler and the model I bought was the clear-bodied one with red cap and knob. They have a screw cap which houses a lovely large #6 nib so it is a pretty smooth writer. When my pen came the piston was jammed and when I unwound the mechanism the whole end came off, showing that, unlike mainstream brands like the TWSBI Eco, this pen uses the same thread for adjusting the piston as it does for removing the piston mechanism. That makes it simpler and cheaper but it does mean that you have to be careful to make sure the mechanism is well screwed in and that it doesn’t come undone when filling the pen. 

It writes pretty well though so the basic mechanics of it are fine and it’s a good pen – but as you’d expect it just falls down a little on the build quality. The nib makes up for this though and I really like using the pen. 

EDIT: after being left for a few months, inked with Diamine Writer’s Blood it wrote first time, with no dry start issues. Very nice to see and a good indicator that PenBBS deserve their reputation for being one of the best Chinese brands.

PenBBS 494

(work in progress)

WingSung 699 

This is a direct copy of the Sailor Custom Heritage 823 and is really comfortable to write with – a lovely pen. It has the vacuum filling system 

WingSung 3003

A simple converter-filler pen but they write well and look pretty. They have a push cap which seems to seal very well indeed as the ink didn’t dry up after months of storage and they just needed a dip in water to restart the ink. I even used De Atramentis Black Velvet Gold, which is a very shimmery ink and it hasn’t seemingly affected the flow at all. 

One nice little bonus is that the nib seems to be semi-flexible as the tines split nicely when you apply pressure. This perhaps helps the ink flow and keeps it wet.

WingSung 3008 v1 (clear)

These are lovely writers but I have one that seems to be writing dry, with a wet ink like Diamine Poppy Red. I’m not sure why this is happening but it is a bit disappointing. This one was inked with Dominant Industry Base Black though and has always been a great writer – even after being left for months it wrote first time. I think this just highlights problems with quality control. 

WingSung 3008 v1 (blue)

Again, another great pen that just needed the nib wetting to restart it after a long time in storage. This was inked using Diamine Hell’s Bells, a German exclusive. 

EDIT: I would recommend these pens but there is a third in the set with an F nib, which has consistently written dry. It dry started after storage and even after wetting the nib the flow seems to dry up and it becomes scratchy. So perhaps the moral is to swap out the nib for something broad? 

WingSung 3008 v2

The slightly larger cousin of the 3003, with a piston instead of a converter and a screw-cap instead of push fit. Looks nice and writes well but after being left I found that most of the ink had leaked into the cap and it was a ghastly mess! Not sure if I just have a leaky seal but the jury is out with this pen. On the positive side it hadn’t dried up, with all that ink in the cap!

WingSung 3013

I actually took ages to get around to inking this pen because I wasn’t sure if the vacuum filling system was going to work properly – it was a very cheap pen! But after I had had such good experiences with other WingSung pens I decided to try it and it worked brilliantly. You get a massive fill of ink and it just works first time – you just unscrew the end which frees up the plunger in the middle – you pull the plunger out and then, with the nib submerged in the ink, push down the plunger fairly quickly and this induces a vacuum in the chamber which when released at the end of the down stroke draws ink into the main chamber. Ingenious! 

This is a plastic framed pen but although the frame is plastic the guts are made from metal and so this pen feels quite heavy.

Last year I thought I’d get a cheap fountain pen (Faber-Castell Fresh), just to see what they were like these days as I had only dim and distant memories of using them at school. I was so impressed with the smooth writing that, when CultPens advertised a TWSBI Eco T to me 6 months later, I had to get one … and there I fell into yet another rabbit hole of geeky, collections of cool kit 😀 

Why use a fountain pen though? That’s what I asked myself actually because they can be messy and you have to refill them if you don’t use cartridges and the ink can smudge and isn’t always water resistant. But what attracted me, besides the fact that they are quite cool, was that the inks these days come in a huge variety of colours – some with sheen and shimmer – and they also actually force you to write more carefully. They are also fairly environmentally friendly because you don’t throw them away when they have run out of ink. 

Since hand surgery 20 years ago to fix a broken thumb tendon, and after 30+ years of being primarily keyboard bound, my hand writing has become abysmal. Even I have difficulty reading my scrawl sometimes and I’m often forced to write in capital letters just to make it legible. Writing with a fountain pen though focuses the mind and therefore writing becomes a more enjoyable pastime. Being able to choose colours and ink effects beyond the standard blue and black in a quality pen (not a felt pen or marker) gives extra creativity and enjoyment. 

As you might imagine, there’s also a thriving fountain pen user’s community on social media and so you’re always provided with friendly help and advice by fellow “penablers”! In the UK alone there are also many good companies like CultPens, PurePens, PenHeaven & ArtFromTheHeart with great service and a huge catalogue of good quality products to choose from. I have bought from all of them and from AliExpress. 

My main interest at the moment is exploring the different inks that you can use and in buying lots of fairly cheap “demonstrator” pens which show off the ink and mechanism inside. My favourites so far are the TWSBI range of pens, which are well made, write smoothly and look great! 

TWSBI Diamond 580ALR

This is the top of the range piston-filling model made with anodised aluminium trimmings – in this case Prussian Blue. It’s very comfortable in the hand and writes very smoothly with a large nib – I have inked it with Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo, a lovely smooth Prussian Blue ink. 

Early versions of this model seemed to have problems with the barrel resin cracking due to internal stresses, but they seem to have fixed this now. 

TWSBI Eco & Eco T

To be honest, both sell for the same list price and they both feel identical to me, to write with. They’re really smooth piston-filler pens (so no cartridges or converters needed) with a huge ink capacity and the nibs are quite wet and free flowing. The entire pen can be stripped down and serviced to replace the silicone grease on the piston but the nibs are a little fiddly to swap out. I hope to investigate this further with one of my pens and I have a few replacement metal nibs on order. The black, plastic feed, which sits under the metal nib, isn’t very easy to remove and care is needed to avoid breaking it. 

These pens are made in Taiwan.

TWSBI Swipe

This is one of the budget models – it has a push cap and a funny spring/plunger filling system but it works well and writes beautifully. I use this with a 1.1mm stub nib inked with Organics Studio Nitrogen, one of the most sheening inks ever made. 

Lamy Al Star

This is a very simple cartridge (with optional converter) pen with petal housing and a little ink window. The build is sturdy and there are a huge number of colours in the range – with more being released every year, with regional variants and limited editions. The nibs are smooth to write with and are also relatively easy to swap out of you want to get a different width of nib – this isn’t always the case with other brands.

These pens are made in Germany.

Faber-Castell Fresh

I have 3 of these lovely little cartridge fountain pens now and they write very well. They are an ideal way to try out the feel of a fountain pen or for a child’s pen. The rang of inks for cartridge-only pens isn’t huge though, if you want to give it a try, you can refill cartridges but it gets messy very quickly.

Platinum Preppy

These are a real classic amongst the cheapie pens – a lovely writer that takes converters and ideal for a child or beginner. Just be a little careful with them though because they also have a reputation for being a bit fragile and easy to break. This was inked with Diamine Aurora Borealis. 

Chinese pens

China has had a long history of fountain pen production btu recently they have cottoned on to the growth in the fountain pen market and have been producing a wide range of models in direct competition with some of the big names. The pens tend to be very cheap and work well but the build quality and quality control suffers a little and they’re not as refined as other brands. You will often find that if you buy a few of them most will work fine but 1 will mysteriously have flow issues or have a scratchy nib. You also have to shop around because sometimes the same pen will be sold at wildly different prices. In my experience the best place to look is either AliExpress or Temu.

Interesting fact: Many Chinese pens are supplied with nibs that look almost exactly like the Lamy Z50 nib unit, used on the Safari and Al-Star models. You can also buy replacement nibs from China in a huge range of widths from EF (0.3mm) up to 2.9mm stub, which means (and yes I have tried it but do it at your own risk!) you can swap these nibs onto a Lamy pen and get a wider range of nib choices. The steel nibs themselves can be a very tight fit on the plastic feeds but the sticky-tape trick (tape on the top and sides of the nib & pull in line with the pen) usually works. I’ve swapped out quite a lot of my original nibs for 1mm stubs because they are much nicer for testing inks than the supplied EF & F nibs. 

Caliarts Ego v2

This is a make I hadn’t heard of until recently but they got some good reviews on Facebook FP groups so, here it is! It actually seems to be a really good buy – it writes very well and when left for months it wrote again first time – no stutter, no dryness! I inked it with Iroshizuku Asa-gao, which is a gorgeous bright blue (as you can see in the feed/section!) and a very well-behaved ink generally. 

Jinhao 874 (standard metal clip)

These are unusual pens in that I’ve found them in 2 versions – this is the typical version with the metal clip and black converter. They are all push-cap, not screw, and the barrel has a little window in it (like a Lamy Safari), which is a bit superfluous as the ones I have are transparent. All are really nice pens that write well and they seal well so they restart easily after being stored. They come in a very wide range of nibs too so you can get everything from an EF right up to a 1.9mm stub, which is immense! I tend to prefer a 1.1stub if I want extreme italics – anything more is like writing with a chunky felt parker!

I’d happily recommend these to anyone. 

Jinhao 874 (St. Penpps version with wire clip)

This seems to be a version of the Jinhao 874 sold by an AliExpress seller called St.Penpps and they have given it a wire clip and red converter. This was inked with Diamine Skull & Roses, a German exclusive. 

EDIT: after months of being left all versions of this pen wrote well after just wetting the nib – they didn’t lose any ink at all so the seals are all excellent too. The only problem with one pen was that it clogged while using De Atramentis Pink Rose Gold, but this ink is a pen-killer and has clogged every pen I’ve put it in within minutes. 

Jinhao 990

These are simple plastic-framed pens with integral converters. The pen feels quite small in the hand but they come in a very wide range of nibs so they make good, cheap pens for testing inks or different writing styles. 

EDIT: Despite being fairly basic pens, when these were left for a few months and tested the nib just needed a slight dip in water to restart it. No ink had dried up so the cap clearly seals well. 

Jinhao 100/Century

This is a plastic-framed pen with an integral converter, so it’s effectively like a piston-filler but the capacity is much smaller than, say, a TWSBI where the entire pen chamber is filled with ink. These pens have a size-6 nib.

Jinhao x450

This is a metal-framed pen with an integral converter and size 6 nib, as per the Jinhao 100.

Lanbitou 3059

This is the closest copy of the TWSBI Eco I have seen so far – right down to the red logo on the cap, the split clip, the wide cap-band and hexagonal cross-section. But, although it seems very similar from outside, there are significant simplifications in the design that make it cheaper and less functional.

For instance, no little spanner or bottle of silicon grease has been provided because it has a much simpler arrangement for opening the barrel up and disassembling the pen – it just unscrews if you turn the collar between the barrel and the piston winding mechanism. The feed is also transparent and I’m not sure yet whether it is removable – I suspect not because on my pen the nib is also hooded and unreachable, but there are unhooded versions, which I might try to get hold of later. 

EDIT: after being left for a few months all of these pens had dried up completely and needed flushing out. Not a great sign and clearly the caps don’t seal at all well. I can’t recommend it as it can only be used for a short period and there are better pens in this price bracket. 

Majohn Capless A1

This is a very interesting pen indeed – mainly because it is an almost direct copy of a very much more expensive pen, the Pilot Vanishing Point / Capless, but a lot cheaper. The mechanism is extremely similar to the Pilot, including the little trap-door that seals off the nib to keep it wet when retracted. One extra option that you don’t get with the Pilot is a clipless version with a small roll-stop for people who don’t like big shiny clips.

I enjoyed using it from day #1 and even months later it usually starts first time, even with Diamine Noel ink in it – a sheening ink. The only slight problem has been that it isn’t easy to see how much ink is left in it because the clear converter is almost completely hidden in the nib mechanism and the barrel is of course opaque. 

Majohn Capless A2

I haven’t inked this pen yet – just too many pens and not enough time! But on first looks it is a very nice addition to the collection. It’s a copy of the Pilot Decimo Capless but, as you’d expect, very much cheaper! It has a plastic body, which makes it a bit lighter than the A1 but not a lot lighter because so much of the internal working is metal anyway. 

Majohn C3 

This adorable little chunky pen is such a good writer and feels great in the hand. I like that the cap thread is actually the rim of the section so it seals way inside the cap. It has no clip but it does have a little silver roll-stop. I inked it with Iroshizuku Momiji which is very well-behaved and a brilliant red colour.

After being left for a few months it wrote first time! 

Majohn M2

A smallish eye-dropper, demonstrator pen that I received by accident (twice!) from a seller but which has grown on me. It comes with a free pipette and has a nice, tight seal which should keep the ink in very well. 

Majohn (Moonman) T1

This has a lovely large (#6?) nib on it but when inked with Troublemaker Doña Victorina it has persistent dry starts and often stutters. The dry starts look to be a problem with the cap sealing and could possibly be fixed with an extra rubber O-ring but I haven’t got a spare to try. I’ve dipped the nib in water and then it writes fairly well but it quickly dries up so I do suspect that there are flow issues too. 

PenBBS 309

This pen is a plastic piston-filler and the model I bought was the clear-bodied one with red cap and knob. They have a screw cap which houses a lovely large #6 nib so it is a pretty smooth writer. When my pen came the piston was jammed and when I unwound the mechanism the whole end came off, showing that, unlike mainstream brands like the TWSBI Eco, this pen uses the same thread for adjusting the piston as it does for removing the piston mechanism. That makes it simpler and cheaper but it does mean that you have to be careful to make sure the mechanism is well screwed in and that it doesn’t come undone when filling the pen. 

It writes pretty well though so the basic mechanics of it are fine and it’s a good pen – but as you’d expect it just falls down a little on the build quality. The nib makes up for this though and I really like using the pen. 

EDIT: after being left for a few months, inked with Diamine Writer’s Blood it wrote first time, with no dry start issues. Very nice to see and a good indicator that PenBBS deserve their reputation for being one of the best Chinese brands.

PenBBS 494

(work in progress)

WingSung 699 

This is a direct copy of the Sailor Custom Heritage 823 and is really comfortable to write with – a lovely pen. It has the vacuum filling system 

WingSung 3003

A simple converter-filler pen but they write well and look pretty. They have a push cap which seems to seal very well indeed as the ink didn’t dry up after months of storage and they just needed a dip in water to restart the ink. I even used De Atramentis Black Velvet Gold, which is a very shimmery ink and it hasn’t seemingly affected the flow at all. 

One nice little bonus is that the nib seems to be semi-flexible as the tines split nicely when you apply pressure. This perhaps helps the ink flow and keeps it wet.

WingSung 3008 v1 (clear)

These are lovely writers but I have one that seems to be writing dry, with a wet ink like Diamine Poppy Red. I’m not sure why this is happening but it is a bit disappointing. This one was inked with Dominant Industry Base Black though and has always been a great writer – even after being left for months it wrote first time. I think this just highlights problems with quality control. 

WingSung 3008 v1 (blue)

Again, another great pen that just needed the nib wetting to restart it after a long time in storage. This was inked using Diamine Hell’s Bells, a German exclusive. 

EDIT: I would recommend these pens but there is a third in the set with an F nib, which has consistently written dry. It dry started after storage and even after wetting the nib the flow seems to dry up and it becomes scratchy. So perhaps the moral is to swap out the nib for something broad? 

WingSung 3008 v2

The slightly larger cousin of the 3003, with a piston instead of a converter and a screw-cap instead of push fit. Looks nice and writes well but after being left I found that most of the ink had leaked into the cap and it was a ghastly mess! Not sure if I just have a leaky seal but the jury is out with this pen. On the positive side it hadn’t dried up, with all that ink in the cap!

WingSung 3013

I actually took ages to get around to inking this pen because I wasn’t sure if the vacuum filling system was going to work properly – it was a very cheap pen! But after I had had such good experiences with other WingSung pens I decided to try it and it worked brilliantly. You get a massive fill of ink and it just works first time – you just unscrew the end which frees up the plunger in the middle – you pull the plunger out and then, with the nib submerged in the ink, push down the plunger fairly quickly and this induces a vacuum in the chamber which when released at the end of the down stroke draws ink into the main chamber. Ingenious! 

This is a plastic framed pen but it ends up feeling quite heavy because the guts are made from metal. That aside it feels very good in the hand and the #5 nib writes beautifully.

Yiren DisplayGT

There are no prizes for guessing which pen inspired the design of the Yiren – it’s clearly a Lamy Safari. But if you like the Lamy Safari then you’ll also know that they come in specific colours which become collector’s items and the Yiren just comes in its own variety of colours so I think they aren’t a direct competitor. They have a push cap and everything else you’d expect from a Lamy Safari but some variants also have transparent sections and coloured clips. They also come in a myriad of colours including multi-coloured ones. 

I’ve found them to be a decent pen which just needs a little dab of water on the nib to get them writing after storage. This pen was inked with Troublemaker Lam-ang, which isn’t the most free flowing inks but I used a 1.1mm stub nib on it to give it better flow and to lay down more colour.

One slight issue is that they are very hard to attribute a brand name to – in fact most sellers just seem to describe the pen without any branding. I just found the name Yiren on a few ads for this pen so I  am assuming that’s who makes them. You can also find similar pens listed under the name Morandi and JIKUN.

Unbranded piston-filler

This is a basic, unbranded piston-filler pen. This came with a cosmetic fault – the internal silver shroud that hides the piston mechanism was cracked. That said, it has written well since day #1 and even when left for a few months it just needed a dip in water to restart it. I inked it with Troublemaker Petrichor. 

 

Parker 51/61 clones

The Parker 51 was the single most successful fountain pen in the history of … well … fountain pens! It stands to reason then thatthroughout the tiem they were made other companies tried to copy some of the design or, in the case of Russian & Chinese pen companies, just blatantly copy the design in its entirity and hide behind laws in their countries that allowed copyright theft.

All of the following pens are Chinese clones of the Parker 51 or the Parker 61, though the 61 clones are basically the same pen as the 51 with a silver or gold arrow on the pen body pointing to the nib so that you can orient it quickly and easily – they don’t have the body design of the original 61. 

Hero (英雄) [100], 329, 330, 616/616S 

This is a classic Chinese pen that has been made for decades and was popular across China & the Soviet Union in the 60s, 70s & 80s. They use a copy of the Aerometric filler system found in the later Parker 51s and it works well and lasts forever – as is proven by how many 70yo Parkers are still going strong.

They are usually a bit cheap-looking and the re-capping action is particularly “scratchy” rather than butter smooth on the Parkers, but they write well and come with standard EF & F nibs. 

Wingsung / YongSheng (永生) 601 / 618 

These are my favourite because they have a modern copy of the Vacumatic filler – there are even some lovely demonstrator versions too, which show off the ink & filling mechanism really well. They write beautifully and are lovely to use. They might not be as butter smooth writers as the gold-nibbed Parkers but they are at least as good as the steel nibbed Parker 21 & 45.

Jinhao 85 

A copy of the modern, rereleased (2020/21) Parker 51 with the screw cap & cartridge converter. They look very nice but I haven’t writen with any of mine yet so I can’t say how they write but I would suspect that they write as well as the Parkers with steel nibs. 

Last year I thought I’d get a cheap fountain pen (Faber-Castell Fresh), just to see what they were like these days as I had only dim and distant memories of using them at school. I was so impressed with the smooth writing that, when CultPens advertised a TWSBI Eco T to me 6 months later, I had to get one … and there I fell into yet another rabbit hole of geeky, collections of cool kit 😀 

Why use a fountain pen though? That’s what I asked myself actually because they can be messy and you have to refill them if you don’t use cartridges and the ink can smudge and isn’t always water resistant. But what attracted me, besides the fact that they are quite cool, was that the inks these days come in a huge variety of colours – some with sheen and shimmer – and they also actually force you to write more carefully. They are also fairly environmentally friendly because you don’t throw them away when they have run out of ink. 

Since hand surgery 20 years ago to fix a broken thumb tendon, and after 30+ years of being primarily keyboard bound, my hand writing has become abysmal. Even I have difficulty reading my scrawl sometimes and I’m often forced to write in capital letters just to make it legible. Writing with a fountain pen though focuses the mind and therefore writing becomes a more enjoyable pastime. Being able to choose colours and ink effects beyond the standard blue and black in a quality pen (not a felt pen or marker) gives extra creativity and enjoyment. 

As you might imagine, there’s also a thriving fountain pen user’s community on social media and so you’re always provided with friendly help and advice by fellow “penablers”! In the UK alone there are also many good companies like CultPens, PurePens, PenHeaven & ArtFromTheHeart with great service and a huge catalogue of good quality products to choose from. I have bought from all of them and from AliExpress. 

My main interest at the moment is exploring the different inks that you can use and in buying lots of fairly cheap “demonstrator” pens which show off the ink and mechanism inside. My favourites so far are the TWSBI range of pens, which are well made, write smoothly and look great! 

TWSBI Diamond 580ALR

This is the top of the range piston-filling model made with anodised aluminium trimmings – in this case Prussian Blue. It’s very comfortable in the hand and writes very smoothly with a large nib – I have inked it with Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo, a lovely smooth Prussian Blue ink. 

Early versions of this model seemed to have problems with the barrel resin cracking due to internal stresses, but they seem to have fixed this now. 

TWSBI Eco & Eco T

To be honest, both sell for the same list price and they both feel identical to me, to write with. They’re really smooth piston-filler pens (so no cartridges or converters needed) with a huge ink capacity and the nibs are quite wet and free flowing. The entire pen can be stripped down and serviced to replace the silicone grease on the piston but the nibs are a little fiddly to swap out. I hope to investigate this further with one of my pens and I have a few replacement metal nibs on order. The black, plastic feed, which sits under the metal nib, isn’t very easy to remove and care is needed to avoid breaking it. 

These pens are made in Taiwan.

TWSBI Swipe

This is one of the budget models – it has a push cap and a funny spring/plunger filling system but it works well and writes beautifully. I use this with a 1.1mm stub nib inked with Organics Studio Nitrogen, one of the most sheening inks ever made. 

Lamy Al Star

This is a very simple cartridge (with optional converter) pen with petal housing and a little ink window. The build is sturdy and there are a huge number of colours in the range – with more being released every year, with regional variants and limited editions. The nibs are smooth to write with and are also relatively easy to swap out of you want to get a different width of nib – this isn’t always the case with other brands.

These pens are made in Germany.

Faber-Castell Fresh

I have 3 of these lovely little cartridge fountain pens now and they write very well. They are an ideal way to try out the feel of a fountain pen or for a child’s pen. The rang of inks for cartridge-only pens isn’t huge though, if you want to give it a try, you can refill cartridges but it gets messy very quickly.

Platinum Preppy

These are a real classic amongst the cheapie pens – a lovely writer that takes converters and ideal for a child or beginner. Just be a little careful with them though because they also have a reputation for being a bit fragile and easy to break. This was inked with Diamine Aurora Borealis.