Wing Sung 618
First Impressions (8/10)
Although I knew, roughly, what to expect I found the WS 618 shockingly tiny. It’s barely bigger than some ballpoint and roller ball refills. However its sleek and elegant style impressed me greatly. The only thing which really irked was that, whilst it had been described on the website as ‘Maroon’, it was, in fact, brown.
Appearance (9/10)
Beautifully slender and with an innate understated style that few modern pens match. It is extremely skinny, this pen would make a cocktail stick look fat and ungainly...well maybe not quite that thin, but still the thinnest pen I’ve ever seen.
It also looks good. In fact it looks so good I’ve started using it when out in public, just to show it off, even when a larger pen would be more convenient.
Design/Size/Weight (8/10)
The overall design is really quite basic, a cylinder which tapers slightly towards the end.
It is, as I said before a very small pen, a mere 4 6/8” long and 1/4” wide tapering to 3/16” at the end. It is, as you can see below, much smaller than a Parker Reflex, a Parker Frontier and is even thinner and only slightly longer than a Parker roller ball refill.
As for weight, a metal, probably brass, construction gives this tiny pen a surprising amount of weight. In fact it weighs more than the Parker Reflex many times it’s size.
Nib (8/10)
The stainless-steel nib is, unsurprisingly, a fine, bordering on extra-fine. It is also not too scratchy considering the size of it and the cost of the pen.
In fact, so long as you’re not planning on writing The Great American Novel with it the pen is a decent writer and not too uncomfortable, even with it’s tiny size.
Filling System (7/10)
Ah, now we come to the filling system. This is the only part of this pen which I felt let down by. The filler its self is a syringe type, like the converters Manuscript include with their pens. However it is built in and, obviously, extremely small.
The first time I tried filling the pen it took almost five minutes to get it to fill and stay filled. The ink would drain back out of the filler almost instantly. It took me holding the end of the pen in the ink and repeatedly filling and emptying the filler before it would stay full.
I realised this was because the piston in the filler was not air tight and needed a small amount of ink around it to make a seal and prevent leakage.
However once the pen was filled it stayed filled. but it doesn’t hold a large amount of ink due to the size limitations.
Cost and Value (10/10)
I paid about 5 GBP for this pen and I consider that to be a fair price when compared to the cost of fountain pens in the local branch of a national stationers. Especially as it’s the only fountain pen I’ve ever seen which will fit in the pencil holder of some of my old notebooks.
Even better was the shipping cost which came to exactly nothing.
Conclusion (8/10)
This pen has good points and bad points. Luckily the good points outweigh the bad. Overall this is a nice pen which looks amazing. It’s not going to be comfortable to write with for long periods of time if your hands are larger than those of a child. However it makes an excellent notepad/diary pen and for those little bits of writing we do every day, like signing receipts and so on.
So, if you want a tiny pen or a pen which will surprise people every time you use it then this is certainly worth your consideration and at £5 you can’t go far wrong.
Mike
Still, I'm nervous!