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Martemodena Fountain Pens - My Take


s60m23

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I thought I would share my experiences and thoughts on Martemodena pens. I definitely have a love / hate relationship with their pens - aethetically I love them, and I now have three: the Citizen of London, the Freedom to change with rosegold trim, and the classic Dolcevita Federico Orange, which arrived last week.

 

post-118881-0-85500400-1534582663_thumb.jpg

 

Here a size comparison with the Platinum 3776

 

post-118881-0-39357900-1534583442_thumb.jpg

 

I really love the colours of all of these pens, and they are well made. The Federico is one of my holy grails, and only recently have I managed to get one at the reasonable price of 77 Euro including shipping on a 50% off special offer by Martemodena.

 

The hate part of the relationship is without a doubt the poor quality of the nibs. Even the Federico I just got is a major disappointment in this regard - poor ink flow and scratchy. Have to admit based on the experience with the other two, I was not surprised.

For a pen normally costing 155 €, the nibs are just plain unacceptable. If you compare this with a Platinum 3776 Bourgogne, which I have, and cost me 77 €, and has probably the best nib of all of my pens (and that in EF), then clearly something is wrong in the nibs department.

And on the Citizen the gold plating seems to be coming off the front of the nib.....

 

When I received my first Martmodena pen, the Citizen, it did not write at all, for this reason:

post-118881-0-47923700-1534583208_thumb.jpg

 

The customer service I cannot complain about - first I got sent a new nib, which made no difference. Then I got sent a complete new section and feed, which also made no difference. In the end, I took a feed out of a Jinhao pen and lo and behold, it now works the best of all three.

I cannot remember, but it looks like I changed the feed on the Freedom pen too. The Federico has a feed which looks more like that of the Jinhao, so some improvement there.

 

In summary, visually stunning pens, but for the price normally charged, the nibs are unacceptable

 

Marc

 

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Sounds like Marte continues to have serious issues (now it's the quality of the Pens) ...IMO, A pen that doesn't write, no matter the cost, is not a good pen.

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If the quality has deteriorated it is a pity. I only have two of them, both bought in 2016, one with a gold and one with steel nibs, and both are excellent writers. The needs are hard but smooth, and quite wet as I like them. Fancy acrylics too.

Gistar

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  • 2 weeks later...

I bought one of their Chronicle pens in a horn finish just to check them out. While it looked good, wrote good and had an interesting clear feed, the captured converter rattled in the barrel while I wrote. I ended up wrapping a piece of tape around it to shut it up. Now it's all good. It was worth the $70 USD I paid.

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