Quick Review Of Wing Sung (Yong Sheng) 9128

[bob_hayden]

This pen is easily described as an all-metal 78G clone. The exterior is painted on my black one. Other available colors are red, while, silver, and an odd shade of pink. The section is a smooth tapered cylinder in gold-colored metal. The XF-F nib is two-tone with the Wing Sung logo and the words "Yong Sheng" which appears to be an alternative to "Wing Sung" in rendering the Chinese name in Western characters. (It might also give a clue as to who really made the pen.) The pen comes with a converter or, unlike many recent pens from Wing Sung, you can use standard international cartridges. Fit and finish are outstanding -- comparable to some $100 pens. Weight empty is 30g. Functionally the pen is OK but nothing special. I found the nib to be rather scratchy compared to other more recent, cheaper, and finer nibs from Wing sung. Micro Mesh improved it but it is still not great. It feels as though the times are not aligned but they don't look it.

 

I can recommend this as a gift pen that looks much more expensive than it is ($4-6US). I will probably buy at least one more just to see if the nib in this one is a lemon. If they are all lemons I will consider surgery.

 

[JollyCynic]

Oh! That's interesting! I'm replacing a cracked Pilot Metro section with a WS 3001, but my Metro is a European MR which takes international cartridges, and I'm lamenting that it'll switch over to the Pilot proprietary size. In addition to keeping the international c/c size, a metal section will probably stand up better than the 3001's. Maybe this one's section will fit on my Metro. And make it look absolutely hideous in the bargain.

 

For nibs, I keep a few loose WING S nibs around to replace the pen-in-circle (propeller?) logo nibs.

[bob_hayden]

To make sure this really worked with international cartridges I tested it with an ancient one I had sitting around. Performance continued to deteriorate until the pen would not write at all. I could not really see if there was ink left in the cartridge but the nib was wet so I just grabbed a converter and put in some Waterman Black. Instantaneously the pen wrote like a dream, and has been ever since. So, it looks like I have some cartridges that are way past their freshness date. Now I'd rate this pen very highly.

[bob_hayden]

The black pen nominally had a F nib. I liked it so I ordered a red one with an XF nib. This turned out to have a hooded nib unlike any photos in the seller's eBay listing. To compensate, the seller offered me a 10% discount on a future purchase, so I opened a case. I am pretty tired of Chinese sellers showing photos of one pen and shipping another.

[bob_hayden]

eBay ruled in my favor and I got a refund. My case may have been aided by a photo of the nib and section of the red pen next to the black, showing the red pen did not look like the black one nor the seller's photos. The seller did not ask me to return the pen and in my experience that would cost more than the refund. In practice it appears to me that eBay either takes the refund out of the seller's account or demands they provide one, after which the seller has no leverage over the buyer, and the norm is the item does not get returned. I actually think that is quite fair if the item does not match the listing. That seems a common issue with pens from China so I think it is appropriate for eBay to be a bit harsh until that is a rare problem. And I think it appropriate for other FPN members to demand refunds in such cases to help get the message across;-)

 

In fairness, I have to say that the red pen writes very well. My real issue was with it not being as advertised. I am reminded of someone here who has a sig file in which they appear to have received a P-51 Mustang Korean War era fighter plane and are gracious but that was not the P-51 they were hoping for;-) Minor but related issues are that I just do not like hooded nibs, and in this case the hood is metal, leaves only about 1/8" exposed, and is very close to the nib, hence stiffening it to write like a nail, and making it difficult to align the tines (which fortunately I did not need to do). It WAS an EF nib as advertised; I have had some Jinhaos that followed a similar custom of EF=hooded, F=open in which the two nibs set down lines of identical width.