Cheap Vs $$$$$ Worth The Investment?

[Driften]

Does this exist in English anywhere?

 

 

Nibs.com has a list of measured tip sizes including Platinum.

https://www.nibs.com/content/nib-tipping-sizes

Edited January 29, 2019 by Driften

[A Smug Dill]

Nibs.com has a list of measured tip sizes including Platinum.

https://www.nibs.com/content/nib-tipping-sizes

I don't think you (or purchasers of Platinum fountain pens) can hold Platinum to that, as if it was something the manufacturer promised to deliver in its product specifications, though.

 

Whether a customer can hold Nibs.com to it is a different question, and in any case, Nibs.com is one of the retailers that offers customise-to-order service logically separately from what the manufacturer produces at the MSRP.

[Driften]

I don't think you (or purchasers of Platinum fountain pens) can hold Platinum to that, as if it was something the manufacturer promised to deliver in its product specifications, though.

 

Whether a customer can hold Nibs.com to it is a different question, and in any case, Nibs.com is one of the retailers that offers customise-to-order service logically separately from what the manufacturer produces at the MSRP.

 

 

Correct... I expect even Platinum's own list is an average and there will be some + and some -. It's just the tolerance of making something. Nibs.com is based on measuring a sample and may not be what a used would get, but he can grind it to what ever the customer wants.

[TSherbs]

 

 

Nibs.com has a list of measured tip sizes including Platinum.

https://www.nibs.com/content/nib-tipping-sizes

 

 

Thank you.

[Honeybadgers]

Gil, you just need to learn to accept that "writes perfectly out of the box" is just shorthand for "doesn't skip or hard start and isn't scratchy" (scratchy as in "beyond toothy, somethin' ain't right.") Visconti fails to meet that bar on a regular basis.

 

That's all that people mean. It goes without saying that no nib will be tuned in such a way that satisfies every human alive. This is the second or third time you've had to make that argument now, lol.

Edited January 29, 2019 by Honeybadgers

[A Smug Dill]

you just need to learn to accept that "writes perfectly out of the box" is just shorthand for "doesn't skip or hard start and isn't scratchy" (scratchy as in "beyond toothy, somethin' ain't right.")

Well, apparently some people believe that 'dry nib' constitutes 'malfunction' and 'dysfunction'. (Check the tags applied by the O.P. of that thread.) I'll take "their word" for what they mean, if you don't mind.

 

I can understand that subjectively 'unsatisfactory' implies (also subjectively) 'imperfect'. My argument is simply that 'unsatisfactory' does not imply 'defective' in the view of an independent and/or objective third-party arbiter (who does not need to share the complainant's views and preferences as a fountain pen user).

Edited January 29, 2019 by A Smug Dill

[Honeybadgers]

Well, apparently some people believe that 'dry nib' constitutes 'malfunction' and 'dysfunction'. (Check the tags applied by the O.P. of that thread.) I'll take "their word" for what they mean.

 

SEEEEEEEEEEMANTIIIIIIIICS. I remember that thread. That guy's situation was very unique and he had a direct comparison to ask whether or not there was something wrong/not as intended from the factory. It's pretty well established that a pelikan should be very wet. And that a Sailor will be very pencil-like. If I had a glassy smooth sailor I'd assume something was off too. But that's not my point.

 

 

No word in recorded history is 100% applicable to 100% of situations. That guy's was quite unique to the general form of the phrase. I know how strict you are about turns of phrase, but I'm just trying to save you some time here .

Edited January 29, 2019 by Honeybadgers

[TSherbs]

 

 

No word in recorded history is 100% applicable to 100% of situations. ...

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

 

Not even the same meaning in the span of one sentence.

[WLSpec]

I would think that more expensive pens may be slightly superior in quality up to a certain point. For example, a Pelikan 1000 will probably feel better made than a Platinum Preppy simply because more time was put into making it, which will make it cost more. At a certain mark in the hundreds, though, I would say that quality reaches a sort of terminal velocity and then pens get more expensive based on material, how many were made (limited and special editions) or because of some sort of art on the pen (like maki e pens). Handmade pens will also cost more because there arent as many and they will take more time to make.

So more expensive pens will usually be higher quality up to a point, but this does not mean that more expensive pens are "better". I would say that any pen that really speaks to you is worth the investment if you can afford it.

For the record, though, this is a question that could be answered in many different ways. This is just my way of thinking.

Edited January 29, 2019 by WLSpec

[TheRealMikeDr]

It's been said many times, many ways, price paid has little to no correlation with writing quality. That's just the way it is. In fact you can purchase two models of the exact same pen and have different writing experiences with them.

 

What you get when you pay "arbitrary large number" or more for a silly pen is generally higher quality materials, better workmanship, art, pedigree, panache, branding, etc., none of which has the direct result of guaranteeing a great writing experience out of the box. You can also spend $250,000 on an Italian sports car and have it die on you on the drive home.

 

The important thing to keep in mind is these are very niche luxury items for the most part, Q/A isn't going to be the same as you would expect on a commodity item sold at a big box retail store unless you go for a full custom pen.

 

Embrace the finickiness! Learn to tinker around with your pens, it's not too difficult to remedy most issues for the most part if you're careful and go sloooooow. I paid close to $1,000 on a new Montblanc pen that wouldn't write at all when I received shipment. Five minutes later, after adjusting the tines, it wrote like a champ!

[JakobS]

Twelve years into fountain pen use, I had not spent more than $100 on a pen, and no more than $125 to retip a pen in which the nib was damaged. You can find a lot of great pens for under $100, especially if you take time to learn about what to look for in vintage pens. The cheapest pen I probably got for ~$12, was an Esterbrook J, or Dollar. It was more of a steal than what the pen was worth, they are durable, beautiful, and smooth writers, usually possessing a medium flow using standard not over the top saturated inks, I prefer Diamine. I saw and still greatly have no reason to spend a lot of money on a pen, there are hundreds of great writers within the sub $100 range.

 

But, this year, well actually it took 23 months, I decided I wanted to take everything I liked about my favorite pens, and have a single pen made that had all these features. When I decided I wanted to spend into the $$$$ range, I knew that I wanted to have a pen that left very little to the unknown, so I had it custom made. This allowed for a filling system that was guaranteed to work, a nib that wrote without modification, and smoothly, and to have the size of the barrel, section. and postability of the cap be to my liking. It was worth the investment because I was able to enjoy all my favorite features in in a single pen. Does it write better than my Esterbrook J or Dollar, or even my Pilot Metro, or Airmail 69T? No, I have been lucky to have all my cheapest pens be amazing writers with nibs that write as hoped or expected.

 

I see pens as tools, and though a good many pens have been made that aren't, it really is about what type of investment you want to make in order to have a reliable, enjoyable tool. A great writer doesn't become great because they put down a Dixon #2 pencil, and pick up a Pelikan M1000, they become great because they are confident the tools they have will reliably provide them with the ability to record their writing in a way that allows their creativity, and thought process to flow freely, and undistracted.

Edited January 30, 2019 by JakobS

[sirgilbert357]

I've been wondering what it would cost to get a custom pen made. Then I thought a Kickstarter might be more fun. I could give everyone a top notch fountain pen with the features I see a lot of people saying they like. But it takes a marketing genius to get a Kickstarter campaign off the ground and that's not really my thing. I could design the pen and that's about it. Further complications arose when I realized I didn't know the first thing about how to hire or source a factory, where to source materials, or how to get something other than "just a Bock" nib made to my own specifications.

 

I have drawings of the pen I want that will never be produced. That's as far as I got, lol. Oh well...fun to dream. Maybe Edison can work with me and get me close to what I want. Someday I'll ask them...

Edited January 30, 2019 by sirgilbert357

[TheRealMikeDr]

I've been wondering what it would cost to get a custom pen made. Then I thought a Kickstarter might be more fun. I could give everyone a top notch fountain pen with the features I see a lot of people saying they like. But it takes a marketing genius to get a Kickstarter campaign off the ground and that's not really my thing. I could design the pen and that's about it. Further complications arose when I realized I didn't know the first thing about how to hire or source a factory, where to source materials, or how to get something other than "just a Bock" nib made to my own specifications.

 

I have drawings of the pen I want that will never be produced. That's as far as I got, lol. Oh well...fun to dream. Maybe Edison can work with me and get me close to what I want. Someday I'll ask them...

 

Newton Pens will work with you - that's what he does.

 

https://newtonpens.com/

[Arkanabar]

It'll depend on what you want.

For me, the best QC is found on inexpensive Pilot FPs, like the Kakuno, Prera, and MR, or the Platinum Plaisir and Preppy. I don't think I've ever had to tweak any of these pens, out of the box. (It's no accident that they're all Japanese; the Japanese have made QI/QC part of their culture since the mid 1950s, and they're generally better at it than anyone else .)

QC and QI work best in a high-volume production environment. This is why a Chevy Malibu is more reliable than a Corvette, and both are far more reliable than a Bentley or Rolls. Finding causes of variation is easier when you have a lot of samples.

Unfortunately, luxury depends on exclusivity. If you're making for the masses, it's not luxury. Part of the point of conspicious consumption is to prove that you're rich. That's not a very strong motivator for a lot of us (especially the INTJs), but for a lot of people, it helps build social status, something many people find very desirable. But that, by definition, is going to make it harder to find and eliminate the causes of variation that we call manufacturing defects.

[Bo Bo Olson]

A Pelikan 200 is a medium priced pen if not compared to a cheap Chinese one....or a cheap one....when compared to a 400.

 

Same size, balance. I like the nice and springy steel nib, be it plain or gold plated more than modern fat and blobby 400/600 14 K semi-nail nib. The 200 is a nice ride with a clean line.

Semi-vintage 400's have the same great regular flex nib, but in gold. Vintage is stubbed semi-flex.

I have enough vintage and semi-vintage pens to know good gold can be as good as good steel nibs.............accent on good.

 

A nail's a nail, be it gold or steel, and there is no softer gold nail. IMO folks are comparing a gold semi-nail to a steel nail if they can tell a difference. I've a 18 K gold nail, a 14 K Pelikan's D nib, the Nail's Nail. Have a couple steel nails.

But for bling you pay more............like fancy upholstery in a new car....better radio, and what ever.

 

There is a difference in quality between a 400 and a 200. The 400 feels a bit better and the mold lines are gone, that is on a 200. There is a gold nib on the 400/600.

I have sprung for new 200's.....I'd never spring for a new 400. Lucked out with one of the fabled Galeria Kaufhaus 605's for E99.

 

First I have lots of old used 400 ones I bought at near 200's cost.

 

I recommend hunting old Flagship models, on the used market, instead of wasting money on new, or luck out in a Sale.

My Virginia Woolf was a sale pen for 1/3 less.....serious money, great quality................real, real pretty.

My wife told me there was a sale at my B&M, and she wanted to buy me a birthday present. I dithered between a Pelikan Pen of their Times, an Aurora 'Verdi', one that looks more like a Toledo ..in it turns out there are many Verdis, and that MB Woolf.

I forgot the small print.

'Our Money.'

So for 9 months I couldn't buy a cheap pen, ink nor paper.

It was worth it.

 

I don't recommend a diet of buying new though.................well, you can keep the companies going, when I retired I learned a new word.........!@#$%^&*budget.

Edited January 31, 2019 by Bo Bo Olson

[sirgilbert357]

 

Newton Pens will work with you - that's what he does.

 

https://newtonpens.com/

 

 

Shawn is an awesome guy. I talked to him for about 15 or 20 mins at the Dallas Pen Show this past September. His personality is such that I genuinely felt like he was just conversing with me as a friend -- there was a passion for what he does and that spills over into his interactions with others.

 

I love his work and liked a lot of his pens. The Pinnacle in that prototype tortoise resin / chocolate ebonite color is especially amazing to me. I hope that makes it to regular production.

 

I don't know if I could stand the one year wait for a custom pen though (Shawn is obviously QUITE busy!!), and I really don't know that anyone out there would do what I want done. I have a laundry list of very anal specifications (materials, dimensions, capabilities) that would irritate or put off most any pen maker, lol. They would probably think I'm crazy. I've designed my own custom piston filling mechanism that would basically allow an M800 sized pen to hold upwards of 2.0 ml of ink but still fit in the same size. While that is kind of cool, and I love my idea, it would be a beast to engineer and it would likely never be viable on a mass produced scale since there are vac-fillers and bulk fillers that hold the same volumes of ink with simpler filling systems. But I still want to have it made some day just because...

 

ETA: Would you just LOOK at that!! WOW, gorgeous! ---> https://newtonpens.com/pinnacle-prototype-bsea-tortoise-resin-milk-chocolate-ebonite-small/

Edited January 31, 2019 by sirgilbert357

[DiveDr]

Looking at dissections, regressions, cross-sections, inspections, corrections and digressions there has been a lot of discussion on this topic and that's great! Reflecting back, got a lot of pens... some are pricey and some are inexpensive. Seems the way they write (what do I mean by that because some would ask granular qualification) smooth, not toothy in all directions, flow good with recommended ink, no skips or hard starts and the ability to perform uniformly on readily available and reasonably priced contemporary paper stocks as the qualifier, do the high end offerings justify their price tags?

So there are lots of considerations here, flex nib or nail, materials, durability and aesthetics, qualifiers and quantifiers galore! Wow so many considerations. I love writing. Typing this is, well, not gratifying. Wish I could put a quill to the screen and write this out because then, not only would you get the message but the character of my writing style would be there too. Maybe my penmanship is not the best but it certainly has more character than Arial...

 

All things considered my favorite pens are not the most expensive ones in the collection. My daily writers are the Duofold in my avatar pic some Jinhaos, Huashilas, and Boaers with worked nibs. I rarely ink any of the real $$$ guys, they stay in the display case on my desk, not because they are pricey but because they don't write as good (of course in my subjective opinion) as the cheaper ones I have worked to my liking.

 

Also, just not seeing the value in really pricey offerings from Aurora, Mont Blanc, Pelikan, Namiki, etc. The only real pricey guys I have had satisfaction with out of the box have been from Omas and sadly, they are out of business :-(...

[sandy101]

Does this exist in English anywhere?

 

There's a video and mention of it on Cultpens website.

[inkstainedruth]

In reading this topic, it has just occurred to me that the issue is extremely subjective. And that, back in the day of what Bo Bo refers to as "one man, one pen", you would go to a store, buy a pen at the pen counter, and (at least for the better brands) have someone on staff that could do the nib tweaking for you, to get it writing the way you wanted, and maybe also how you held the pen.

I have pens that are (in theory) identical except for color -- and the so-called identical nibs on them? Not so much. I *do* know that when I bought my Pilot Metropolitan, it was in a B&M store, so I could try both an F and M nib -- they hadn't come out with the stubs at that point -- I bought the M because I thought the F was scratchy (and at that point, nearly all the pens I had were F nibs -- especially the vintage ones because you buy what you can find and afford).

I have really cheap pens, and (moderately) expensive pens; my definition of "expensive" has been quite elastic -- 6 years ago I would have called a $100 US pen "expensive". I passed that threshold in a big way 2 years ago when I bought a couple of Pelikan M405s. Were they worth it? Absolutely. And yet, I'm not sure but what I may have the B nib on the M405 Stresemann reground to something like a cursive italic at some point -- because I actually prefer the B nib on the TWSBI 580-AL (a pen which I like but is not "perfect" in that I think there's a design flaw in the pen itself. And we're talking about a pen which cost roughly a fifth of the cost of ONE of those M405s. The B nib on the M200 Café Crème (the first one, which I lost in Ohio several years ago) skipped with every ink I tried in it until I got it tuned by a nibmeister -- then it was a wonderful writer.

And I don't think ANY of those pens is as good a writer as my user grade Plum Demi Parker 51 with a M nib, for which I paid about $12 more (I got lucky on eBay) than the TWSBI.

But writing experiences and preferences are just that -- someone was saying in another thread that slight feedback was preferable (to him) over super smooth, glide over the paper nibs (while I know others complain vociferously about "feedback/toothiness/noises/what have you").

I personally can't see myself spending a grand or more on a pen. Because I don't think at that price point, it starts to be about the bling and the snooty-factor. I pretty much had a panic attack when I lost the pen case with that Café Crème (and the $20 Noodler's Konrad, and the case itself). But also had a panic attack when I misplaced a $9 Parker Vector in my house for the better part of a year (it was my first "good" pen -- and when I bought it I felt completely extravagant, and then wasn't sure I'd like the F nib over the M nibs of the two Parker Reflexes I'd had before it).

But a lot of the fun for me is the hunt. And when I can find something in decent shape in an antiques store for a decent price I'm happy; OTOH, yesterday I didn't bother to even ask to see a Conklin Halloween once I saw the price tag -- I couldn't see myself using the pen at all (orange really is NOT my color) and while I'm sure someone who collects Conklins wouldn't' have quibbled over the $250 price tag, I'm not that person.... [Three stores in Marietta, OH, and a half dozen more in the Parkersburg, WV area -- not counting two stores that didn't seem to be there anymore] and that was the ONLY fountain pen I saw all day except for the M405 Striated Blue I had with me.... ]

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

ETA: The worst pens I have are actually cheap ones: what is probably a fake Jinhao 599 someone gave me, which writes like the $1-2 pen it probably is, and an Arnold I paid way too much for -- it writes, but it just feels cheap and is definitely a 3rd tier pen.

Edited March 10, 2019 by inkstainedruth

[Restored]

It's a tad like "Does a $3,000 watch keep better time than a $100 watch?". No but that's not the point. It's more fashion than utility. If the pen is worth $400 to you, it doesn't matter how it writes in comparison.

But I have more regrets over things I sold than things I bought.