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Just started a pen blog, and my first review is of my favorite Chinese pen, the Hero 237-1. Full text here, full text + pictures at the blog. A couple of months ago I tried out some cheap Chinese pens for the first time. One of them was a Hero 007, the cheapest of their hooded nib Parker lookalikes. I didn’t like it all that much, but for $0.99, it got me interested in what else Hero might have to offer. What I found was this: the Hero 237-1 “Accountant’s pen,” so called because of its extra, extra fine nib. It’s NOS (New Old Stock), bought from an eBay seller for $7, free shipping, and it may be the single most practical pen purchase I’ve made. I’m figuring out a pen review format as I go, so bear with me. Body: This is a pretty cheap feeling but reasonably sturdy plastic pen. It’s wider in the middle than at either end, but not very wide even there. Mine is teal with a black clip and a small black plastic section at the back end. There’s also some Chinese writing on the side. I believe it also comes in blue and green. Aside from the hooded nib and the narrow ink window hidden just under the cap, the styling is copied from the Rotring Rivette. Both pens are from the 90s, so I guess that makes sense. I actually have a Rivette–I’ve had it for about fifteen years, probably–but I didn’t notice that the two pens have basically the same body until they were actually side by side. It’s not a bad design to steal, I guess–light and fairly comfortable to write with. The Hero’s plastic is smooth and shiny, though, where the Rotring is matte and very slightly textured. The clip has a lot of flex in it, and has worked well for me so far, but it could probably be bent out of shape really easily. The cap doesn’t click on, so it never feels super secure, but when I forget that it’s not a screwcap and twist the cap, sometimes the section partially unscrews, so I guess the cap grips the section better than I thought. I’ve also had ink leak into the cap a couple of times. Nib: About as hooded as a nib can be, and very, very fine. I haven’t got a huge amount of experience with EF nibs, but this is significantly finer than my Pilot F nibs, and I can reverse the nib for an even more ridiculously fine line. I’ve tried it out on some very cheap and absorbent paper, and it performs kind of spectacularly well. The flow is a little on the dry side, too, which helps. I should also note that the feed came loose one time and threatened to fall out of the front of the pen, but I pushed it back in and it’s stayed there. There’s a little bit of line variation, which is more or less visible depending on how you angle the nib. I haven’t been able to get that variation consistently, but sometimes I feel like I’ve writing with the world’s tiniest stub. It’s not smooth. There’s lots of feedback. It falls short of being scratchy, but not by a whole lot. Flow is pretty consistent. This is not a fun-to-write-with pen–not the one you take out for a journal entry, or to write a letter on nice stationery. But it’s so practical, and so good for notes in the margins of printouts, or writing small in cheap notebooks, and for handing off to a non FP user without intimidating them. I’ve made my coworker Laura, who sits next to me, try out a bunch of my pens, and this is her favorite. Filling System: I’m not a huge fan of Hero’s aerometric filling system. It’s a silicone sac permanently attached to the section, mostly encased in metal, with a metal bar that you squeeze to compress the sac. You have to squeeze it a few times to get much ink in there, but once you do, it has a decent capacity. Especially when you consider that you won’t be using up ink the way you would with a broader, wetter nib. This is the place where the cheapness of the pen is most obvious, but basically it works, so I can’t complain too much.