"yafa" Brands

[tryphon]

For me personally, I have Yafa pens at the bottom of my list. I will literally take a chance on a $1.99 Hero pen than buy a piece of junk Monteverde.I am not in the habbit of bashing a brand across the board, but this one takes the cake - there isn't one pen they make that appeals to me, issues with Stipula that I have had have resulted in me leaving the Speed in the box for over 6 months, and the Delta nib - the less said the better... So there we have it - mediocre product and mediocre service...

Stipula recently went through bankruptcy and are now under new ownership.

[Brian Anderson]

I purchased a Monteverde Prima at the Philly pen show this year and I am quite impressed. So far, everything works as it should. It worries me somewhat that the experiences above are almost all negative.

 

The Prima is, in my opinion, the best pen in the Monteverde lineup. There are some other good pens, but I like the Prima the best. Low incidence of issues and decent nibs.

[Ereshkigal]

and here I was considering Delta Unica for myself... Is it really this bad? The reviews are mostly favourable though.

[overwriter]

I had an issue with the Fusion nib on a Delta Fusion 82 that I bought from Pentime. I first e-mailed Bryant who looped Ross Cameron at Yafa into the e-mail thread.

 

Ross asked me to mail the pen to him and he replaced the nib no problem and no charge. He even swapped the medium nib that had issues for a Fusion stub. From Calgary to California and back in about three weeks.

 

You might want to e-mail him. All indications are that he's a pretty good guy and it is now my best writer.

 

His e-mail address is: rosscameron@yafa.com

[KBeezie]

Sort of tried to give them a second chance, recently got a brand new Delta Italiana in brown with a steel medium nib, real smooth feeling really liked the feel of the body. Except it had two problems.

 

- The nib lacked proper capillary action and would not flow without being helped along to the tip first (retailer of course trying to convince me that I need to press down on the nib to "promote flow"... right.) After that happening continuously over a couple of days that was enough for me.

 

- The trim between the grip and barrel keeps rotating and clicking back and forth as if not firmly in place, very annoying and when it happens while writing I have to pause to see if cracked something cuz that's what it kept feeling like when the ring moved.

 

Delta wasn't very helpful in the matter, and the retailer didn't have a second one in stock to exchange, so I just simply returned it.

[ISW_Kaputnik]

When I had problems with my Delta Serena out of the box, I didn't go to Yafa, I complained to the retailer, who exchanged it for me. The replacement was just fine.

 

I've done so much (ultimately successful) to my Stipula Passaporto getting it to work properly, that I think any warranty service would be out of the question at this point.

 

The only time I wrote to Yafa was about my modern Conklin Crescent, and it was purely for information, wanted to know where the nib was made (Germany) and where the entire pen was assembled ( other parts from Taiwan, assembled in U.S.A). They responded with this information fairly quickly, but then, it was probably a different department responding than the one for helping with spare parts.

[Drone]

One year ago I had a terrible problem with the black nib in a Volcano Grey Monteverde Intima. See my post with the gory details complete with pics here:

https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/index.php/topic/248734-monteverde-intima/?do=findComment&comment=3160730

Ms. Clara Cornette at Yafa's Customer Service was responsive when contacted. She did the right thing by sending me the replacement needed to make the pen right at no cost (still in warranty I think, but barely if memory-serves).

Unfortunately I do not use the Monteverde Intima much any more - I don't trust it. That's a shame, because the Intima is a lovely pen.

I also have a new Conklin (retread) brand All American in Yellowstone with an F nib. The All American has been a great pen, but only after I aligned and smoothed the nib out of the box. The pen seems well built, plus the nib actually has a bit of flex to it, and the feed can keep up with the nib.

So that's my experience with Yafa brands - what little of it there is. YMMV... David

[Drone]

Stipula recently went through bankruptcy and are now under new ownership.

 

Wow, I didn't know Stipula went under. Frankly I'm not surprised, the Titanium nibs they were putting out were a disaster because of the lousy plastic feeds, but they kept pushing them anyway.

 

Then there was the "Stipula Splash" flex pen, which was a total rip-off. The $65 "Splash" was essentially just a re-branded crappy $5 school pen made by the Pakistani company Dollar Industries (Pvt.) Ltd.

 

Sorry to run off-topic... David