Wing Sung 601 regular vs 601 flighter - Best writer?

[jcgara]

I  lost a Wing Sung 601 a few months ago that was a great writing pen. I want to replace it and I'm tempted to buy the 601 flighter - but I'm concerned that it is too heavy. Which would you consider the better writer - the regular 601 with inlaid nib or the 601 flighter with same nib?

[IThinkIHaveAProblem]

By "inlaid nib" do you mean the triumph style nib on the 601A? 

[Paganini]

Regarding the 601A "triumph" nibs, I have 5 of them. I guess that's not such a large sample, since there are supposed to be literally buckets of the things left over from the '90s when they were made for pens that are now out of production. My understanding is that when you buy a 601A, the nib is much (well, 30 years) older than the rest of the pen; the 601A model was conceived specifically to have something to sell that would eat up that old stock.

 

My comments apply to those NOS nibs - maybe Wing Sung has started making these nibs again to keep up with demand; if so, possibly the new ones are better than the old ones (they'd almost have to be), I don't know. 

 

Anyway, those NOS triumph nibs are truly awful. In my 5 nibs you can find just about every problem that a nib can have. No two tipping material blobs are the same - they're all different shapes and sizes. There are uneven tine lengths, off-center nib slits, canted nib slits. The nibs are made out of some kind of strange metal that is both hard and soft. It's practically impossible to align the tines, and you can scrub away with micro-mesh with no discernible change; yet, if you press down the tines will just bend. 

Regarding the 601 "flighter," internally it's identical to the plastic 601s. You can (and I do!) swap parts between them willy nilly, nibs included. The flighter version is, naturally, heavier than the plastic one, but not in a way that changes how the nibs perform. I think which of the two you prefer is just a matter of whether or not you like a heavier pen. I have 6 of these pens inked up at any one time; two of them are flighters. Which one I grab mostly is a function of what nib / ink combo I feel like using in the moment.