Pelikan quality

[Heinkle]

I’m interested to get community views on whether Pelikan fountain pen quality has declined in recent years. 

[arcfide]

The Pelikans that I purchased recently have all been very high quality in my estimation, but I don't have anything with which to compare them. They feel solid, well constructed, and the tolerances seem to be very good. I specifically chose them for their light weight, and they've met my expectations. I did have one Broad nib that I had to tune up, but I didn't have to polish the tipping any. However, that's not surprising, since I've had to do that with a lot of my pens to get what I wanted, and I think this tends to be more common with broad nibs. With a Fine and Italic Broad, I haven't had any issues. 

 

At least what I've received has been at least on par with all the other major manufacturers, including Lamy, Platinum, Pilot, Sailor, Waterman, etc. 

[senzen]

Just reached 13 Pelikans, all among my most reliable pens: not just well built but they dry way slower than other pens, which means no starting or skipping, and consistent ink colours. My newer are 5 M205, 1 M120, 1 M605.

[Bo Bo Olson]

I have a lot of old ones...in outside the 200 I can't afford new Pelikans. I do have a 605 that was bought on sale, that had baby bottom, but I exchanged the nib for BB in sooner or later I was going to stub or CI it. I had it stubbed to 1.0/B.

 

 

Many folks want Butter Smooth nibs at all costs....and over polishing to butter Smooth leads to enough compliants here about it skipping and being baby bottom....there is no way to know how real wide a problem Baby Bottom was.

There was a 600 or an 800 made for a year or two with problems that the folks got new pens for....but generally Pelikan is a very good pen.

 

The 400 and 600 in newer...can still have great nibs put on them...old vintage semi-flex  and regular flex gold 400 '82-97 nibs, or Pelikan 200's springy regular flex nibs.......get the older ones with the tear drop tipping, gives a cleaner line.

Some 5 years ago, the old grand 200's tear drop nib...became ....that horrible ball point user's double ball tipping that has been issued since ''98, on the 400, 600, 800 and 1000.

My advice is to buy a 400nn ('56-65)....2.0 ml of ink load....semi-flex nib, great balance posted. It has plastic gasket 2.0...so is good to go.

If the world was coming to an end, I'd have to dither between green stripped or tortoise, but it would be a 400nn that gets away.

[langere]

I have 33 Pelikan pens that range from vintage (100s, 120s, 140s) to the most modern pens, including many of the M101Ns (and 200s, 400s, 600s, 800s, 1000). I have found no difference in quality over time. They are all great pens and, in my opinion, the quality has not diminished over time.

 

Erick

[Jjanek73]

I agree about unchanged quality, but the problem with baby´s bottom is not exaggerated in my opinion. I have mostly old "birds", but out of my two "new" ones (M200, M800, both made around 2010) one suffered from it, which is 1:1 ratio. 😃 I´m sure I´ve read this (overpolished nibs) happened only in some interval (hopefully someone who knows better will specify it), but trying first could be adviseable.

 

Best regards

Janek

[Bo Bo Olson]

I prefer semi-flex call it '50-65. And do also like regular flex of '82-87 and the 200's.

 

Having but one from '66-80 and one from '80-81....don't know that era.

 

The '82-97 400's are tear drop regular flex along with the regular flex 200's ...springy regular flex. Regular flex is better for two toned shading inks, in it is drier than the wetter semi-flex.

 

I don't care for nails or semi-nails.........so have stayed away from modern Pelikans. So outside that BB nib on the 605 (on sale €99) that was baby bottom...the original M, was just fine, no baby bottom. I did a nib swap with an idea to have as much nib for future stub or CI modification.

 

Post '97 is semi-nail for the 400&600...often nail in the 800, though mine after 200's 805 is is semi-nail with nice tine bend. Back wen Bock was making Pelikan nibs exactly to Pelikan's spec's....the 1000 was semi-flex, now after @ 2012 when Bovck made the last 1000's they are now a springy regular flex.

 

So nib wise I do recommend vintage and semi-vintage Pelikans. Older Pelikan 200's work just fin in the 400-600's and are great...........

 

My newest 200 EF is double ball, the 200 EF before that was tear drop...and the double ball is narrower. And seems a clean line....which is not expected of double ball nibs.

A clean line is expected in the older tear drop or stub semi-flex nibs.

 

I notice often that many folks doing ink reviews have slightly woolly lines of double ball nibs and don't mention it, in perhaps they don't know better, due to having only modern Pelikans instead of the pre-double ball Pelikan's.

 

[Mercian]

I think that @Heinkle needs this thread to receive a response from someone who has Pelikans that were made both before and after the company stopped making pens with barrel translucency between the stripes.

 

I own the following Pelikans:

A 400 from the early 1950s;
An M400 from the early 1980s;

A ‘W.-Germany’ M800 from 1990-92;
An M205 from 2012, and;
An M805 from 2020.

 

Although the specification of their nib-grinds & nib-flexibility vary in the manner that Bo Bo describes, their construction quality is consistently high, in all of the aforementioned pens.

That said, I also own two P480 ‘Pelikano’ pens from the 2010s.
They are reputed to be built to a lower quality than their 1980s-to-early-1990s counterparts were, and e.g. I have broken the ‘clip’ on my blue Pelikano (by naively attempting to use it as a clip, when it is in fact no more than a roll-stop), and I have cracked the barrel on my transparent one (by over-tightening it on to a Pelikan converter).
I cannot say anything about the more-recent iteration/model of the Pelikano.

 

In my opinion, the loss of the translucency between the stripes on recent Souveräns represents a significant diminution of the ‘customer value proposition’ of the Souverän range.
It is an abandonment of one of the brand’s ‘unique selling propositions’, and of an eminently-sensible, very useful feature - which had been present on Pelikan’s ‘high end’ or ‘luxury’ piston-fill pens since at least the early 1950s.

 

In the past, Pelikan used to manufacture the translucent barrel material in-house.

The following video is from either the 1980s or 1990s. The stamping on the mono-colour 14k nibs shows that it pre-dates 1997:

 

 

Some time after this video was made, the ‘business genius’ executives employed to run Pelikan came up with the great ‘wheeze’ of ‘outsourcing’ the production of this key component in Souverän manufacture.
To an external for-Profit company.
Making Pelikan dependent for supply of the material on an external for-Profit monopoly.

 

When Pelikan stopped making pens with translucency between the stripes, it said that the reason for this change was that it it could ‘no longer obtain’ the translucent material.
I presume that Pelikan tried to ‘low-ball’ the external for-Profit monopoly-holder on its price during a production-contract ‘negotiation’, and that the external for-Profit monopoly therefore told Pelikan’s executives ‘where to go’.

 

If the ‘business genius’ executives who ‘outsourced’ production of this key component in Souverän manufacture also gave away Pelikan’s ‘intellectual property rights’ over the method of manufacture to the external for-Profit monopoly, then in my opinion they should be hunted down and executed, as the ‘wealth-destroyers’ that they surely are.

 

Full disclosure:
I am a misanthropic old curmudgeon; a short-tempered man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition 😔

You, dear reader, may very well be a far more forgiving - and very much more pleasant - person than I am, and so bear much less ill-will towards those oxygen-thief numpties than I do!

[Bo Bo Olson]

42 minutes ago, Mercian said:

I am a misanthropic old curmudgeon; a short-tempered man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition 

Echo valley.........

[Lam1]

With well over 100 Pelikans of all eras (about 90 or so modern, i.e., from the 90s on). I am of the opinion that quality has declined significantly in the last few years, particularly in the plating of the Mx05 (but not only those). I have had a handful of pens (5 to be precise) whose plating started deteriorating for no reason at all, or that I noticed that it had plating problems only when it was too late - all of these pens had been used only once and stored very carefully (since I have a few hundred pens, it takes a few years for them to come back on rotation).

 

Before anybody says it could be where/how they were stored, there were several others Pelikans and non-Pelikans together with those and they were just fine (also the ones that had problems were all in different storage units).

 

Granted I have one LE from the 1990s whose cap band started flaking (the same happened with the section ring, despite the fact that I avoid contact of the ring with ink). So, maybe the quality has never been there.

 

In any case, all these problems started in the last year and I went from being a die hard Pelikan fan to the point that I totally avoid the brand, unless it is a vintage (and even so I hesitate).

 

 

[Bo Bo Olson]

8 hours ago, Lam1 said:

I am of the opinion that quality has declined significantly in the last few years, particularly in the plating of the Mx05 (but not only those).

WOW..............I'm going to have to keep a sharp eye on my LE200's...my more modern ones.

My 805 is ok....just took a look at it...is the Pelikan in use right now.

[Mercian]

10 hours ago, Lam1 said:

In any case, all these problems started in the last year and I went from being a die hard Pelikan fan to the point that I totally avoid the brand, unless it is a vintage (and even so I hesitate).

With my apologies for being thick/my peerless capacity to read several meanings in to any statement (no matter how clearly it was written)…
 

…in what I have quoted above, do you mean that your purchased-brand-new Pelikans that were manufactured in the last year have all shown this problem with their plating?

 

Or are you saying that the flaking problem has appeared on all of your Pelikans (regardless of their date of manufacture) in the last year?

Edited March 19, 2024 by Mercian
Hilariously, to disambiguate my phrasing.

[Azulado]

I have three fine writing Pelikans, two M150's and one M200. Of the M150's, one is from the 1980's and the other, which I bought as NOS, could be any date between 1997 and 2019 (approximate period). I have noticed no difference in build quality between these two and the M200 blue pastel I bought three months ago. The nibs are slightly different, the modern one being harder and the M150's being more flexible. I will say that the M150's scratched, but they were very well polished. I just sanded the edge, trying not to touch the contact surface, and they were perfect. The M200's came almost perfect out of the box, but for the first few weeks it had little skips and hard starts, especially during the first few lines. Now, two to three months later, it writes very well.
Last week I had the opportunity to try out a 1949 Pelikan M400 from a friend. The restoration he did was superb, it looked like a NOS pen. The quality is impressive. It was also very pleasant to write with, the nib was springy and produced line variations with little pressure. In my opinion, there seems to be a DNA present in nibs from different eras, as I noticed in the M400 nib similar sensations in the glide to those of more modern nibs. In my opinion, I seem to see a DNA present in nibs from different eras, as I noticed similar sensations in the nib of the M400 as in the more modern ones.

I should add that I inherited the 80's M150 from an aunt. The pen looked as if it had spent at least a decade with dried ink. Despite the apparent rough treatment, the gold plating and the celluloid part were in very good condition. The ink had damaged the lip of the section, but this did not affect its functionality. I managed to get it to write well. But I ended up breaking the feed when I tried to unscrew the housing. The ink seemed to have hardened inside, it soaked for over 2 weeks and no ink came out. Perhaps the thread was deformed.

[Azulado]

15 hours ago, Lam1 said:

So, maybe the quality has never been there.

You have 90 Pelikans, 5 of them have given you problems in the last year and you say that the pens of this brand may never have had the quality that you attribute to them. 
I don't know, maybe you wrote in a hurry, but your account seems a bit inconsistent, and not just to me. 

[Lam1]

19 hours ago, Bo Bo Olson said:

WOW..............I'm going to have to keep a sharp eye on my LE200's...my more modern ones.

My 805 is ok....just took a look at it...is the Pelikan in use right now.

 

My M2XX's are all good. But they are a bit older (5+ years). 

The problems were with a M900, M1005, M805, M405 and a M625 (this one actually belongs to my son and was stored in another city, and came to me for a while last year - its cap was in a terrible state).

 

16 hours ago, Mercian said:

With my apologies for being thick/my peerless capacity to read several meanings in to any statement (no matter how clearly it was written)…
 

…in what I have quoted above, do you mean that your purchased-brand-new Pelikans that were manufactured in the last year have all shown this problem with their plating?

 

Or are you saying that the flaking problem has appeared on all of your Pelikans (regardless of their date of manufacture) in the last year?

 

No worries. No, they have not been purchased last year, but started to show problems last year. It it was only in 5 pen (but, for me that is unacceptable). They are among the last few modern pens I had bought (around late 2019, early 2020), used once and stored with pens I had for a while longer (of several brands, including other Pelikans), and when I went to use them again last year, they had plating problems. For example, the M1005 Stresseman flaked in the bottom of the section ring and the M805 Blue Dunes is the weirdest, it seems to have that the cap band just lost some plating in some regions, but it was not flaking (it is very weird).

 

There is one pen that I had purchase a while longer, a Chrono Swiss, which I bough NOS and, again, used when it arrived and stored. Last year I noticed that it lost some plating on the section ring, and last week I noticed that its cap band was flaking. That's the one that made me question if the quality was ever there in the modern pens (since it was made in the 1990's).

 

It's a shame, because these are some of my favorite pens.

[Lam1]

11 hours ago, Azulado said:

You have 90 Pelikans, 5 of them have given you problems in the last year and you say that the pens of this brand may never have had the quality that you attribute to them. 
I don't know, maybe you wrote in a hurry, but your account seems a bit inconsistent, and not just to me. 

 

I am only reporting my experience and stating my opinion, as asked in the OP. I'm not trying to convince anyone one way or another (not even my wife, who collects the white M600s, I try to convince...). So, feel free to ignore or not believe what I said.

 

The fact is, I now avoid the brand because I see more value in other brands (like MB, Pilot/Namiki and, maybe, Leonardo. But the latter has to pass the test of time yet). And it would take a very special release, and even so only of a M101n or, perhaps, a M100x (my favorite nib) for me to even consider a modern Pelikan.

[Azulado]

@Lam1, I think Pelikan would be very interested to hear your case -Someone who has 100 Pelikans is a very special customer. From what I see in this Penexchange thread, they have very good customer service. The same goes for Lamy and Kaweco (I had a very good experience with that brand). 

https://www.penexchange.de/forum_neu/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2858&start=390

Sometimes there are series that come out with a defect. I think it happened with the cap of the M400 turtle white. Pelikan admitted it and repaired the defective parts. When the problem is frequent, and more so with a brand like Pelikan, it is normal for complaints to appear on forums like Reddit, FPN or Penexchange. But in your case it seems to be different models. 
I can tell you that a few days ago a collector friend of mine showed me a corrosion spot on a ring of an MB 144 he had just bought. I think any brand can have an occasional problem. Back in the 90s I had a Waterman nib break off due to corrosion. I had it replaced under warranty and the corrosion came back. In the well-known shop in Madrid where I bought it, they didn't understand anything, they had never seen anything like that on a Waterman. I am sure that it was a faulty series and that Waterman has a high level of quality. 

[Lam1]

On 3/20/2024 at 6:52 AM, Azulado said:

@Lam1, I think Pelikan would be very interested to hear your case -Someone who has 100 Pelikans is a very special customer. From what I see in this Penexchange thread, they have very good customer service. The same goes for Lamy and Kaweco (I had a very good experience with that brand). 

https://www.penexchange.de/forum_neu/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2858&start=390

Sometimes there are series that come out with a defect. I think it happened with the cap of the M400 turtle white. Pelikan admitted it and repaired the defective parts. When the problem is frequent, and more so with a brand like Pelikan, it is normal for complaints to appear on forums like Reddit, FPN or Penexchange. But in your case it seems to be different models. 
I can tell you that a few days ago a collector friend of mine showed me a corrosion spot on a ring of an MB 144 he had just bought. I think any brand can have an occasional problem. Back in the 90s I had a Waterman nib break off due to corrosion. I had it replaced under warranty and the corrosion came back. In the well-known shop in Madrid where I bought it, they didn't understand anything, they had never seen anything like that on a Waterman. I am sure that it was a faulty series and that Waterman has a high level of quality. 

 

Ah, the famous MB 144 ring... 

The thing with MB is that they charge you a flat rate and will fix any pen for you. 

 

With Pelikan... well, if you are in Europe the service seems to be excellent.

But my experience on this side of the pond, the only time I reached out to them, was not as good. I needed to exchange the barrel of a pen that came defective from factory and filled a form online requesting it, the request went straight to Chartpak that promptly ignored it. After a few months trying this way, I decided to reach out via Facebook, which is a public forum and they are certainly more motivated. They were at first receptive, but then ignored me for about two or three months (the conversation was, at this point, via messenger). Then I said that I would complain here at FPN, at Facebook and other forums, etc., so they finally told me to send the pen to Germany that they would exchange the barrel. It took about 10 months with zero communication until I, again, complained and they finally sent me the barrel back (with a free bottle of Edelstein of my choice, for all the trouble). The whole thing took about 1.5 years and left me unwilling to go through it again. Coincidently, I began to see the problems I mentioned above just a couple of months after the barrel exchange was finalized.

[chromantic]

I started with M150's and M2xx's, many used or NOS (and mostly post-97) before I started buying new issues, then moved up to M4xx's and two of the more recent M6xx, the Red and Black Tortoises. I've not seen any difference in the quality of materials or workmanship of these pens spanning 25+ years and are comparable to my little 140, likely from '54 and still in pristine condition.

[dbs]

On 3/15/2024 at 4:22 PM, Heinkle said:

I’m interested to get community views on whether Pelikan fountain pen quality has declined in recent years. 

I have bought two m1005, two m1000 recent years, none of them can write properly out of box.  Every pen has this or that line skips/hard to start and need nib adjustment. I have bought two m800, one m101 5 years ago, at least all can write out of box.

 

Because of so many repair requests, Pelikan US service center now refuses to repair any Pelikan pens not purchased from a handful US dealers (far less than 5, I think), even though I can pay for the service.