NOS Wing Sung 106

February 3, 2025

Collecting vintage Chinese pens from across the Pacific and without being able to read Chinese has been for me a case of finding interesting pens that raise far more questions than I’ll ever have answers. Nevertheless, I’ve persisted and recently I found several colorways of a NOS Wing Sung pen with a strong resemblance to the Hero 800 and thus ultimately to the Parker 45, a pen I admire.

The Hero 800 came about as a collaboration between Hero and Parker, as I understand it. No pens resulted from their short partnership, but Parker left the machining etc. behind and Hero produced the 800, so closely modeled on the Parker 45 that the parts are interchangeable. The Hero’s nib is 12K—Parker made 45 nibs in 10K, 12K, 14K, steel and their proprietary alloy, octanium. The 800 came in multiple colorways. I’ve seen black, stainless steel in two trims, and gold-plated. It’s very likely there were additional colorways, as I think the 800 was in production for as long as 20 years. Hero went on to make other 8XX pens with 45-style nibs, some of which are very different than the base model 800. The Hero 156 is very close to the 800, with different trim. Many Hero pens over time featured nibs that looked like the 800, but few if any were the actual original nib and feed assembly.

The Wing Sung 106 is clearly derived or influenced by the Hero 800. It is slightly slimmer and a few centimeters longer, with longer cap and barrel finials and a modified arrow clip. The clip shows both the styled ‘W’ logo and the current ‘target’ logo, suggesting it could be dated to whenever that transition happened. I thought the clip looked fragile, but it has great elasticity and snaps back just as well as the 800. Like the 800, the 106’s smaller squeeze filler is built-in to the section. It does have a breather tube so it fills well.

What really caught my interest was the 106’s nib. Uncap the pen and you see a 45-style nib in a section just like the H800 or P45. But it isn’t at all, rotate the pen 180° and it’s plainly one of the ubiquitous P51 style nibs so widespread in China (let’s pause to note the Chinese never abandoned the hooded nib). Whatever is inside the section, it isn’t a 45 nib unit.

I inked the gold-plated 106 seen in the last photo and it wrote very nicely, although—this isn’t a complaint!—it was so smooth it kind of skated all over the page before I got control of it! An interesting little pen from the past.