Arc Fountain Pen By Porsche Design

June 18, 2013

I have never seen a review about this fountain pen: The ARC by Porsche Design. I have always been a big fan of all PD models which I believe they used to be made by Faber Castell and now by Pelikan.

I am fortunate to own all the ARC series: the fountain pen, the ball point pen and the mechanical pencil.

The look is great, I particularly like heavy metallic pens and the shape of these pens, in particular the clip, resembles the streamline of Porsche automobiles.

The material is brass, finished with a very nice frosting and then treated by a chemical process in order to obtain a black color. In my opinion is an excellent finishing even though after a few years of good writing the black color started to fade away a little bit, you can see now some tiny spots of yellow brass. This is very normal for such a finishing, after holding the pen for a long period of time it is normal that you will start seeing some discolorations. Nevertheless I still believe that the quality of this finishing is great.

The weight of this fountain pen is excellent, I would even like it a little bit heavier, whenever you have brass, chances are that you will have a good weight. I love brass.

The balance is very good, cap can be posted, it has a plastic ring inside so you will hear a click sound either when you close the pen or when you post the cap.

Here come the bad news, the nib is a still nib and nothing wrong with it, but in this case the writing is not as flawless as it should be for a pen of this value. I have some fountain pens that have still nibs and they write beautifully. Unfortunately this is not the case for this pen, you always have to find the right angle and then as soon as you slightly move the nib loses its flaw. Not to mention if you leave the pen open for more than a minute, then you need to get the ink flow started again.

In my opinion they should have used a better quality nib.

All Porsche Design pens are positioned in the $150-$400 price range. Again, to me these a very good quality pens, I particularly enjoy the ball point models. Their design is also different and innovative that stand apart from the majority of all other pens that they look all the same to me.

Considering all this I would give this pen a score of 9.

10 for all points except for the nib where my score is a 5.