Yiren 566 A Re-Badged Hero 359?

[bob_hayden]

Seele, I have a Hero 1515 which is metal like the ones you posted a link to, but sells for $5US. It looks rather like enameled brass while the ones you linked look aluminum. I note the ones you linked are quite light while the 1515 is top heavy posted. I also note in your link that the pens are shown with the Hero 359 cartridges which have a nipple like Parker/Lamy while the 1515 takes international cartridges. It also has a clip like a Jinhao rather than the paper clip style on the ones you linked and on the Lamy.

 

I now have two Yirens inked and more on the way. I looked at the nibs and did not see any issues with how they fit over the feed. I did notice with the Jinhaos that batches differed. The first had all the waist line trim rings attached to the pen while the second had them all loose and prone to fall off and get lost. May just depend on who was napping at the factory that day;-) At about $1.60US per pen we can't expect great quality control.

 

I did find the Yirens and Jinhaos to be made of quite brittle plastic and there have been reports of the Jinhaos breaking at the waist. I also had one Jinhao with a partially clogged feed. The only Heros I have are the sherbet colored ones and those have the look and feel of better plastic (and cost more) but I am no plastics expert. I have some Yirens on order in that style so I will see what they look like.

[Seele]

Bob,

 

The Hero 1515 looks quite a lot like the Jinhao 599; I wonder if someone has both of them to give a comparison.

 

Comparing both the transparent Yiren 566 and Lanbitou 757, there are indeed significant differences: here are some of the most salient points:

 

In weight and dimensions the Yiren is almost identical to the Safari but the Lanbitou is slightly lighter. The Yiren's cap has a transluscent inner cap and a smooth top tassie, but on the Lanbitou the inner cap is black and the tassie has the Lamy-like cross. I still have no luck in removing the Yiren's feed but it's not hard to do so with the Lanbitou, which facilitates cleaning. The collar at the back of the Yiren section has only two slots, without the smaller slots to grab on to the Lamy converter's studs, but the Lanbitou's has four slots and can take Lamy converters correctly. The Yiren converter looks almost exactly like the Lamy one but without the studs and possibly international fitting. The Lanbitou converter is less like the Lamy's for not having a black socket at the end, but with a spring agitator inside, and most importantly, the black collar unscrews from the converter body, allowing the whole converter to be disassembled if necessary, and when assembled, becomes a stronger unit which I think is a very nice feature. The material used for both pens are of course much cheaper than what Lamy used, probably polystyrene, so they are a bit more prone to shattering if stepped on.

 

A detail worth noticing is that the Safari parts are moulded with a very high level of precision, so when the barrel is screwed home, the flat surface of the barrel lines up perfectly with the section's centre-line. While both of them fall short somewhat, here the Lanbitou is better than the Yiren as the barrel and section can indeed line up.

 

Hope this is of some interest.

Edited December 5, 2016 by Seele

[bob_hayden]

The 1515 weighs almost twice as much as the 599. The clips look the same -- flat metal rather than the wire style on the Lamy, Yiren and Hero 359. The 599 has a traditional shaped nib while the 1515 nib looks like the Yiren's. It wraps around the feed and clips to it rather than just sitting atop. The Yiren takes Parker cartridges. While the business end of Lamy cartridges fits, the other end is a very tight fit in the body -- I find I have to remove an empty cartridge with pliers. I do not have a Lamy pen or cartridge here and am not familiar with the studs so I cannot address issues about the converters. The flat sides of the body line up with the top surface of the nib on the 599 and 1515 but not on the Yiren. To me it looks like it just was not designed to line up rather than intended to but did not because of sloppy tolerances. I think Chinese copies often miss details of the original. They tend to just make it look about the same to a casual observer, but may not look exactly the same, and, more importantly to me, may not work the same, either.

[Seele]

Bob,

 

I do agree with your observation that, by replicating the tangible "hardware" does not mean one also gets the "software": the rationale of its design; I could say more but it's probably not appropriate here.

 

A very clever design feature of the Safari is the studs on the sides of the converter which locks it to the section. At the rear of the section is a collar extending backwards, it has two wider slots for the barrel's ink windows, and yet has two additional slots between them. When the converter is fitted, the studs slide into these additional narrow slots and are clicked into place, thus physically locking the converter in position without fear of it getting loose.

 

In the case of the Yiren, the collar has only two slots for the ink windows because the manufacturer did not envisage the use of converters with the Lamy-style stud and slot locking mechanism. However, there are four slots on the Lanbitou: even though the supplied converter was especially designed for it, it still does not have the slots, but a Lamy converter could fit and work with it correctly.

 

An interesting point is this: as the studs are pressed into the slots, the material of the section needs to have a certain resilience for the slots to open up ever so slightly to grab hold of the studs. Here the material used by Lanbitou is a bit more brittle and I would not want to fit a Lamy converter to it for fear of breakage. In fact I ordered two units of the Lanbitou and on one of them, one of the four "prongs" that make up the four slots had already broken off.

 

Regarding the barrel not aligning to the section, I also traced the issue to a bit of carelessness in tolerancing calculation. If your examples are like mine, where the barrels do not quite reach its correct position, the open end of the barrel can be carefully sanded down slightly to, allowing the barrel to turn a little bit more. As I use nail buffing sticks - plastic with four grades of sandpapers - for nib smoothing and iridium point shaping, I use the two coarser grades for this purpose, and so far I have been successful in helping them along. Get the sanding surfaces very wet first, turning it like 90˚ or so every few strokes along the surface; you need to go very slow or you can overdo it: I did on one of mine and now have to improvise some shimming.

 

I do not have an urge to get the Jinhao 599A and 599C for now, not only because they have further departed from the 599 by having standard nibs, but also a production "uh-oh": as they accommodate standard Jinhao converters, part of the ink window gets obscured by the rear part of the converter. But of course, using cartridges would not be a problem but an "uh-oh" situation it still is.

Edited December 6, 2016 by Seele

[k3eax]

Seele and Bob, the metallic version of the Jinhao 599 and the Hero 1515 are identical in all ways. Also I might add, despite the differences that were noted, my won on auction 99-cent Yiren pens continue to perform as well as my over-priced Lamy Safari. If value for money were to be considered, the Yiren easily wins.

[bob_hayden]

I am glad you had success with your Yirens -- in part because I have more on order and hope they turn out as well as your and the other two I already have.

[Seele]

k3eax,

 

Let me join Bob in congratulating your excellent Yiren bargain, the eBay vendor told me that misaligned nib is known to be an issue with Yirens, and my luck was not quite as good as yours, and I sure paid a little more than 99c.

 

Thanks for the tip on the Hero 1515, it makes me wonder if the previously suspected Hero-Jinhao model-sharing had some substance. With regards to the 599's weight, my example weights 25.3g overall and pen only at 13.3g, compared to the Safari's figures at 18.2g/10.0g respectively, it's quite a bit heavier. I do not have an AL-star or the new Lx so I do not what they are like.

 

Before I quit the 559 subject, I like to say that both my examples - gloss black and matt black with different nib/feed - do not have the key and keyway arrangement that obliges the user to use the Safari's grip: the nib/feed can be turned at an angle if desired. While I can see through my Yiren's section for being a demonstrator I have not been able to pull the nib/feed out for verification.

 

Still, with both the Lanbitou and Yiren as demonstrators, I have examined the engineering and assembly of both and they are indeed quite different. To my mind, Lanbitou has an edge in the pen, while Yiren has an edge on the cap, but of course they are not cross-compatible!

 

P.S. Almost useful information here. "Lanbitou" literally means "broken nib", a dry sense of humour of course, but it's from a proverb "Good memory is no match for a broken nib", so, value the written word!

[tamiya]

P.S. Almost useful information here. "Lanbitou" literally means "broken nib", a dry sense of humour of course, but it's from a proverb "Good memory is no match for a broken nib", so, value the written word!

Good to know!

 

I had Lanbitou translated to mean "rotten derrière" & other less printable versions.

 

It's been butt of many a pun

[bob_hayden]

I received four more Yiren 566s yesterday -- one black and three white with sherbet colors. All wrote well out of the box and I felt no need to tweak anything. All the nibs were properly centered on the feed and not forced on. I only checked one body for compatibility with Lamy cartridges and like the first batch it was a snug fit and getting the cartridge back out was a nuisance. Looking inside the barrels I saw that there were four reinforcing ribs along the inner walls of the Heros and Yirens but not the Jinhaos. The ribs in the Yiren seemed to be longer and higher than in the Hero and I am guessing it is those ribs that grip Lamy cartridges. FYI all the Yiren nibs were marked "F" and matched my personal definition of a fine nib. The Hero 359 I had on hand was marked XF and was indeed finer than the Yirens. A Jinhao 599 I had inked was unmarked but was the widest of the lot.

 

Re the misalignment of body and section, all four of the latest Yirens had the exact same misalignments do I am guessing it is not tolerance variation but lack of attention to that detail in the design of the pen.

 

Considering only the plastic pens, there is no escaping the fact that the Yiren and Jinhao cost about a third as much as the Hero or Lanbitou. I have no experience wtih the Lanbitou but of the other three my sample of only two Heros seemed to have the best quality. But such a small sample makes it hard for me to say for sure that these Heros are better in general than the cheaper Yirens. What I can say for sure is that the Hero pens will work with Lamy cartridges as well as Parkers and Hero 359s so they do offer a wider selection of ink in cartridges, including some very cheap Thornton cartridges.. The Jinhaos are even more versatile in taking standard international cartridges, but in my experience with more than a dozen they are also the lowest quality of all, though not really bad by Chinese standards.

[k3eax]

 

Re the misalignment of body and section, all four of the latest Yirens had the exact same misalignments do I am guessing it is not tolerance variation but lack of attention to that detail in the design of the pen.

 

 

 

Bob, I'm not sure to what you are referring. I've checked my Yirens and could find no misalignments. Just what are you saying is misaligned?

Edited December 20, 2016 by k3eax

[bob_hayden]

k3eax, Seele said

 

 

A detail worth noticing is that the Safari parts are moulded with a very high level of precision, so when the barrel is screwed home, the flat surface of the barrel lines up perfectly with the section's centre-line. While both of them fall short somewhat, here the Lanbitou is better than the Yiren as the barrel and section can indeed line up.

 

I think the flat surface is the one on which the brand name is printed/molded. Using the coordinate system of the nib, a neatnik might have the flat side facing the same direction as the top of the nib, or the bottom, or maybe perpendicular. On the one Hero to hand the label faces the same direction as the top of the nib. On two Jinhaos it looks like that is the intent though one is a bit off. The Yiren has the label off at some odd angle from the top of the nib, though it seems to be the same odd angle on every Yiren. My guess is that the designer of the Yiren was not a neatnik and took no pains to have these things line up. I am not a neatnik either and did not notice this until seele pointed it out. seele suggested that the Yirens were not maintaining tolerances but since all the pens look the same my theory is that they had no intention of lining these things up and the pens are within tolerance. But we'll probably never know for sure.

[Seele]

Bob,

 

The Safari uses a two-start thread - think of a double-helix - for joining the barrel and section, so there are two possible orientations for the label side to end up: in other words, when the pen is held at working position, the branding on the flat side of the barrel has a 50/50 chance to be visible. While Lanbitou preserves the two-start thread, Yiren (and Jinhao) uses the single-start thread which makes the branding appears in the same position every time.

[excentricexplorer]

Greetings; I'm new round here but have been collecting FPs for 25 years and a user of the Safari for ages. I've recently begun actively collecting Safari clones. Thus far, I have:

 

• Jinhao 599a
• Oaso s007
• Hero 359
• Hero 1515
• Yiren 566
• Lanbitou 757

I see a number of these listed, but I'm wondering if anyone can point me to additional clones. My one criterion is that they mustn't be knock-offs -- nothing that says 'Lamy' on the body, comes with fake Lamy packaging, etc. (In the wristwatch world, we'd call these 'homages' as opposed to 'replicas' / 'fakes'.) Much obliged for any ideas that anyone's willing to share!

[Seele]

excentricexplorer,

 

I have also located several others on Taobao, most of them appear to be re-branded Jinhao with some modifications such as fude nibs etc, but there are also some which are a little different from these known variants as well.

[Pichak]

I dont have Yiren. One advantage of Hero 359 is its nib can be replace with the Lamy Safari.

[tamiya]

where's good place to score an Oaso s007? fleaBay seems all out...

[bob_hayden]

excentricexplorer, does the Jinhao 577 count?

[Seele]

where's good place to score an Oaso s007? fleaBay seems all out...

 

If you don't want to go the Taobao route, I'd imagine Aliexpress might be a possible source.

[bob_hayden]

 

An even odder candidate as Safari-clone is the LANBITOU 8040 I recently found on eBay. The nib, section, and converter look about as expected but the body is a traditional cigar shape and the cap looks like it's from outer space;-) I would rather have had them replace the triangular finger-denting section with a normal one and leave the rest alone;-)

 

[bob_hayden]

Update. My white with pink cap Yiren lost the O-ring like black trim around its waist. Though disappointed I decided I would replace it as these cost less than $2US on eBay. Then when I went to buy I found the seller offered a discount if you ordered two so I did -- $1.76US each. They have arrived, been flushed and inked. Both write well. The eBay listing gives no information about nib width, but the nib itself is marked "F". Writes more like a medium in my opinion. As new, the O-rings seem securely attached. The converters do NOT feel very secure in attaching to the section. One body seemed like my earlier 566s to be reluctant to divest itself of a Lamy-style cartridge while the other body was more willing. The cartridge would not fall out due to gravity but could easily be pulled out with my fingers. All the nibs were properly centered on the feed and not forced on.