Hero 338 Review

[Honeybadgers]

I was on a little ebay kick and saw that a seller had a "buy two or more, 15% off" deal going for what amounted to a ton of chinese pens. I wanted a jinhao 992 demonstrator and just went a bit nuts, buying 4 other fountain pens and a pack of the weird little jinhao slide converters that I like quite a lot.

 

The cheapest pen in the lot was the Hero 338, a little stainless steel hooded nib pen. While the other pens ran the range from great to usable, this one unfortunately was a big fail.

 

Firstly, it's well balanced. the cap is a friction slide and very secure, posts very deeply and also very securely. Second, it's a nice, EF, consistent line, not very wet, but never skips or hard starts, and it's quite smooth.

 

From there, however, it falls down bigtime.

 

The plastic section has a metal second piece that screws to the barrel. It's machined really badly, and there's an nasty sharp step between the two.

 

The converter is super old school. A press bar over an ink sac that's spread over the grip section.

 

The nib can be pulled straight out but is a pain to get lined back up again.

 

It would be usable, but has my one cardinal flaw that makes a pen a 0/10. it dries out completely overnight. Bummer. it'd at least be good to give away if it didn't dry out overnight and need priming.

 

Overall, the Baoer 100, hero 9026, and jinhao 9009 are all hooded chinese pens for the same price or a buck more that work properly. This one does not.

 

 

[WJM]

I have a similiar experience with Hero 338. The step between the plastic section and metal body is a downside but I could live with that for this price. Unfortunately it does indeed dry overnight and it's a pain to get it to write again the next day. Also in mine the cap jewel fell off and I had to glue it.

A shame, because the nib is quite pleasant to use when the pen writes properly.

Edited September 12, 2017 by WJM

[Mech-for-i]

I had almost all the Hero 33X / 34X hooded range and 338 is somewhat a love it or hate it affair ; its styling is old school understated and serve well as that, but I've always find that the 338 tend to be less well assembled and less well build than its CHEAPER siblings; judging from the photo above I question if the feed had been seated properly on this one. Anyway this is the older version of the 338 as Hero did change the whole design that take care of a number of mentioned faults. Those newer production 338 had clear plastic section barrel mating thread with no metal ring bushing and it use a converter instead of the build in aerometric.