Pen Pit Stop : Kristiaan Brenard Handmade Cork Pen

[namrehsnoom]

Pen Pit Stop : Kristiaan Brenard Handmade Cork Pen

Welcome to the Pen Pit Stop. Here you will find reviews of pens that already have some mileage on them. More specifically, these reviews are of pens that are in my personal collection, and that have been in use for at least a year. I thought it would be fun to do it this way - no new & shiny pens here, but battered vehicles that have been put to work for at least a year. Let's find out how they have withstood the ravages of time.

The fountain pen entering the pit stop today is a handmade cork pen by local Belgian woodworker "Kristiaan Brenard". Kristiaan is what I would call a semi-professional wood-working hobbyist. He creates amazing things in his workshop, like wooden jewelry, boxes... and the occasional fountain pen. I received this pen in July 2018 from my family as a birthday present - as such it already is of special value to me. The pen has been in use for a couple of years now. Let's take a closer look at it.

Pen Look & Feel

This pen is the result of an experiment by Kristiaan. He wanted to try some new material, and was interested in finding out whether cork could be used to craft a pen. The pen is constructed starting from a general pen-building-kit - as is obvious from the nib designation "Iridium Point Germany". Kristiaan build a fine fountain pen out of it, with a nice hour-glass shaped design and a cork barrel and cap. In the detail pictures, you can see that the cork cladding is built from cut-out pieces of cork that were fitted together (the cork parts come from wine-bottle caps). From what I heard, it took some trial & error before Kristiaan managed to make things work. A lacquer was applied to cap & barrel to keep the cork from crumbling with age. I quite like the resulting looks of this pen.

The pen has a screw-on cap, that cannot be posted. Both capped and uncapped it is about the same size as a Lamy Safari. For me, my grip falls just below the threads and I can write quite comfortably with the pen. The grip section on this pen has a rather small diameter compared to the barrel, and is barely adequate. For me it is borderline comfortable - in diameter it is about the same size as the grip section of the Kaweco Liliput. Due to the flaring-out design the pen is also a bit top heavy. This cork pen has a generic steel M-nib, that wrote beautifully right out of the box, no tuning required.

The pictures above illustrate the size of the pen in comparison with a standard Lamy Safari. Capped and uncapped both pens are about the same size. This cork pen is big enough uncapped, even if you have larger hands, which is fortunate because the pen cannot be posted.

Pen Characteristics

• Build Quality : the pen is fairly well build, and still looks great after a couple of years. It is constructed from a low-cost pen kit, so you can't expect miracles. It accumulated some small scratches on the shiny end caps. I'm reasonably sure though that the thin layer of lacquer that keeps the cork from crumbling will wear out with further use. So at some time in the future I will need to do something about that. But up to this day, the pen has aged gracefully.


• Weight & Dimensions : about the same size as a Lamy Safari, but with more weight to it, due to the metal parts used in the pen-kit. The diameter of the grip section is very small, and just borderline comfortable.


• Filling System : this is a cartridge convertor pen, that uses standard international ink cartridges (both small and large). To use bottled ink, I simply syringe-fill used cartridges.


• Nib & Performance : the dual-tone generic steel nib on this pen is well-proportioned for the size of this pen. The M-nib on my unit writes like a dream, and produces a wet and well-saturated line. This generic nib was great right out-of-the-box, and writes as well or better than the nibs on some of my much more expensive pens. It just shows that nib performance has little correlation with pen price.


• Price : at the time, this pen could be bought for about 50 EUR, which is quite acceptable for a hand-made pen.

Conclusion

This Kristiaan Brenard hand-made cork pen looks & feels very nice. The hour-glass shape and the unusual cork finish make for a rather unique writing instrument. The pen has its flaws though - especially the grip section is too small in diameter for a pen of this size, and the pen is a bit top-heavy. Not a pen to use for long writing sessions, but more suited for a bit of journaling.

The big question: is this pen a keeper? To this, my answer is: YES, but that's because of the story behind it (a birthday present, the unusual material, an experiment by the artist). So it's a keeper because of its emotional value. Would I have bought this pen myself? NO - it's not really the type of pen that attracts my attention. But this specific pen with its history is definitely a keeper.

[txomsy]

Cool!

[corgicoupe]

I've made a few experimental pens using kits. You've got to appreciate the attempts to be creative with materials and design changes that require you to discard some of the components.

Edited May 28, 2020 by corgicoupe