Which big fountain pen companies have the best and worst quality control?

[Keyless Works]

This is an interesting topic. This is my ranking after having at least 3 or more pens from the following brands:

 

Best quality control for me comes from Pilot/Namiki, Aurora, Platinum/Nakaya, Waterman, JoWo

Mid pack: Lamy, Bock (generic, OMAS, Danitrio, Kaweco, and others), Montblanc, Pelikan, Sailor

Bottom tier: Visconti

 

To be fair with the "mid pack" pens, I happily buy these without much worry. Some of my absolute favorite pens are from these brands.

[katerchen]

Worst : Visconti and Pineider. I keep falling over and over again for their form over quality mentality and then swear to never purchase anything from those brands (and guess what happens next ... )

 

I swear that I had better luck (much better, in fact) with inexpensive Chinese pens punching way above their weight than this modern Italian (bleep). Emphasis on modern. All my Aurora and Omas were fine.

 

-k

[sirgilbert357]

Pilot seems to have exceptional quality control. Everything I've had by them has been excellent.

 

Visconti has been the worst pen buying experience I've ever had. But to be fair, the vendor's terrible customer service was mostly responsible for that. I did get two defective nibs out of three in their efforts to get me a writing pen, though. I doubt I will buy another Visconti, which is a shame, because I still want a Homo Sapiens Bronze Age.

[katerchen]

7 hours ago, sirgilbert357 said:

because I still want a Homo Sapiens Bronze Age.

 

Just mentally treat the nibmeister fee and lead time as an integral part of the purchase. That's what I did this time with my Bronze Age with ink window. Beautiful pen with just the right weight and --naturally-- it skipped like crazy on high end papers. Just sent it off to Ms Salorino. In a couple of months I'll have a good pen.

 

Meanwhile : every. single. one. of these wrote perfectly:

 

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KXDZ82G/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1

 

comes out just a hair under $5 apiece with tax. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[sirgilbert357]

6 hours ago, katerchen said:

 

Just mentally treat the nibmeister fee and lead time as an integral part of the purchase. That's what I did this time with my Bronze Age with ink window. Beautiful pen with just the right weight and --naturally-- it skipped like crazy on high end papers. Just sent it off to Ms Salorino. In a couple of months I'll have a good pen.

 

Meanwhile : every. single. one. of these wrote perfectly:

 

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KXDZ82G/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1

 

comes out just a hair under $5 apiece with tax. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

I'm on the fence about the value proposition of the Bronze Homo Sapiens. And I've tried those 3008's with the Lamy style nib. Out of 5, only two of them wrote well. The rest of them all had quality control issues. Nibs so loose they would wiggle while you write, a feed that would fall out if you shook it with the nib pointed down, one came without the rubber o-ring...and ALL of them had rusty screws in the caps, LOL.

 

You're better off with a Pilot Kakuno if you just want a cheap fine nib that writes well enough...

[maclink]

Kudos for me go to Pilot and Platinum.  I've found their quality control to be outstanding.  I've never had issue with any of the 9 Pilot and 8 Platinum pens I've bought.  These span a range of levels (entry level to premium).

 

OTOH, I check every Pelikan nib that I receive since I've been bitten enough with misaligned tines, although admittedly bitten less often than not.  Even then, it's frequent enough for me to be wary.  I also check all pens with Bock or Jowo nibs.  Again, the sadly more frequent than odd lemon crops up.

 

Lamy is great as well.  I've bought many a Lamy pen and experienced a problem nib only once.  Ironically, the nib was one of their gold nibs!!  However, I've since bought 5 Lamy's, 3 with gold nibs and all have been great out of the box.

 

My experience with MB has been mixed.  The pens I bought new have all been fine.  However, the pre-owned ones have all had issues making me think that this may have been why they were sold.  The first, had a skipping nib that settled down with steady use, re-inking and flushes.  Another had babies bottoming that I corrected with my own micromesh work.  The third had misaligned tines, a shocker since I had never seen that before in a MB.  I've always looked with admiration at the precision in the alignment of MB nib tines. 

[bisbob]

I have a Pineider La Grande Bellezza, which is a beautiful pen, and a wonderful writer. Except that the Fine quill nib write like a wide Medium. I will have that fixed by a nibmeister. Someday.

 

I have 5 Visconti Rembrandts; 3 Mediums and 2 Fines. And if I wrote a few words with each them on a sheet of paper you would fail to pick out the Fines. None of them write Fine. And they are slightly different degrees of Medium to all five.

 

So despite these six pens performing nicely, there was a lack of QC to determine if they actually wrote as branded. Still,I enjoy using the Rembrandts, but not the Pineider so much.

My Stipula Etruria Magnificas, Sailors, Tibaldi,Montegrappas, Auroras, all write as advertised. But my best performers are my Leonardos and my Esterbrook.

[jchch1950]

Lamy pens have good overall quality. No complain about the nibs either.Very good nibs from Sheaffer pens. My biggest problems are Visconti pens with the quality control of the ink charging systems. Omas,Visconti and Stipula with the falling in parts of their celluloid pens.

[tim77]

On 11/16/2021 at 9:47 PM, txomsy said:

Otherwise they would soon drop down like, er, a satellite shot down by a missile?

 

If you are trolling physicists, then I salute you 😶✋

[MidSouthern-Dad]

Thankfully, new pens that I've bought have had enough QC to make a bad one a memorable experience.

I bought a beautiful new Waterman Gentleman pen in the 1990s.  It's nib was super smooth - too smooth as it had baby's bottom.  Other than that, it was a good writer.

Every new Parker that I've bought (usually the Duofold Centennial, or Parker 75) has written without a problem.

I have two Visconti pens now, and they write beautifully.  Granted, my Bronze Age Homo Sapiens had been ground and tuned by Mark Bacus prior to sale (via Goulet Pens).

 

My Omas Gentleman 1930 pen had a piston that wouldn't draw up ink.  It was a new old stock pen, left over from the 1980s.  I sent it to Ron Zorn, who found the piston undersized, but he has no replacement parts for Omas.  I finally sent it to Fountainbel (Francis Goosens), who used heating to expand the piston diameter.  Now it writes like a dream.  It's also the smoothest piston action of any pen that I have.

 

All modern day Conklin steel nib pens have been horrible writers.  Which is a shame, as the pen bodies are attractive.  This was solved by switching over to a Flexible Nib Factory ebonite feed and collar.  The Conklin collar is unique, and so I had to have a custom one made by Flexible Nib Factory.  They now offer the Conklin collar as a standard product.  I've swapped the nibs over to Fountain Pen Revolution 14K gold nibs (flex and rigid), which are uniformly high performance nibs.  The FNF feed allows a high enough ink flow that you can fully flex the nib (safely to about 2 mm) without any railroading.

 

Maiora Impronte - beautiful pen, but the ink dried out through the slot in the cap that the clip spring runs through.  Rather a bad design to not have an inner cap to seal the moisture against the section.  Also an uninspiring steel nib.  Ron Zorn put in a cut down Sheaffer inner cap, which now allows me to keep the pen inked up without the point drying out for over 2 months.  (I found this out by accident, as I normally don't keep pens inked up unused so long).  I also swapped out the cheap steel nib for an 18K Edison nib.  For a $200+ pen, they should have paid a little more attention in the design.

 

Pelikan M1000 - got an 18K M nib which gushed out ink uncontrollably.  It wrote like a very wet paintbrush. This wasn't a new pen though, so I couldn't have sent it back to Pelikan.  It had to be sent to a nib meister to get it to write normally. 

 

TWSBI Draco, Wancher Bakelite Pen, Esterbrook MV nib adapter.  All  have the same problem:  you could write for a little bit, then there was ink starvation.

The cause was the same for TWSBI and Wancher:  use of a feed with a "tail", meant for an ink cartridge.  This tail extended through a narrow stem in the collar, meant to interface with an ink cartridge.  Unfortunately, with these two pens, the air got trapped between the back of the feed and the interior of the collar, and this formed an air bubble that blocked ink flow.  The solution was to remove the collar, and destroy the back wall of the collar (and ink nipple) with a 3.5 mm drill bit.  With the TWSBI Draco, I had to extend this drilling into the base of the pen, which had too narrow a channel for air flow into the pen body.

 

The Esterbrook MV adapter  is supposed to allow you to use any vintage nib in your "modern" Esterbrook.  Unfortunately, it's a huge flop.  The vintage feeds don't have the "tail" to extend the air into the converter / ink cartridge that the modern day Esterbook pens have.  Air builds up at the back of the feed, but can't go up the tiny pipe that leads into the converter.  Thus, the vapor lock phenomenon occurs again.  One day I'll get Flexible Nib Factory to make a feed that fits Esterbrook nibs, AND contains the tail to guide the air into the converter.

 

Santini Libra - I bought one with an 18K gold broad nib.  The nib wrote very broad for me, and the slit was also asymmetrical.  There was more tipping on one tine, and less on the other.

I had Ron Zorn grind down the "too wide" side to match the other side, and convert it into a medium - broad stub.  It writes wonderfully now.

 

I know that most of these aren't large volume manufacturers, but I'm hope that my experience may help others who are considering these brands.

[sirgilbert357]

I had the same ink starvation issues with all of my TWSBIs and my Franklin Christoph pens. I gave up and sold them all off and bought a Pelikan....never looked back.

 

But knowing how you fixed it -- well, I might need to go look at Franklin Christoph's website again now...

[MidSouthern-Dad]

Yes, the ink starvation is the most frustrating thing.  I finally decided that I'm going to fix this pen or destroy it.

I ended up fixing it with the drill bit, by removing the back wall of the nib/feed collar entirely.

 

Here's a tip on how to do the drilling.  I mount the 3.5 mm drill bit on my cordless drill.

BUT DON'T DRILL WITH THE POWER DRILL!!!  iT'S ONLY PURPOSE IS FOR THE CHUCK TO HOLD THE DRILL BIT.

I turn the empty nib collar BY HAND to get a controlled precise drill hole.  It's only a thin walled bit of plastic, remember.