Prestigify, an online shop for art supplies, located in Canada, offers a flexy nib calligraphy fountain pen to a very low price. "If you buy cheaply, you pay dearly." This is mostly but not necessarily always true for sketching material. The Lamy Safari fountain pen, which is very popular among urban sketchers – I use it myself – is not upscale. Even if this calligraphy fountain pen wouldn’t cope with waterproof ink, I could use it for handwriting. So I ordered one.
Ordering and Shipping
Ordering flew smoothly. There was no charge for shipping. I paid by PayPal. And then I had to wait. The tracking of the parcel told me that the pen was doing a little world tour from China over Turkey to Austria. Why is a Canadian shop sending its products from China? The pen arrived in an air cushion envelope without letter, invoice, etc.
Looks
The fountain pen appears solid, well processed – a bit of an eye-catcher. The ordered colour White turned out to be mixture between Bright Yellow and Creamy, but that didn’t bother me.
The cap and the barrel are made of metal; the grip and the converter are made of synthetic material. An engraving on the center band reveals the name of the fountain pen: Jinbao X450
With about 14cm (5,5in.) it is as length as the Lamy Safari. But the Lamy only weights 14d (0,5oz.) whereas the Jinbao X450 weights 44g (1,5oz.)!
The Nib
I couldn’t find out the manufacturer. Allegedly it is exchangeable – I was not able to move it.
The nib is long and dangerously pointed. As promised it is flexible. One can spread it up to 3mm (0,1in.).
Writing
The fountain pen was cleared between the tests. I used three different types of ink.
- Pelikan 400: A water-soluble ink, recommended for pupils and their pens.
- Rohrer & Klingner Writing ink: A water-soluble ink for pens and quills.
- DeAtramentis Document ink: A waterproof ink I use for sketching with my Lamy Safari without any problem. (I describe DeAtramentis ink in another post.)
Although I expected some troubles with the waterproof ink, I was not prepared for the actual writing experience.
This fountain pen doesn’t have an ink flow; it doesn’t even have an ink trickle. For a better overview here are the three test results together.
Finally I filled the converter with water. The result was the same. With this fountain pen you can neither write a thin line nor a thick line. You can’t write with it at all. It is only suitable for producing two parallel creasing on the paper. It is useless rubbish. Wait, it doesn’t look bad and is very heavy – maybe it could be a convenient paperweight.
