Which cheap pens from your beginner days do you still love?

**amk** · February 20th, 2018, 03:42 AM

One of the common responses in the 'What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started' thread was about cheap pens - people who wished they hadn't bought all those cheap pens before they found out what they really wanted, what quality meant in a pen.

But are there cheap pens that you still love after all these years?

My most expensive pens are now a Manu Propria urushi and a Pelikan Toledo. But I still love my Parker 45s and Waterman Laureats and Kulturs. They're not going anywhere. On the other hand all those blingy looking pens with 'Germany iridium point' on the nib can go take a jump. (Mind you, not before I've practised my nibtweaking skills on them... I just look at them as medium italics waiting to be born...)

I'm interested to find out what are other people's "cheap but still loved" pens.

**stub** · February 20th, 2018, 04:44 AM

Originally Posted by amk

But are there cheap pens that you still love after all these years?

Sheaffer Nononsense is IMO the greatest cheap pen of all time. Great in the hand, perfect size, shape and balance, pretty robust, amazing nibs, great great great feeds be they the early ebonite or later excellent plastic feeds. I love them. Only flaw I can find is the clips are cute but functionally pretty terrible.

I still love the Parker 45.

Nostalgia no doubt plays a role but I still love and regularly use both pens. I can't remember the last time I didn't have a P45 or a NN inked up.

Originally Posted by amk

Waterman Laureats and Kulturs.

Would love to score one or two of these to try.

**Chrissy** · February 20th, 2018, 05:00 AM

I still love my Parker Falcon, but the 45 is catching it up pretty fast.

**Sailor Kenshin** · February 20th, 2018, 06:39 AM

Sheaffer school pens, Hero 616 and various other Heros...I still use my Safaris, but don't consider them 'cheap.' To me, cheap is under $20.

**Paddler** · February 20th, 2018, 06:55 AM

Sheaffer school pens and Nononsense pens. I still use them regularly.

**top pen** · February 20th, 2018, 07:06 AM

Very few I still have 3 Parker Frontiers but they rarely get used. If I hadn't lost I would still have a Parker Sonnet from 2013. But I wouldn't call it overly cheap. I haven't pushed the boat out with expensive mainly preferring pens I can use everyday pens I should have brought pens such as the Lamy CP1 and Kaweco Sport sooner as they rarely leave my side.

**jar** · February 20th, 2018, 07:17 AM

My first fountain pen was a hand-me-down from my Grandfather and is second from the right below.

The first fountain pens I bought myself were the Balance style Cartridge Pens AkA School Pens although Sheaffer never called them that. I still have several of them. Next came some NoNonsense pens and I still have several of them too.

The thing I learned from that was that price and quality are not always the same, but often are. The Cartridge Pens and the NoNonsense were really nice but they were not as pleasant to use as that old Sheaffer Balance.

**Ahriman4891** · February 20th, 2018, 11:34 AM

I still like the Pilot Kakuno a lot, despite having much "nicer" pens. It's a ~10 USD pen, so I think it qualifies as cheap.

**grainweevil** · February 20th, 2018, 12:52 PM

You might take a leaf out of the endless antique-buying telly shows and reword "cheap" as "inexpensive".

Anyway, I still regularly use a Hero Jumbo/Doctor/616 Standard/whateveryouwannacallit, Platinum Plaisirs, and a Platinum Carbon Desk Pen all with, not love perhaps, but contentment. The Hero in particular annoys me - how can such a pen, abused as it is in a kitchen environment, just do it's thing without a murmur? Yeah, it dries out in terms of ink in the filler, but it works every damn time. It makes a laughing stock of some more desirable prima donnas currently in my stewardship. Most annoyingly of all, I really enjoy how it writes. As its writing consists of undesirable domestic duties, that makes an undesired task a whole lot better, which is worth more than rubies.

**SaoDavi** · February 20th, 2018, 01:21 PM

Lamy Al-Star/Safari and my TWSBI still get a lot of writing time.

I enjoy stepping away from some of those "fancy" pens and just using a nice utility pen.

**Hawk** · February 20th, 2018, 07:58 PM

I found a Parker 21 on the ground when I was walking to school. Don’t ask me how old I was. It had a damaged black barrel. Later on I acquired a green barrel so I have a writing Frankenpen that looks good.

**Lady Onogaro** · February 20th, 2018, 08:15 PM

I still use my Sailor Clear Candy pens. Still love my Lamys. Still use my Varsity pens and Parker 45s.

**Sammyo** · February 20th, 2018, 08:47 PM

It depends on how you define cheap, which was my point in the other thread.
To me cheap is not necessarily a price, but rather a tactile feeling and ...

Sorry...

To me I no longer own or use any Jinhao, Iridium point Germany, etc... pens.
To many experiences of problems, fixes, messing about and ultimately failure.

The cheapest pen that I use regularly (and love) is my Pilot 78G with a Pilot Deskpen EF nib swap.
I fit it with a Pilot Blue/Black cartridge and it will last for months before needing a new one put in.
It looks nice in any situation and writes wonderfully, reliably and without fail.

I also have to join the Parker 45 train. I have 4 of them and love them.
In fact, it is the only pen that I have more than one of... in multiple finishes... it's the pen that breaks my own unwritten rule!!

**amk** · February 21st, 2018, 02:59 AM

How could I have forgotten Pilot 78G! It's such a great pen. Of course part of its charm is those very understated looks. It's the kind of pen you *do* forget, I suppose, and when I look at something like the Montegrappa Chaos, I'm very glad that it is!

**Kaputnik** · February 21st, 2018, 07:13 AM

Still love? None, really. Of my cheap modern pens, Kaweco Sport, Lamy Safari, Pilot FP78G, well, they're all good pens, and I wouldn't be unhappy to use them again, but I just find that I like my somewhat pricier pens, such as the Pilot Custom models, much better. So the cheap ones sit around mostly unused. I do use a couple of Pilot Varsities that I've refilled with inks I didn't want to put in better pens. And I'll occasionally take out a Pilot Petit1, which I always thought was a neat little pen, but unfortunately it's not very comfortable in my hand.

Defining cheap for vintage pens is trickier. Not because of some objection to the word "cheap". I use the words "cheap" and "inexpensive" synonymously; I think it was some time in my childhood when marketers and sales people decided to distinguish between them. No, the problem is that, as we all know, you can often find bargains with a bit of luck. But just because one person found a Waterman's 52 for $2 at a yard sale, needing only a new sac, doesn't mean that these are typically cheap, or that other people will get that lucky on anything.

No, for vintage pens, I'll consider pens that were fairly "cheap" when they were made, by the standards of the time. And by that definition, there are a couple that are in my vintage favorites case, a steel nibbed Parker 45 (which I like a little better than my one gold nibbed one), and an Esterbrook SJ. Mind you, there were cheaper pens in their day; the Esterbrooks were a step or two above Wearevers, for example. But these were still meant to be affordable pens for people who didn't want something fancy or luxurious.

**wingwiper** · February 21st, 2018, 12:52 PM

Parker 45's and of course Esties............

**Wahl** · February 21st, 2018, 02:23 PM

Parker 45, I still look for unusual colors.

**Lexaf** · February 21st, 2018, 05:26 PM

My Wing Sung 233. I got it from my parents when I was about 14 years old. ( oh dear, that's 54 years ago...). Still have it. A few years later I bought myself a dark blue Parker 45 'Arrow', my first cartridge filler. Still have that one too and a lot of other 45's along with it, because it's fun to collect them.

**VertOlive** · February 21st, 2018, 06:45 PM

My Lamy Safari in matte black with its black BLS nib has been inked since the day it came back from Pendleton Brown and it was a very early aquisition.