Hello FP Geeks, and goodbye Chinese fountain pens.

I have about 15 Chinese fountain pens. All of them but one have needed some sort of adjustment... anything from widening the nib a little, to aligning the tines and smoothing the nib too. The only Chinese fountain pen I have that wrote wonderfully right out of the box is my Jinhao 159. So, I'm quite used to adjusting nibs.

Now let me tell you a little story. A while ago, I got a Jinhao x450. Normally if you need to widen a nib, it only takes about 10 to 15 minutes to do, if you're being careful. This Jinhao x450 just wouldn't write, unless I gave it a fair amount of pressure, so it was obvious the nib needed widening. I gathered my tools and got to work. It took two hours, yes, two hours, to get the nib widened. Then the tines needed to be aligned and the nib needed to be smoothed. After all that, it wrote wonderfully. For a while. I used up all the ink in the pen and refilled it, and now it's decided it wants to leak whenever I hold the pen point-down.

Later, I got a Kaigelu 356. I had heard nothing but good things about them. When my pen arrived, the nib slit and tines were closed so tight, it was like they were welded together. Just slightly down from the hole, not a speck of light would pass between. I worked on that pen and worked on that pen. I really wanted it to work because it was so comfortable to hold. Two hours later and I could get the barest, thinnest line from it. And then the tipping of one of the nib tines decided to break off.

So then it was on to a Baoer 388. Baoers are generally well-received and this was basically the same model as the Kaigelu 356. When it arrived there was a nice amount of space in the nib slit, until it got to the tines, which were stuck fast together. Three hours, three hours of work and the pen still wouldn't write without applying quite a bit of pressure. The nib just would not adjust. And I noticed that it too was leaking whenever held point-down, both with bottled ink in a converter, and a completely different brand of ink in a cartridge.

At that point, I carefully and deliberately bent the nib into a very interesting shape. Three different Chinese fountain pens from three different manufacturers all in a row. I'm done with Chinese fountain pens. I'm so frustrated, I can't even look at my fountain pens right now. I'm just reaching for my trusty roller ball. It has a magic button on the back where when you press it, it just works. Every time.