TWSBI ECO Fountain Pen - Black

Good flow. Reliable.

I really wanted to like this pen more. I bought it with the 1.1 stub hoping it would provide some variety and while it did do that initially, the last two years have been an adventure in "Will It Or Will It Not Write Today?" Sometimes it's wetter than Niagara Falls and sometimes it's so dry I want to drive it right through the paper in order to get a response. I'm no longer willing to risk nice inks with it any more.

(Incidentally, you can swap out nibs as long as you're careful. It's the only way to fill from a sample bottle, in fact.)

I had this pen for some time now, can't recall how many years ago I bought this, but it was lightly used. I just found lots of micro-fractures running down the grip-section and one of the crack was big enough to let ink leak through. I've owned two TWSBI pens including this, the other being the old Vac700. Now that they've both cracked (Vac cracked twice), I'm not going to bother ordering replacement parts. They were both great pens while they worked, also very affordable for the features. However, I now have zero trust in their durability.

I bought the extra fine, and I'm surprised that it's actually thicker than my Pilot Metropolitan in fine. It's still fine enough for my tastes and writes very smoothly with a bit of toothy feedback for a nib this fine. The build quality is very solid and the ink capacity lasts me weeks. Seeing the ink slosh around makes the pen very attractive, but several people have mistaken it as a vape so be aware of that in professional environments.

This pen is just so neat! It writes beautifully. It is a little harder for me to fill, and clean, than a regular converter that is not a part of the pen itself, but the look of it is so fun, and the nib writes so smoothly at a little difficulty in reassembling it is well worth it.

On WonderPens.ca in general:
The shipping price was reasonable. It was packed perfectly. I appreciated how quickly it got to me, and the postcard enclosed was a really nice touch. It was even written in a beautiful brown ink, which I thought was a nice touch, as I had ordered two samples of different brown inks in my order.