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Product Description
For those who prefer pens with some heft, the Faber-Castell BASIC is an absolute pleasure. The metal barrel lends satisfying weight to each stroke, while the grip section features horizontal grooves, soft-touch coating, and enough length to accommodate the big-mitted among us Read More
I love this pen. I got the carbon fiber version in EF and find it to be well-balanced (note: I don't typically write with my pens capped, so I have no qualms with the fact that it dosn't post well), and the nib is both fine and extremely smooth-writing, somewhere between other German and Japanese nibs (finer than a Lamy Safari EF but smoother than a Pilot Metropolitan F). I picked up a converter from Goulet Pens and after trying a few inks gravitate toward this pen with Noodler's Black as my everyday work pen. It's a combination that is very pleasing for note-taking in meetings, but also doesn't suffer from scratchiness or feathering on cheap copy paper when you need to fill in forms quickly. I haven't had any issues with skipping or hard starts yet.
The pen itself looks great and hits that sweet spot of being subtle enough to not draw everyone's attention, but to get compliments from people who do notice it. (I would definitely recommend the carbon upgrade over the regular body.)
Overall, I feel like this pen falls into the high end of the price point for beginning pens, but I really do like it better than my similar budget pens from other manufacturers. No regrets about this purchase at all.
I wrote some parts of my review in the discussions tab. If anyone is wondering about using an ink converter (not why on earth do Massdrop not give an option to buy it alongside the pen like they do for other pens like LOOM), and has been questioning and searching all over the internet how the bloody hell does it accept standard international cartridges but not converters, well actually it surprisingly does. I have a standard international piston converter (from a Jinhao pen) that has an all-plastic nipple and it really does click securely into the unit. One post I found on FPN says it definitely wouldn't work on the ones that have a metal ring. On Goulet Pens review they said the converter would be too tight to fit inside the pen. But mine fits just fine (even with the long piston twister), not even too snugly. So if you have some standard international converters in your stock, find out which one fits best and stick to it. If you're not too lucky, then just buy the Faber-Castell one about $5-10.
I am usually not disappointed with items that I buy from Massdrop but this was a waste of money. Even though I ordered fine tip the letters are still pretty thick and ink quickly spreads on paper. I have used it on multiple papers with different inks.
The overall appearance and feel of the pen is satisfactor. It is a bit longer than I anticipated, but I write with it uncapped. The nib does not allow for continuous flow on all paper. On better paper, it preforms well, and, oddly, on cheaper bond it draws consistently, but school notebooks, it skips.