Prepare for Jinhaoageddon.....

[Formulansx]

The storm is coming my friends. The second pen arrived today. A porcelain Jinhao 950. This one is the version with a painted dragon in the material. It is done in the same fashion as China dinnerware. I was not sure if it was just called "porcelain" in reference to the color before I ordered. I was hoping for actual porcelain and that's what I got. The eBay seller stated the pen was a medium nib but arrived as a fine. The nib was also 2 sizes smaller than I thought at a #4. When I got it out of the package and opened the cap, all signs pointed to a very scratchy experience. $8 Chinese pen......small nib with a fine point. This is going to get ugly. I inked the pen up with Pilot Iroshizuku Asa-Gao (perfect color match for this pen and line weight) after flushing the converter with water and got to writing. This nib is actually pretty great! There's good feedback but no scratchyness at all. It's very smooth and puts down a nice line. Not dry and not sopping wet. The feed is a little off center to the nib but I can't tell any adverse effects to the writing experience and it doesn't want to budge. Leaving it as is. You can squeeze out a fair amount of line variation as well with this nib. More than the #6 Jinhao nib. I compared it to my Montegrappa Espressione also with a steel #4 nib but in broad vs fine. The Montegrappa nib I've had to do some work on. I actually prefer the Jinhao fine to the Montegrappa. It's a much more interesting nib right now. It has more feel to it and the line is more consistent. I just like the Jinhao better. So far I've been very impressed with the Jinhao nibs. They've been awesome right out of the box and, I would say better than any of my other steel nibs. That covers Visconti, Montegrappa, Schmidt, Lamy, JoWo, Nemosine, and Monteverde. So far these Jinhao pens have exceeded my expectations in every way by a huge percentage! I've got 5 more Jinhao's on order that should be trickling in over the next week. One of them is a 100+ gram signature pen! That's going to be an experience right there! I'm planning to pick up many more Jinhao's over time. These have just been awesome so far if you buy from a US seller. The line has a million different pens and you can pick up around 10 pens for the price of 1 Monteverde! Got burned on 2 pens by a Chinese seller. As in didn't send the pens so watch out for that one. The only down side so far is nib options. All are iridium tipped steel though so you can grind them as you please if needed.

[Formulansx]

More 950

[Formulansx]

The #4 nib

[Formulansx]

#6 Jinhao X450 medium vs #4 Jinhao 950 fine.

[Formulansx]

I took a look at the nib under magnification and found out why the feed is offset to the nib. The cut to form the tines in the nib is about 3/4 out of alignment to the vent hole It performs great though. It's entirely possible that the nib was installed offset to the nib to compensate for this. That's amazing to me that labor would be that cheap that it was more cost effective to pay a technician to tune the pen, or even look at it for that matter, than scrap the nib. This is an ISO 9000:2001 company so either their tolerances are so loose that this alignment is acceptable or there is a "use as is" reject tag floating around in China with my pen referenced It's also possible that there's a million pens like this and the engineer responsible for the "950 line" just skewed the nib insertion machinery to compensate! As an engineer this is worth $8 just to see how the "other side" reacts to these issues.

[blue16613]

Originally Posted by Formulansx

I took a look at the nib under magnification and found out why the feed is offset to the nib. The cut to form the tines in the nib is about 3/4 out of alignment to the vent hole It performs great though. It's entirely possible that the nib was installed offset to the nib to compensate for this. That's amazing to me that labor would be that cheap that it was more cost effective to pay a technician to tune the pen, or even look at it for that matter, than scrap the nib. This is an ISO 9000:2001 company so either their tolerances are so loose that this alignment is acceptable or there is a "use as is" reject tag floating around in China with my pen referenced It's also possible that there's a million pens like this and the engineer responsible for the "950 line" just skewed the nib insertion machinery to compensate! As an engineer this is worth $8 just to see how the "other side" reacts to these issues.

You already know that I have and enjoy some of these pens so hopefully you won't take this as a sarcastic comment or flame.

At $8 a pop there are two things you know.
1. There is no on site QC. What intrigues you is likely the result of a teenage laborer's mass production work. Nothing more goes into it.
2. The seller paid no import or duty taxes.

Looking forward to your reports of all the incomings!

[Formulansx]

Originally Posted by blue16613

You already know that I have and enjoy some of these pens so hopefully you won't take this as a sarcastic comment or flame.

At $8 a pop there are two things you know.
1. There is no on site QC. What intrigues you is likely the result of a teenage laborer's mass production work. Nothing more goes into it.
2. The seller paid no import or duty taxes.

Looking forward to your reports of all the incomings!

Slight bourbon related typo in the original post. Actually is ISO9001:2000. Jinhao, according to their website, complies to this standard so there has to be a quality system in place along with continuous improvement. They also produce stationary as well. We will never know if the entire facility complies with ISO as their QC manager can guide the auditor to areas that are known to be sorted. What ISO auditors are like in China I have no idea but I can tell you that the building I work at here typically has no findings during an ISO audit but if I just talk to anyone in the building as an engineer, I can find an issue on any particular day let alone during a full audit. I can't imagine that an auditor would overlook an entire worldwide pen production facility within Jinhao but anything is possible in China. Basically what ISO states is that "you say what you do and you do what you say". This means that all Jinhao has to do is specify an extremely loose tolerance and document it through an engineering change order. There is a quality system in place regardless though. They could have a kid building pens for 10c a day but if he screws up, it's documented someplace within quality engineering. I find it extremely odd though that the hardest part of the pen to make in my opinion, the nib, has been Jinhao's strong suit. My 3rd pen came in today and the nib is great! That beats even Omas who legitimately had a program were a sample of nibs were tuned. I've only benefited from this with 1 out of 6 pens though. All untuned pens looked the same. Nibs turned on the feeds slightly. Omas 1 for 6 and a Chinese $10 pen 3 for 3? There's always the great statement on QC from a famous dictator "Quantity is quality" maybe that's what happened here. I've got a statistically significant sample coming in here so we will see what the Chinese have in store for me