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.