Maybe it's the broad nib or this particular nib or poor quality control in general (though I suspect it's the latter) but I constantly struggled with this pen. I'm also tempted to try a medium or fine nib but I'm not sure I want to sink more money in these pens, no matter how cheap they are. In contrast, I have two Parker Sonnets, each one of them costing as much as my entire Chinese collection, and neither of these has a decent feed with one of them usually refusing to start for several minutes before it will give any ink.

Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). I’m a big fan of quality and I know there are highly talented people in most countries of the world that can make a high quality pen if given the resources and direction to do so. The mediums I received are more of a mini-broad and require much larger lettering than I am capable of. Since these types of pens are not very mainstream (to my knowledge), I turned this into a game by masking the photo and asking my readers if they can identify it.I used the piston on the converter to force some ink into the nib, and since that time it is writing very wet again. The Jinhao X750 Shimmering Sands is an attractive chameleon going from near black to rainbow sparkly depending on lighting conditions. The site states that “Every nib that ships from His Nibs is closely examined under high magnification and tuned or adjusted if needed. Unlike your experience I now own 10 Chinese pens from Jinhao, Duke, Baoer and Hero and not had a bad pen amongst them.

Check out more info on these filling mechanisms including a video on how to fill each one on our blog. But the nib is smooth and I found that if you stick it in a Noodler's Ahab it makes for a very wet, smooth writing nib. The pen is not as heavy as it looks, but nevertheless has a good substantial feel to it, and has a very good writing balance, and the whole pen design, actually, is heavily influenced by pens from the 1930s "streamline" movement. Mine has been pretty good though after having it awhile I think I would have picked another color this time. We always recommend you give your pen a good cleaning first, using our Goulet Pen Flush, or a drop of dish soap in some water.Alas, one cannot know “good” without some idea of “bad” against which to contrast; and, as one of my former bosses (back when I was in my twenties) used to say, “on the scale of good to bad…”, it's a spectrum, not a dichotomy. I am using the pen exclusively for notes, so dramatic variation in the flow doesn't matter very much, but I look forward to discovering patterns. Well, regardless of the opinions of others, I find that the Jinhao X750 is a workhorse pen, one that is cheap enough to pocket carry or lend out to friends for a bit so they can test out a fountain pen.