Prosthetic Conscience

Aldo Domani Two Tone fountain pen w/mini ballpoint set

I found this at Office Depot for $16, a bit cheaper than the $22 their website lists it as. I was considering getting a new inexpensive fountain pen, as the clip on my Waterman Phileas is sprung, and I was thinking of the Foray Focus fountain pen in black. However, I happened to see this pen set, and my cheap side jumped out and made my try out the Aldo Domani.

• What it includes:
  
  • the fountain pen, which I’ll describe in detail below.
  • a rollerball converter for the fountain pen, consisting of a rollerball ink cartridge and point assembly, and a housing for the head end of that which replaces the fountain pen’s section & nib.
  • A mini ballpoint pen with a stylus point on the end.
  • A short standard ink cartridge.

  I haven’t tested the rollerball point, nor the mini ballpoint; I bought this only for the fountain pen. If I had a device that used a stylus, I might carry the mini ballpoint for that, but I don’t, and I don’t really have any reason to carry a ballpoint otherwise.

• The fountain pen
  

  The fountain pen, like the rest of the set, is actually made by Yafa, who I’ve noticed before make some cheap fountain pens for calligraphy sets and such. This pen is, according to the packaging, made of brass, covered with lacquer, and with chrome accents. It’s actually a fairly nice-looking pen, with a silver-gray barrel, a glossy black cap, and glossy black ends that look rather like cufflinks. It uses standard ink cartridges, and comes with a short standard cartridge. Note that it does not come with a converter (the Foray Focus I was also considering does).

  On opening the package, I loaded the pen up with a Waterman long standard cartridge, rather than the short standard cartridge it came with. The pen is a very nice substantial weight, much more solid feeling than my Phileas, about the same as my stainless Sheaffer Triumph Imperial. The cap posts very smoothly and solidly, and stays put. The nib is a medium, and is marked with “Aldo Domani” and “Iridium point, Germany”. The clip has a nice shape when looked at head-on, but is not very well constructed – the tip of it is folded metal like you’d see in a decent disposable gel pen, and it is very tight. It would not clip well to thicker fabric.

  One nice feature of this pen, which is not often found in very cheap fountain pens, is that the cap screws on and off. This makes it much more secure for carrying in a pocket or the pen loop of a notebook.

  My first impressions writing with this pen were that it is a very poor starter, but not a bad writer once it got started. On first using it, I had to shake it a bit and press down to get any ink to flow, but after that, it wrote okay, giving a wet line that was slightly wider than I like. After using it for a while, I found that it tended to be slow to start the first time it was used each day. This slow starting made the line quality slightly inconsistent, as it was rather dry starting, then tended toward being fairly wet. Even with these problems, I’ve enjoyed using it over the past couple of weeks as the pen-that-goes-in-my-notebook. The nib is reasonably smooth, and not at all flexible.

  I ordered a standard cartridge converter from PenCity; I had thought I had a spare from somewhere before, but apparently not. I cleaned the nib by soaking in cold water, dryed it on a paper towel, attached the converter, and filled it with Noodler’s Bulletproof Black. I don’t know whether it’s the ink itself, the act of drawing ink in through the feed, or whether I should have cleaned the nib in the first place, but the pen no longer shows the tendency towards slow starting that it did on the cartridge ink.

• Summary
  

  I give this pen a B+. It’s an excellent value for the very low price, assuming you can get it as cheaply as I did. Except for the cheap clip, the body of the pen is as nice or nicer than pens I have in the $30-$50 range. The nib is not great (not as good as even the Waterman Phileas, say), but it’s about as good as decent school pens like the Parker Reflex or Vector. The real appeal to me of it is that for hardly any more than a Reflex, I get an all-metal pen that will stand up to a bit more daily abuse than the somewhat flimsy Reflex.