'Nother Pen Disorder

New Pen Day!

Look, I have a bit of a… thing… for pens with two specific attributes. Italic or oblique nibs, and retractable fountain pens. I haven’t seen anyone make a combination of the two, but.

Here’s a retractable that is, at least, very cheap. Which is kind of unique in its field, because I’ll bet you most of the other options you can name are pretty expensive. The most budget friendly I know of so far is the Majohn A2 Press, which will still run you $30. More if you want one of the nicer variants.

This, however, is the Oaso K016 and it’ll run you less than ten bucks. I only learned about it recently. Maybe this is old hat to some of you. But I’m going to talk about it a lot now, because that’s what I do. Look, just count your lucky stars that I don’t crank out 30 minute long youtube video essays instead, okay?

It is cheap and very cheerful, and aimed squarely at schoolchildren. It comes in a variety of plasticky colors, but I had to get the “Deep Sea Green” because green is, clearly, the superior color for most things. The grip section is kind of a dusty forest green but I’d call the body section more of a seafoam sort of color.

This pen comes in the below pictured rather garish packaging, which is labeled almost entirely in Chinese. Which makes sense, considering this pen is apparently manufactured (per the box) by “Shanghai Youshang Stationery Co., Ltd.”

This is made to appeal to the Asian market, and if all that didn’t tip you off the kawaii mascot certainly should. The box, by the way, says:

• OASO Youshang
• Seal Press Pen
• K016 Push-Type Tip Extraction (i.e. it is a clicker pen)
• Budget Friendly
• Writes Smoothly
• Upright Pen Grip
• Universal Ink Cartridge
• Sealed Pen Tip - Thermally Insulted (i.e. won’t dry out) and Corrosion Resistant (i.e. stainless nib)
• Inlet and Outlet Sealing Valve

And at the bottom:

• Youshang Submarine Cabin (your guess is as good as mine)

I’m paraphrasing some of these. The rear:

• 0-3 Sad Onions (Actually, it says, "Warning: Contains small parts, not suitable for children 3 years or younger.)
• Please use universal ink cartridges with the same specifications as the Youshang ones, with 3.4mm diameter
• Ink Cartridge Replacement Instructions

The rest is rather self-explanatory except:

• When installing (lit, “replacing”) the ink cartridge for the first time, leave the pen tip down for about 30 seconds before writing.

The bottom lists the manufacturer’s contact info, and claims that the product documentation and photography was done in Shanghai. No surprise there.

At the very bottom: “Write The Future.” I thought we were supposed to fight the future?

Anyhoo. This is indeed a retractable fountain pen.

I said that already. It’s a very basic model, all things considered, and pretty much every component except the nib and pocket clip are made out of plastic. One thing that jumps out at me about this which is different from all the other retractables that I own or have handled, is that it is not upside down. Or rather that it is upside down relative to all the rest of them. When clipped to something the point is downwards, as opposed to the Pilot Vanishing Point, A2 Press, Platinum Curidas, and Lamy Dialog which all clip with their points up. This is more like unto a ballpoint and the inverse of most fountain pens – even non-retractable ones. But it does keep the clip out of your grip area for people who hate that sort of thing. Time will tell if this turns out to be a bad idea from an ink retention standpoint. Maybe don’t carry this in the pocket of a really nice shirt.

The K016 unscrews as you’d expect, and the nib assembly remains captive in the grip section. I was a little surprised to find that in addition to the four blue cartridges the pen came with, it also had a fifth empty one already installed inside. So I dutifully filled this with some black Sheaffer Skrip ink I had lying around.

The grip section is slippery plastic, but has three flat sections giving it a somewhat triangular profile. You’re not going to mistake it for premium, but at least it’s not tapered down its entire length ready to squirt out of your grip like a watermelon seed. Like some pens I could mention. (Pilot, I’m looking at you.)

There must be some way to get the feed and nib out, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how. I haven’t messed with it with too much gusto because I don’t want to break it. Yet.

You install the cartridge the usual way via pressing it against the tube on the end of the feed. But that illustrates that the clicker mechanism is not in fact in the business end, because the whole thing squishes down against the spring when you do so. The K016 has a very stout spring in the nose and amount of force you have to apply gets progressively greater the further out the point goes, culminating in having to give it an alarmingly hard shove to get it fully deployed. That’s a little strange. But it springs right back out – whatever ratchet that toggles between the deployed and retracted position is on the other end, under the button.

The exposed nib is very short, extremely stiff, and is supported for most of its length with the solid plastic feed:

The nib is a 0.5mm so you can quibble amongst yourselves if this counts as a “medium” or a “fine,” but I will say as a habitual italic nib user that it’s annoyingly fine by my standards. It is stainless steel, and while the online description claims that it is “iridium” I’m not entirely certain I believe this for two reasons. One is the writing feel, and two is that the package doesn’t actually mention that anywhere.

Something about that 3.4mm diameter cartridge rung a tiny bell in my brain as well. That’s because I measured one just like that while doing some home research on this thing the other day, vis-a-vis compatibility with the Zebra “V Refill” for the V-301. Well, those are the same as these. Totally interchangeable; this is indeed the same old China Standard cartridge that is currently flooding the East Asian markets.

The K016 has this in the end for sealing off when not in use. It’s a little different from the usual mechanical trap door arrangement in the fancier retractables. Poking it with a paperclip reveals that it is in fact rubber. I suspect this accounts for the bodacious shove you have to give it to get the point out, since this’ll surely add a whole bunch of friction to the equation.

It also introduces the possibility that over time the rubber could perish. So there’s a fun thought.

But I’ve spent all of these words without talking about the only thing that really matters in a pen. So, how does it write?

Well, it writes.

I’m damning with faint praise, I am. But you are definitely not going to mistake this for a premium pen. The nib is decidedly scratchy and catches frequently on ordinary paper, which made inking my doodle at the top of this a real chore. The point is very sharp and very stiff, leading to no expressiveness whatsoever. The ink flow seems to be much lower than average, such that the Sheaffer Skrip I’m using which is usually very prominently black comes out almost grey because it’s spread so thinly.

This is not a pen that rewards variations in stroke, and it punishes writing quickly. You have to scribble pretty fast to get it to actually skip, but I did manage to do so (it’s visible at the end of my scroll in the headline image) but the faster you write the thinner and less defined the lines get. This is a pen much more at home methodically plonking down katakana, not racing across the page in cursive.

Maybe it’ll work better with the ink it came with. I’ll try that later and see.

The point is also too fine for my liking but that’s my problem. I don’t do fiddly little glyphs as small as possible in neat boxes. I do big spiky seriffed letters, a lot of them, fast.

What’s everyone’s problem, though, is that it seems very sensitive to both rotation and angle against the paper, and getting either of these even the slightest bit outside of the very narrow zone that it likes makes the output even worse. Further, since so little of the nib’s length sticks out, the bottom face of the grip section cruises really close to the paper at all times. I could see it would be definitely possible for a user with small hands to naturally hold the thing at an angle such that the plastic hits the paper, which is sure to cause some grief.

(What that sticker says, by the way, boils down to “Kindness Tip” and “Don’t Point Your Pen At Anyone.” Stab, do not the crab.)

But on the bright side, this pen is so cheap that you won’t have to hire out a hitman if somebody steals or breaks it.