Po'tD 2024-03-14: The Five Below Pen of Unknown Provenance
Spring is here, the air is clear, and the boid is on the wing. So here’s a pen that’s cheap and absoid, a pastel plastic thing.
It is the first warm spring day of the season, so on a lark (ha) I grabbed this out of the Pen Bucket. These don’t even get a slot in my pen holder. I bought this as a pack of I believe eight at Five Below for $5. They came in all different pastel colors, but among them this green one is the superior choice. Each was included with a cartridge of different colored inks roughly matching the color of the pen bodies, which is watery and very transparent, and comes in a cartridge style I don’t recognize:
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/43874b8e-c4b2-4152-a03b-09ea4b926e09.jpeg
As before these are all taken in my office at work which has terrible lighting for photography. Sorry about that.
The exposure didn’t do it justice, but the ink this came with is a very transparent, very light sort of plastic-easter-grass green.
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/88edb26c-f3b9-4dc0-8544-81fdc11cef93.jpeg
All eight or however many came in the pack have these same unremarkable steel nibs which, if we’re keeping score, would probably be called a “medium.” They’re not terribly nice, but they do write albeit with some skipping if you’re fast and not careful (visible in my headline picture). Neither the pen, nor the nibs, nor even the packaging bore any kind of brand name or maker’s mark aside from “manufactured for Five Below.” It did not go as far as to specify by who. We’ll probably never know.
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/22af6aaf-bd6c-4ca1-8714-96a736d2ef2c.jpeg
The bodies are all injection molded and if I had to guess I’d say they’re ABS plastic, complete the world’s most Fisher-Price cap and pocket clip. The clip is molded in, not terribly well designed, nor is it removable. When it breaks, that’ll be it. The knurled part on the end looks like it should unscrew but it doesn’t. Curiously, the cap does not have an anti-choke hole. But the pen body does. (Obviously putting an anti-choke hole in the cap of a fountain pen would be a dumb idea, but that hasn’t stopped manufacturers of cheap and nasty examples from doing so anyway either via the old monkey-see/do or possibly out of an overabundance of caution, and with predictable results.)
But as the refrain goes – whaddaya want for 63 cents each?
Bottom of the barrel: Scraped!
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