Fountain pens have been a lifelong obsession of mine since I first laid hands on a disposable Pilot Varsity over twenty years ago. The one regret I had from the written portion of my bar exam several years ago was that I was forced to use a heavy-handed ballpoint to write out my answers. How the examiners managed to decipher my chicken-scratch handwriting well enough to give me a pass remains a mystery to this day. (Interestingly enough, the very next administration of the exam was the first to allow examinees to type out their essays on a computer loaded with ExamSoft. Coincidence? Who knows.)
I've used fountain pens whenever practicable ever since then. (The usual impracticability occurring wherever carbonless copy paper is used, such as check writing and certain old-school governmental forms. While a fountain pen could be used in those applications if you exert enough force, I have ballpoints in reserve to save my nibs - and hand - from the unnecessary torture.) At one point my collection approached a dozen, but like the recent trend with my watch collecting, I've been putting into practice the principle "less is more." So the Hero 616 is the first fountain pen I've added to the stable in well over two years. A well-regarded Chinese-made Parker 51 doppelganger, it has several attractive attributes.
The first thing that makes the Hero 616 such an easy addition is its price. It's readily available on eBay for somewhere between $4-6, shipping often included. By comparison, the Lamy Safari - commonly regarded as a strong entry-level pen among European models - costs around $20. The Hero 616 really won't break the bank, and offers solid performance that amounts to a high value-to-cost ratio. Its affordability also means that you don't have to baby it the way you might a pricier pen costing several hundred (or more) dollars.
That last attribute is the main reason I picked one up: I've been looking for a good home for my long-neglected bottle of Noodler's Baystate Blue ink. Baystate Blue is notorious in FP circles for being finicky in use, staining barrels and even laying waste to pen feeds. Needless to say, it's not the ink you'd want to use in a delicate vintage or exorbitantly priced pen. So why bother with it at all? Its vibrant shade of blue brooks no comparison.
The Hero 616 has a reputation as a solid platform for Baystate Blue, and my experience corroborates it. I've had Baystate Blue clog up a Pilot Prera and Lamy 2000 in the past after only a day or two of disuse. The Hero 616 is still going strong three weeks down the line.
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