My experience with the Kaweco Al Sport (in) Olivine

For my first fountain pens, I got myself a Pilot Kaküno in Fine and a Kaweco Al Sport Fine in the gorgeous Olivine colour.

The pen is gorgeous, with it’s sleek olivine body coming in a satin/smooth finish, as opposed to stonewashed or matte with other Al Sports.

However that’s where my admiration of this beautiful pen ends. I got this in a fine <F> nib, and even though the ink flow is steady, it always hard-starts (read: the ink doesn’t flow for the first stroke or the first letter after uncapping or stopping to write), it skips unpredictably, and feels like an all-around unreliable nib.

If you look closely at the writing sample – please excuse my chicken scratch handwriting, and the misspellings – it was the second time in my life I was holding and using a fountain pen – you will find a few examples of the skips and maybe a bit of the hard start in that uppercase B.

I did flush the pen before inking it up, with water and a touch of dish soap, but that did not seem to have any effect. New pens often have oils or residues from the manufacturing process in their nib and/or feed, and flushing it out is always a good idea.

Now I’m not extremely knowledgeable about fountain pens and the problems associated with them, but this looks like to be a classic case of a baby’s bottom.

Basically, baby’s bottom is a problem with the nib in which the tines come together and form a small inverse pool instead of a flat surface where the nib meets the paper. Since the part of the nib that delivers the ink isn’t really touching the paper, the result is bad starts and inconsistent ink flow.

Imagine my surprise, while trying to find an article about Baby’s Bottom, I find that the most authoritative one, from The Pen Addict, uses the Kaweco Al Sport as an example!

I did read about Kaweco’s abysmal quality control when it comes to nibs, but the internet (Reddit, in particular) tends to amplify the loudest voices. But amidst the complaints, there are comments such as these, where people say they have 9 Kawecos and they have had nib issues with only one of them. I guess I was hoping to get lucky. But I didn’t.

As much as I love the pen, and I wanted it to be “the pen” for me for a while, it is right now sitting packaged in a box, waiting to be sent back to Vanness Pens.

(PS: Before anyone asks, I inked it with Diamine’s Sherwood Green. It’s a gorgeous ink.)