A bit of a different review this time! This review is of a pen that is many hundreds of dollars or even over a thousand dollars less than some pens I’ve reviewed. This pen is cheaper than any of my inks! The Pilot V-Pen/Varsity is a single-use (by design) fountain pen that retails for less than US$4. How does it stack up? A friend generously gave me this pen as a gift! Thanks!
The pen goes by Varsity or V-Pen and can come in silver of black plastic finish. I actually can’t find the black V-Pen I have here for sale after a brief search. The V-Pens advertised on Pilot’s sites are all silver. The Varsity pen on the US Pilot store is black with rhombus shapes. This is a simple matte-black finish with a simple Pilot V logo. The V-Pen and the varsity can be found for Black ink as well as Blue, which is what is in this review, Purple, Red, Green, Pink, and Turquoise. The pen comes with a medium nib and is, by design, a disposable pen. You use it once and you chuck it out. However, because it’s not ideal to have disposable single use plastic items, you can actually refill it by removing the feed and treating it as an eyedropper. I tried doing this but I wasn’t able to easily remove the feed and stopped trying. I could rotate the feed so it would come out eventually but it wasn’t easy enough for me!
My version of this V-Pen is very-much unadorned. The entirety of any logos are two printed “V Pilot” logos on two sides of the body near the grip as well as “Japan” on the cap. The rest is either black, clear or blue. Very simple. The plastic feels soft and cheap, better than brittle and cheap, but it’d be silly to expect a premium feel. The simple clip has a ball at the end and each of the finials are blue with the body finial having “L B” written on it. The grip section is a clear plastic where you can see the feed fins on the inside.
Nib (Top Down)
Nib (Side On)
The nib fits onto the feed like a Lamy Safari nib would and it also has a fairly similar boxy look to it. The difference is that this nib doesn't have the same slit that you would expect from a fountain pen. The slit of a pen would usually extend from the tip to the breather hole (or where one would usually be) but this one extends no further than the tip itself. There’s an indent for a slit and the indent of a breather hole but there is no cut! The nib is simply adorned with “Pilot” and nothing else.
The tip of this pen is simple stainless steel that has been pressed from the side and some rudimentary grinding done after that. There is no tipping material (understandable for a disposable pen!) and the tip protrudes quite far from the rest of the nib.
Feed (Underside)
“Feed”
The feed looks like a fairly standard finless feed from the bottom. You can still see the fins inside the grip so everything looks normal. However, when you take off the nib you can see that the capillary action works differently from most fountain pens! Most fountain pens would have a feed with a channel that delivers ink to the slit and down the the tip. This pen doesn’t have a thin slit for a channel; here it is deep and wide and inside the channel is a fibrous conduit for the ink that looks not too dissimilar to a felt tip. This felt conduit brings the ink from the feed inside the grip section to the tiny slit all the way on the end of the nib. Certainly an interesting approach; I wonder the reasoning? To allow a simpler nib and feed manufacturing process?
The medium nib writes more or less like a Japanese medium nib but a little larger. It’s larger on the horizontal stroke which means the pen has a bit of an architect feel to it. You can see from the nib shots above that the nib is thin and long which gives it this architect look and feel.
The nib feels sharp and has a decent amount of feedback. It isn’t exactly unpleasant but it’s not the smoothness of a Pelikan nib nor is it the pleasant feedback of a Sailor.
The nib has a strange effect where at the end of a line each corner is pointy with a convex shape created between the corners. I’ve never seen this before and it’s certainly odd!
Another peculiarity with this pen is its rather inconsistent flow. That doesn’t mean it stops writing, thankfully, but it does get dryer and fainter before coming good again.
The pen is a relatively normal size if on the smaller end. Around a Pelikan M200 or Sailor Pro gear size. It’s also uniform along its length being a simple cylinder shape with no tapering before the finial. Even the Section is only 1.3mm thinner than the barrel.
| Capped | Uncapped | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Pilot V-Pen | 8.6g | 5.6g | |
| Kaweco Sport (with clip) | 13.2g | 6.3g | |
| Kaweco Sport (sans clip) | 10.7g | 6.3g | |
| Sailor Pro Gear | 24-25.9g | 15.7-16.4g | |
| Sailor Pro Gear Slim | 19.6g | 12.4g | |
| TWSBI Eco | 20.8g | 12.3g | |
| Lamy Safari | 20g | 11g | |
| Lamy 2000 | 26g | 17.1g | |
| Platinum Century #3776 | 25g | 14g | |
| Montblanc 146 | 29.8g | 19.9g |
| Capped | Uncapped | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Pilot V-Pen | 13.2cm | 11.5cm | |
| Sailor Pro Gear | 13cm | 11.6cm | |
| TWSBI Eco | 14cm | 13.2cm | |
| Lamy Safari | 14cm | 13cm | |
| Platinum Century #3776 | 14.1cm | 13.2cm | |
| Montblanc 146 | 14.3cm | 13cm |
As mentioned the pen is on the shorter side of normal but still fairly average sized. Where this pen is different is in how crazily light it is! Even the Kaweco Sport, without a metal clip is 2.1g heavier capped and 0.7g heavier uncapped. The Pilot V-Pen is almost too light to feel in your hand. This can’t be that much heavier than a large quill which means this pen is as light as a feather!
This pen is the definition of cheap! It feels cheap, it looks cheap and it costs very little. However, it works when you pick it up and use it. Is it the best to write with? Not at all - its a little scratchy albeit not uncomfortably so, but it works when you pick it up and that’s the most important aspect of a pen and it’s the minimum you can expect from a subUS$4 pen! This is a great pen to get people into fountain pens or to chuck in every bag to make sure you always have one on you. It would never be a pen I deliberately pick up and use but it’s a pen I’d use when I need to. My pen took too much effort for me to want to refill it and I think that’s unreasonable to expect everyone will turn this into a reusable pen and as such a disposable pen in this day and age isn’t ideal! Grab this pen for practical purposes that take advantage of it’s simplicity and that it just works rather than any other reason!
✒︎ ✑ ✒︎ ✑
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I received this pen free of charge by a pen friend who is not associated with Pilot in any way. I was not otherwise compensated and everything here is my own honest opinion. There are no affiliate links.