12 Pilot Pens Ranked Worst to Best — ONLY 4 Are Worth Buying

Open one Pilot catalogue and read the warranty terms, and the first thing that falls apart is the assumption you brought with you. The Sterling, the Falcon and the Vanishing Point are covered for three years. The two flagships people save up for, the Custom 823 and the Custom 74, are covered for one. The cheap specialists outlast the expensive stars on paper, and that is from the warranty terms an authorised dealer publishes, not from an opinion. So this is twelve Pilot pens ranked from worst to best, and only four of them are worth your money. Pilot has been making pens in Tokyo since 1918, when two men who met on a cargo ship registered a small firm called Namiki Manufacturing and started turning out gold nibs made entirely in Japan. The name came from the maritime pilot, the one who climbs aboard and steers a big vessel safely into harbour. Over a century later the catalogue runs from a three-dollar disposable you throw in a bag to a solid silver pen sold in a lined box, and the gap between what those pens cost and what they actually do is the whole subject of this video. The yardstick is the same for all twelve: how the nib writes out of the box, how much trouble the filling system gives you, what the price actually buys, and what the published reviews, the owner threads and the warranty say. Nothing here is a personal test and nothing here is invented. Every criticism is attributed out loud, to the independent scoring table at Nib and Ink, to The Pen Addict, to Wirecutter's long-running pen test, to a collector writing for the Budapest Pen Show, to The Gentleman Stationer, to Fountain Pen Love, to JetPens, to Fountain Pen Network threads and to the dealer warranty pages. Where the sources disagree, and on two of these pens they genuinely do, you get told so instead of being handed a clean verdict that does not exist. Along the way: the Pilot a devoted collector calls truly disappointing, and the arithmetic he uses to explain why. The disposable that survived two house moves and still wrote. The gel pen in every office drawer in America and the test it quietly failed. The starter pen whose job was already being done, cheaper, by its own stablemate one shelf over. The pen that clicks a gold nib out of the barrel like a ballpoint, and the refilling ritual one owner calls nerve-wracking. The fourteen-dollar pen with a smiley face on the nib that scores level with a flagship costing more than ten times as much. The vacuum filler one reviewer says should be called the flagship instead. And at the top, a pen that costs about what two movie tickets cost, sitting one single point under the gold-nibbed Custom on the same scoring table, with a converter in the box so you can fill it from a bottle the day it arrives. The honest counter-evidence against it gets read out too, because Pilot's quality control is very good and that is not the same thing as perfect. Pilot's reputation is earned at the cheap end of the catalogue and spent at the expensive end. By the time the count reaches number one you will know exactly which four pens survive the yardstick and which eight have a documented reason to stay on the shelf. If this ranking saved you from a purchase, or cost you one, say so. Tell us in the comments which pen you would move and where you would put it, subscribe if you want the rest of these buyer's rankings, and leave a like so the next one finds the people who need it.