Banal Minutiae

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything here, so I thought I’d change that with a nics discourse on my current pen of choice, the Pilot Hi-Tec-C Coleto.

For a while now, I’ve been using a Hero 329, a chinese copy of the venerable Parker 51 fountain pen. I’ve come to love the 329 (not as much as my Hero 100, though), especially since I smoothed the tip, but the fiddly nature of a fountain pen keeps pushing me back to the convenience of a more traditional ball point.

My affair with fountain pens has definitely been of the “love/hate” variety. I love the smoothness, the color and varieties of ink, and the nostaliga of the whole thing, but the width of the tip and potential ink problems (don’t drop this pen!) keep it from total perfection.

The Coleto is a nice multi-pen, although it only sports two different cartridges. The nice thing about it though, is that you choose the cartdridges, and there are literally a ton available. You can go with my combination of blue-black and red ink for example, or vary the tip thicknesses. I prefer a slightly thicker red line, for ease of reading corrections. Easy with the Coleto.