Moooony // Moonman n6 Fountain Pen [REVIEW]

Moonman N6 Fountain Pen
Pink EF nib & Glass dip
~43CAD from Amazon
OR $28CAD from Aliexpress
OR $16.86USD from ebay
EF Steel nib
Currently Inked: Berlin Notebook Blue No. 1 (Black Label)
12.99 EUR from Berlin Notebook

Hello from the ether!! What is this…the first review of 2021?? I’m finally back with a review, this one is a rather fun one actually. Sometimes I browse the Instagram (understatement, honestly), and one day I came across an account (Becca Makes Blog) that featured a glass nib pen. I got super enticed immediately, since the last glass nib fountain pen I reviewed I ruined the nib, and my prized Bortoletti XS glass dip pen has also been chipped — sad story, and I have no idea how. Anyway, I got really excited because I thought this was another converter glass nib fountain pen which I’ve been eyeing on Wancher for a while. Of course, once I found out from that super nice blogger where it was from, I found out (after impulse purchasing) it was a separate glass dip screw-in and a separate steel nib with the actual converter attachment. In any case, I’m still happy I got the pen and hope you enjoy my take on it! Let’s get to it.

Look
Does this pen look super awesome? It’s real cute!

I picked up the pink colourway, a plastic celluloid cap and barrel with some neat cast glass-esque vein patterning. I’m not really sure how to describe it, but it reminds me of a cross between the Opus88 Omar Flora pattern and this cast glass cladding material developed by my office way before I stepped foot in grad school. It’s quite a thin material so it does have some translucency to it making the nib and converter visible from the outside.

The pen itself is quite small, total length measuring 12.5mm (<5″) and sub 12mm uncapped (It’s not post-able). The diameter is a tiny 13mm. The finial and the butt feature a shallow rounded dome shape and the cap-barrel connection is screw-on flush (A personal favourite).

The nib itself is quite tiny, measuring maybe 17mm in length and can be screw swapped out with the glass dip option, which measures 22mm in length. The pen is quite elegant with the glass nib attachment, working quite nicely with the pink celluloid patterned barrel. The nib itself has a more bulbous shape, which is rather cute on this relatively small pen.

bulbous glass nib

On to the feels!

Feel
I’ve now started a bit of a routine of using a pen for at least the monthly inked rotation before even starting a review. I did so with this Moonman, having used it for a month back in January and getting enough of a feel to give some backed up thoughts. Early on when using this pen, I enjoyed it! It’s slender, cute, pink and the nib is an EF.

The glass dip is pretty decent, retains a good amount of ink before needing a dip and it has a little bit of friction that makes it have more of a scratchy feel. I think this is relatively common for glass nibs, I haven’t found any of mine to be particularly buttery smooth, so I assume this is normal and I didn’t have an issue with it because of the large ink capacity in one dip.

The steel nib was also a joy to use – smooth and no hard stops. My favourite part of using this pen was that the reverse side of the nib gave an extremely fine line while not being super scratchy or running out of ink! It was great using this pen to draw details for work in my notebook and it kind of made work more fun because of that. Lineweights are life.

Now a few of the downsides, the pen is on the small side, so I found that when I drew for longer periods of time, my hand would cramp up a bit. Unfortunate downside to pens that don’t fit a hand perfectly, so while the actual nib experience came out surprisingly well and thin, I can’t see myself using the pen for long bursts at a time, which means it’s unlikely to stay inked except for a rotation or two.

Click to see enlarged!

I used the glass nib to draw a majority of this review spread, and probably only had to dip the nib a grand total of…15 times? I didn’t keep count, but for drawing so many lines, it was on the low side. Tried something different with the review layout as well, hope you like it!

Value
This is a really strange one for me. I can’t say I paid that much for the pen, relative to how much I normally spend on a pen. But I think the fact that this pen is valued at so many different price points depending on where you buy it from kind of bugs me. Ultimately, I think I paid too much for it, but going through Amazon got me the pen rather quickly compared to say if I went through aliexpress or ebay. But regardless of that, it’s a cute little pen that isn’t expensive, great for entry level use, and the glass dip is a nice bonus as well since those aren’t too common! The small size may not appeal to everyone (and they do offer an even smaller pocket pen line too), but the celluloid pattern could be unique enough and worth adding to a collection.

Conclusion

Pros

• relatively cheap for decent quality
• smooth EF steel nib with no issues
• reverse nib is smooth and continuous and not too scratchy
• glass dip nib swappable is a bonus

Cons

• the cost of the pen varies depending on the seller
• small size can cause cramping over extended use

Ink

I’ve wanted to talk about this ink for a while since getting it! This is a Berlin Notebook branded Blue No. 1 ink ‘Black Label’ edition. Finding that it was not expensive at all to order, picked it up almost immediately after reading about it on Charlie Rufus’ blog at The Indian Marmalade Company. The thing that attracted me to this ink was that it was a dark blue ink with little to no sheen! A rarity in dark blue inks apparently.

It does indeed not have much sheen at all, and it’s a beautiful dark blue-black. It’s not incredibly runny or thick, kind of in the middle and it makes for a decent inking pen – if only it were waterproof. However if I don’t plan to use watercolour with this ink then it’s brilliant for inking in my opinion.

Couple end-notes — The reason this review ended up taking so long (my original target was to finish one a month, this one took…three) was that I couldn’t decide what to draw. I knew I wanted to spend time on it, but nothing was coming to me. On top of that every other aspect of my life just ramped up in busy-ness, so pen reviews got sidelined 😦 Recently I had the opportunity to visit (with much precaution) the Tom Patterson Theatre, a project I was on the main Architectural team for the better part of my career at HPA. It was very nice to finally see it complete in person, and it makes me quote proud and grateful to have worked on it! So I knew I had to at least try doodling it, and what better way than to include it as an Easter Egg in my review.

Image courtesy of Stratford Festival

Image I took last Thursday!

Another note, you may or may not have noticed something different with the photographs. I treated myself to a new lens! I’ve always wanted to try a macro lens but photography isn’t a priority hobby for me so I always get very hesitant to spend money on a lens. I found this relatively cheap third party e-mount lens for my nex-6 which had great reviews so I picked it up. It’s been really fun to use and so far am very happy with it! Hopefully I can take more macro shots of my nibs now 😄

Anyway, Happy Easter Weekend, hope you all find rest, relaxation and peace! =)
And thank you so much for reading!