Back with a review: AOPO Signature Pen 1.0mm

Hey dear readers, I am back on track with blogging! Sorry I have been busy for the past few weeks (yes, in my “Hiatus” post I wrote “two weeks or so” but it ended up almost 1 month, oops!), but I would like to give a huge THANK YOU! to all my readers who have been constantly checking back on my blog. I seemed to have also gained a couple of new readers in the process. Hmm, maybe I should have more “hiatuses” like this! Kidding! I do miss blogging, though.

The pen I will be writing about today is a nice grand pen. “Grand” here is used loosely, as in the overall feel and experience with the pen. Not imagining a diamond-studded Mont Blanc now, are you? The pen in question is much simpler-looking than that. Granted, it isn’t a fountain pen, but it is good enough to deserve some attention to it too. It is a…

The AOPO Big Boss Signature Pen. And yup, the sample was really written on a piece of tissue paper. Or rather, a disposable kitchen napkin.

The pen is medium-big, black, rollerball, and silky-smooth. That’s probably the most apt sentence I can ever speak of about a pen.

I bought this pen in a furniture shop in Singapore called King and King Wong, at the shopping mall in my neighbourhood. The great thing is that this random purchase has left me happy, but the sad thing is, the pen is NO LONGER AVAILABLE!!! There had been a clearance sale of the furniture shop where they sold this pen at 50 cents each (down from the original price of S$2.50)! I asked the staff about possible restocking of the pen, but they said they would not bring in this pen anymore. WHY? Good things never last! 🙁

I did a frantic search online to find nothing but a chinese website selling the pen in bulk quantities, with the minimum price exceeding S$2.50. Not sure if it is even worth it to buy so many of that (I do have quite a number of other pens waiting for me to use, though). It was nothing short of disappointing. Readers, if you ever find this pen in any corner of the world, please drop me a line and I will see whether I am able to get it in my hands or not. Or just send me about 20 of them right away!

Took the pen apart, finally! It screws out from the top instead of the usual nib area, unlike many other rollerball pens

Anyway, let’s talk about the pen itself. It’s medium-big, black, and bad-ass. Its size and shape reminds me very much of the Pilot Custom 74 fountain pen, and indeed it measures only a few mm’s longer than the Custom 74. Here are some vital stats of the AOPO signature pen:

Length capped: 14.8 cm
Length uncapped: 14.1 cm
Length posted: 16.0 cm
Weight: light
Weight distribution: pretty much evenly distributed
Material of body: rubber
Nib: rollerball gel pen with 1.0 mm nib

As for the writing experience, it is awesome and it even writes well on a kitchen napkin, the disposable kind. Don’t ask me why I had that crazy idea to write on a kitchen napkin. It just came as a brainwave when I was watching my experiments in lab and waiting for them to finish up. We use disposable napkins to clean up minor spills, and this clean piece was just lying around, so I just scribbled on it. The nib does not catch on the fragile napkin, and I can write normally on it, like I am writing on paper! This can give you an idea of how smooth the nib is. From my experience of using it, I have never encountered inconsistent ink flow, starting problems, or skipping. AT ALL.

In addition to that, it bleeds through badly over to the reverse side. This is nothing to be freaked out about, though, considering the absorbent and thin quality of kitchen napkins in general. The bleed-through is quite consistent. It actually creates a nice effect, like a “writing on super thin, fragile and translucent paper” kind of effect! Consider this if you want to write a note on some special paper to a friend. Or maybe, if you just wish to scribble your number and slip it into someone’s pocket, this pen can be a good choice, with an appropriate kitchen napkin, of course.

Needless to say, this pen is smooth on all other papers I have tried it on. You hardly need any effort to produce a thick, consistent line. Probably the only downside of the writing experience is that it lays down so much ink that it takes some time to dry, so for a leftie like me, it means smudg-smudg-smudging! But even I am not concerned about this. So why should you?

To further convince you of the smoothness of the pen, let me tell you a true story. Once, I grabbed this pen at random and went to my boss’ office to let him sign a document. He borrowed the pen to scrawl his signature on the paper, and was instantly surprised by the smoothness. Frankly, for a busy guy like him, who almost never cares what kind of pen he uses, to be stunned by a plain-looking pen is quite a miracle. Okay perhaps I exaggerate on that part, but I was equally surprised by his reaction as he was by the writing experience. He asked me where I got it from and praised its quality. I told him he could keep that pen since I still had two others in my possession. He was quite happy about it. A week later from his other office overseas, he dropped me an email saying again that the pen is great, and he hoped that I could buy about 10 of them so that he can put a couple of them everywhere and never run short of them. Sadly, though, the pen was not to be found anywhere anymore (as my one and only source of it discontinued selling it). When Boss came back to my office, he repeated to me, “Please, if you find that pen anywhere, buy it for me! Buy 10 if you can!”

Of course, I tried to propose alternatives such as fountain pens, but he was not interested in them, so I didn’t say more.

Is it convincing enough? I hope it is. So, is anyone ready to creep at every corner to look for this pen? Don’t forget to get me a few of them!

*** I think AOPO (or whatever the company name is) should pay me a small advertising/marketing fee, since I praise their pen so much. Too bad, I don’t even know which company manufactures it, so I can’t claim the fee from them. That said, I want to clarify that all opinions on this post about this pen are entirely my own (except the part about my boss’ reaction). ***

Maybelline

I am the founder of this website.
Chemist by day, slacker by night, fanatic of stationery all the time.
I write with my left hand, but can also do the same with my right hand – it just won’t look very pretty.

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