Welcome to the land of cheapo fakes and clones!

Already name-dropped in my review on the Pilot Metro, the Wing Sung 659 is a Pilot 78G clone. Plenty underpriced, you can get them off eBay in a whole range of colours, and in both silver and gold trims. The important thing (for me) was that it came with a spare nib and section: one gets two nibs in total, one F and one EF. A converter is included as well. The fine nib is what I have fitted on today; the other section and feed has gone into cosmetically upgrading my Pilot Metro.

And how does it compare? Well, quality control is hugely lacking, of course. The rings on the cap are printed onto the plastic, and scrape off easily. Unlike the 78G, there are holes at the bottom of the barrel; I had to seal them before I could eyedropper the pen. And the nib is designed to copy Pilot’s — in place of PILOT on the original, we have WINGS. Funnily enough, the clip has PILOT replaced by LUCKY instead. Not even the same “brand”!

The only really neat thing about the Wing Sung 659 is the transparent feed, seen in the featured photo up top. The barrel is surprisingly sturdy, which is a plus, and the inner facets at the end cause some pretty interesting visual effects.

The nibs are decent, though the particular specimen I ordered did not show any difference in size between EF and F. Others have reported real Pilot-sized EFs as well as F nibs that write like Western mediums. Mine is comparable to the kind of line laid down by a Japanese medium, like those on the Pilot Metro.

I ended up buying three more to give to friends as “gateway drugs” into the world of fountain pens. For how cheap these are, they function surprisingly well! For people who like fine nibs, I would actually recommend this pen over the Lamy Safari, since it comes in at almost a quarter the price. (Just kidding. Buy the Pilot 78G or the Metro.)