The Platinum 3776 did my laundry and bought me lunch

Platinum is not a brand that gets hyped up all that much among fountain pen users. Its main claim to fame is the Preppy, which is generally considered to be good for how cheap it is. I actually think the Preppy is an objectively good pen, but this post is not about that.

Apparently, I am not immune to dropping a couple hundred bucks on a pen, and so I have come into possession of a Platinum 3776 Century.

I spent a few months debating whether a purchase of this magnitude would even be worth it. I already won't buy a pen unless it writes meaningfully differently from the ones I already own, and a $200 pen raises the stakes even higher. On god, if I'm going to spend this much money on a pen, it better write like a fucking Rolls Royce. (Disclaimer: I have never driven a Rolls Royce.) I had my eye on the 3776 and its soft fine nib because I've heard it described as "springy" by multiple people and wanted to know what the deal was.

Luckily for me, my local art store carries the 3776, so I got to try it out instead of perpetually wondering. The store understandably only lets you test fountain pens on a water pad, but even then, I could feel the springiness that everyone was talking about. I was sold! Take my $200! To my immense disappointment, they only carry the 3776 in the blue and red colors, and I wasn't willing to compromise on the green. So I decided to wait and squirrel away some extra money for a while until I could check out their main location in Denver. I went last weekend and found that they don't have the green, either, which meant I had to resort to ordering online.

I loathe online shopping already and was especially hesitant to buy such an expensive object online, but I decided to take the chance with Goulet Pens. The ink I've ordered from Goulet has always come packaged very nicely. They have a reputation for being thorough and careful with orders, so I figured that they, of all stores, would help my pen get to me unharmed. And they sure delivered! The box was lined with no fewer than 3 layers of packing paper, and all was well. They also ship orders with a sticker and some candy. This time I got a really cute fountain pen corgi sticker, which is new!

The 3776 is a resin pen with a screw-on cap. It's not what is widely considered to be a sexy pen in the way that the Sailor Pro Gear (for example) is; it's the traditional cigar shape in a solid color with a simple clip and a bit of metal trim. Regardless, some people, myself included, view the simple design favorably.

It probably goes without saying that I'm a huge fan of the color. It's dark and elegant while still being readable as green. The resin's got some translucency, too. It's not clear enough to be a demonstrator, which I think works to this pen's favor, and it looks so good when it catches the light. And I love the gold trim! I'm very much a gold-over-silver kind of person, so I always get excited when I see pens with gold hardware. (If gold isn't your thing, there are also rhodium-plated versions that cost a little bit more, because rhodium.)

The 3776 is a good mid-sized pen. It's about 5 and a half inches long with the cap on and just under 4 inches without the cap (not counting the nib). The diameter comes in at around a centimeter. I have small hands and feel comfortable holding it, and I've seen people with big hands say the same thing.

It's lightweight, but it feels more substantial than a plastic pen like the Preppy and even a cheaper resin pen like the Sailor Compass. A lot of the weight comes from the metal clip on the cap, so posting the cap helps balance out the weight if it feels too light. I think it feels fine either way.

One feature that all Platinum pens have in common is the anti-drying mechanism in the cap. It's pretty much impossible to photograph this in the 3776, so I'm using the clear cap on the Preppy as a visual aid. There's a spring-loaded inner cap that connects to the grip section of the pen when it's closed, which creates an airtight seal and, according to Platinum, prevents the pen from drying out for up to a year. I have no desire to test this, but I've never had any problems with my Platinum pens getting clogged from disuse. It certainly doesn't hurt, and if nothing else, you can also see that the inner cap prevents the nib from spewing ink all over the rest of the cap (or your bag).

Onto the nib: It's made of 14k gold, the primary reason why the pen costs $200. It doesn't have super elaborate embossing on it, but it has a fun Mt. Fuji pattern that follows the curve of the edge. (The 3776 is so named because Mt. Fuji is 3776 meters tall.) My favorite part about it is the adorable heart-shaped breather hole.

I opened up the pen to ink it up and discovered, to my shock, that it already had a converter! One of the main gripes I've seen is that the 3776 doesn't come with a converter, so I had set aside an extra to use with it. According to the Goulet website, these do come with converters nowadays, indicating that 1. Platinum had rectified this injustice at some point and 2. I can't read. But we'll put my literacy shortcomings aside for now.

The Platinum converters are piston fillers. They're fine, they hold as much ink as you'd expect from a converter. The piston feels a little dodgy sometimes, so I bypass that and fill them with a syringe instead. I syringe-filled the converter with Sailor Tokiwa-matsu, and it took just a few minutes for the ink to travel through the feed. (Good, because I was getting ready to explode from all the anticipation.)

Much to my relief, the nib worked out of the box and was just as springy as it was when I gave it a test drive in the store. It's not a wet writer, but I wouldn't call it dry, either. Despite the slightly drier flow, it still does an excellent job showing sheen (a constant among all Platinum nibs I've tried).

This is not a flex nib and shouldn't be treated like one, but it has natural line variation that's unusual for a Platinum nib. It's subtle but noticeable even when you're not making a conscious effort to modify your pressure. I haven't managed to achieve some of the dramatic pressure gradients that other people have gotten because I don't want to fuck up the nib, but I'm plenty happy with how it looks under normal conditions.

The pressure variation has led to some inconsistencies in the way people see the nib, none of them necessarily wrong. I'm thinking your "default" line thickness will depend on the pressure you use. I personally think it writes like a Western-sized fine nib rather than a Japanese fine (granted, it's on the thinner side of a Western fine for sure). But if you use barely any pressure, you can get some really thin, crisp lines out of it, which has led some people to compare it to a Western extra fine. In any case, this is definitely a fine nib. I actually prefer broader and wetter nibs, so the fact that I still love this one despite it being neither of those things says a lot about it.

Like I said earlier, the nib on the 3776 is made of 14k gold. People tend to overstate the softness of gold nibs; gold is a softer metal than steel, but both types of nibs are tipped with some other metal alloy so the nib doesn't wear down too fast. But gold nibs do have a distinctive "soft" feeling to them because gold can absorb feedback a bit better than steel.

I mention that factoid because this nib is not a smooth writer. I mean that as a compliment! There's feedback, but it's not because the pen is struggling to get ink out. You can really feel the paper while you're writing, and it comes with some great sound effects to boot. None of my other pens make noise like this, so +1 in ASMR for the 3776. I don't necessarily prefer this over the buttery smoothness you get out of some other nibs — they're both pleasant to write with for different reasons.

I was still curious about the nib sizing confusion, so I put the soft fine nib next to the budget Platinum fine and medium nibs, which are known to be truer to Western sizing than Japanese sizing. The soft fine nib is comparable in thickness to the budget fine nib, but you can see what I mean about Platinum nibs not having any line variation. The budget medium nib is an extreme example of that.

Also worth noting: the Platinum Plaisir is basically an exact match in shape and size to the 3776, so it might be a good idea to check that one out if you're not sure about the size.

I'm not going to say you need the Platinum 3776. I won't tell you that you need anything, and you definitely don't need a pen that costs more than I spend on groceries in a week! If you're just looking to try out a Platinum, you'll be enormously well-served by their budget pens. (I have enough things to say about those that they warrant their own post.)

On the other hand, if you've got money burning a hole in your pocket (or just want to try out a gold nib), I think the 3776 is an underrated gem that blows its competitors out of the water. I tried out some comparable pens like the Sailor Pro Gear Slim when I was at the store, and none of them impressed me like the 3776 did. I'd advise trying one out in person if you can anyway, but I don't think you'd be disappointed if you bought it sight unseen.

Footnotes

1. Refer to these reviews: Hand Over That Pen, Pen Addict, Fountain Pen Network thread 1, and Fountain Pen Network thread 2... to name a few! ↩