This is a pocket pen you can carry in your pants pocket. There is no clip, so you can’t clip it to your shirt pocket (with or without pocket protector). It’s kinda heavy, so you want to make sure it doesn’t fall out of whatever you carry it in. I can’t write with the pen without posting the cap on the back of the barrel, because it’s a pocket pen, designed to be short enough to fit a pants pocket.
The material the barrel and cap are made from Zirconium, known for hardness, high temperature tolerance, and corrosion resistance. This makes it suitable for high temperature applications, such as nuclear reactors, but not necessarily ideal for use as a writing instrument. Raw Zirconium is silvery white, meaning the Zirconium pen probably has a coating of some kind…which will wear off eventually, exposing the silvery metal underneath. However, it’s highly unlikely that you will ever damage this pen to the point of unserviceability through regular use. You’ll wear the stainless steel nib down to a nub before you’ll wear out the body or cap of this pen! And it is pretty cool to have and hold, and rarity of the material and difficulty of machining it into a fountain pen justifies the high price even though it has room for only one standard international cartridge, or the supplied mini-converter.
And here’s where I found an unexpected shortcoming: ink flow, specifically the lack thereof. I’ve used several of my nearly 100 different colors and brands of ink in the mini-converter. Almost all of them started to cause ink starvation sooner or later. I was able to replicate this phenomenon by using the mini-converter in one of my Sentry pens, where I also saw ink starvation, confirming that the mini-converter is somehow part of this “problem”. Similarly, ink cartridges cause ink starvation, so maybe it’s related to the size of the ink reservoir. With the mini-converter, you can at least “push” more ink into the nib unit to continue writing, but squeezing the cartridge may cause the cartridge to split, which allows air to get into the cartridge through the crack, which causes flooding of the nib…
My work around for loss of ink flow with the converter is easy. Remove the barrel from the grip section, pull the piston of the mini-converter all the way out, and with the nib pointing downward, re-install the barrel to the grip section, slowly. The mini-converter is just a little too big for the pen; when the piston is fully extended, the inside of the barrel will push on the mini-converter’s handle just enough to restart ink flow. Repeat as necessary.
Surprisingly, Pelikan 4001 Königsblau has provided the most consistently positive results, regardless of the size of the cartridge or converter. That’s surprising, because that ink is generally not known for superior performance or outstanding characteristics, but I’ve had no ink flow problems with it in any of my pens.
Writing with the Pocket Pen is a very “forgettable” experience, and I mean that in the best way possible. Provided you fix or don’t have any ink flow problems, the Pocket Pen is very smooth and consistent, allowing you to concentrate on what you’re writing rather than constantly fidgeting with your writing instrument to get it to write. The instrument fades into the background, so only your creativity occupies your mind, as it should be.