Platinum #3776 Century 2-year Review

I’ll first go through the features of this pens quite briefly, but I wouldn’t bore you with the measurements since the stats are available pretty much everywhere, but however I would tell you the process of how I acquired this beauty and why it is still staying in my collection, as well as some pet-peeves and pros after the 2 years I’ve been owning the pen and some final thoughts for those who are looking into purchasing one as your first gold nib fountain pen.

Features

For those who are still new to the fountain pen community, this pen is considered one of the go-tos for your first gold nib pen purchases, and depends on the nib size or body material, it could range from 80 to hundreds of dollars. Mine is a basic black resin body with gold trimming so it was costing me about 120US dollars at the time of purchase, not mentioning the cost of a small converter. The shape and design of the pen has been around since 1920s so it pretty much look like your typical grandpa’s pen but the nib scrolling has a particular #3776 number to represent the height of mount Fuji in Japan. and it doesn’t have the white star/snowflake on the top to boost the price up to its european counterpart (if you’re a pen nerd you probably know which brand I’m speaking of). Pretty much it is a basic all so basic pen, with a 14k gold nib that writes well.

How did it end up here in my hands

It was around the early or mid 2017 when I first bought my gold nib pen, and it was actually not this particular #3776 but a Pilot Custom 74 with a Broad nib. I then sold the Pilot later on, but that’s a story for another day. but this #3776 still stays in the collection over the years. It’s been through a lot with me, especially my dumb mistake of putting rubbing alcohol on the gold parts to clean it up, before I could realize it I accidentally rubbed off a bit of the gold trimming on this pen, and dull a bit of the glossy resin body, but that eventually fades because of long term use.

Why it still stays in the collection

The pens that are actually kept in the collection bring me joy and different feedback from the way the nib touches the paper and the design of individual pen, hence why the Platinum gets the role of “I want to write, might be a few pages, not a lot, I want to write fast, and I don’t want to think about what ink I put in here” type of pen, the pick-up-and-go kind of thing, you know what I mean.

Final words

Pretty much you can never go wrong with a 3776, however for my particular use cases, I don’t change out ink quite often, probably once or twice a month, but I find that the converter and the barrel of the pen aren’t the best machined, as you might hear the part clicking together when you tap the pen, which doesn’t happen on other Japanese pens that I’ve owned and used, and also the inner side of the barrel scrapped off some of the plating on the converter, I don’t know how it happened, but it happened. Other than that, you get a reliable writer that would just work every time you decide to pick it up for a love session and would find yourself doodling with this pen just to hear the feedback from the nib moving across the paper.