Review: Sailor Fude DE Mannen Fountain Pens (ふでDEまんねん)

These are the Sailor Fude DE Mannen fountain pens. The Japanese name is ふでDEまんねん. Actually ふで translates to Fude which is a kind of bent nib, and まんねん translates to Mannen which means fountain pen.

The Sailor Fude DE Mannen fountain pens are quite long. In the photo above, from top to bottom we have

• Pilot Kakuno
• Platinum 3776
• Lamy Safari
• The two Sailor fountain pens
• Pilot Parallel pens

The pens come with two disposable ink cartridges. As with most Sailor fountain pens, many of the parts can be used with other pens. For example, you can attach the nib and grip section to a Sailor Profit fountain pen body.

It uses the standard Sailor ink converter which you have to purchase separately. It's highly recommended to get this since you can use your own ink and it's more economical in the long run than buying disposable ink cartridges.

The whole pen is made of plastic except for the nibs. The green coloured pen has a 55 degrees nib while the navy blue coloured has the 40 degrees nib.

The pen body is cylindrical. The cap has a little protrusion to prevent the pen from rolling off the table.

On the left is the 40 degrees bent fude nib and the right the 55 degrees.

Here are some ink strokes on Daler Rowney Arteco paper. I've thrown in Sailor MY FIRST fountain pen for comparison because that's also a fude nib fountain pen.

There are some areas where the ink flow wasn't able to keep up with the quick strokes. On the textured paper, when drawing with the broad part of the nib, it's not easy to produce sharp edges with the strokes unless you draw more slowly. But that also gives this pen its characteristic strokes.

Another reason for the dry ink strokes is because the nib is bent too flat. The contact with paper is not as perfect as fude nibs that are curved, such as from the Duke 209 or other Hero fountain pens. When the fude nib is curved, it protrudes out and contact with paper is easy. When the nib is flat, you need to place the nib perfectly flat on the paper to get that contact for maximum ink flow, and many times I find that it can be an issue.

When drawing thicker strokes, the bottom plastic part of the feed may cause unwanted lines. In the photo above, the left's the 55 degrees nib, and right's the 40 degrees nib.

When drawing in real life, the stray lines don't really appear though. There's more tendency for stray lines when you use the maximum surface area of the nib.

These two sketches above are drawn with the Iroshizuku Yu-Yake Sunset Orange.

Conclusion

I prefer using the 55 degrees bent nib to the 40 degrees one. With the 40 degrees nib, I've to make more effort to tilt the pen to have the maximum contact surface on the paper. 55 degrees feel more natural in hand.

The advantage is the ability of the fude nib to produce lines of varying thickness. The downside is both pens still suffer from some stray lines that may be caused by the bottom of the feed coming too close to the paper. When drawing, I seldom see those stray lines.

Overall, these the Sailor Fude DE fountain pens are fine drawing pens. Just take note of the quirks.

Availability

The Sailor Fude DE Mannen can be found on Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP).