[Formulansx]

Originally Posted by blue16613

You already know that I have and enjoy some of these pens so hopefully you won't take this as a sarcastic comment or flame.

At $8 a pop there are two things you know.
1. There is no on site QC. What intrigues you is likely the result of a teenage laborer's mass production work. Nothing more goes into it.
2. The seller paid no import or duty taxes.

Looking forward to your reports of all the incomings!

Slight bourbon related typo in the original post. Actually is ISO9001:2000. Jinhao, according to their website, complies to this standard so there has to be a quality system in place along with continuous improvement. They also produce stationary as well. We will never know if the entire facility complies with ISO as their QC manager can guide the auditor to areas that are known to be sorted. What ISO auditors are like in China I have no idea but I can tell you that the building I work at here typically has no findings during an ISO audit but if I just talk to anyone in the building as an engineer, I can find an issue on any particular day let alone during a full audit. I can't imagine that an auditor would overlook an entire worldwide pen production facility within Jinhao but anything is possible in China. Basically what ISO states is that "you say what you do and you do what you say". This means that all Jinhao has to do is specify an extremely loose tolerance and document it through an engineering change order. There is a quality system in place regardless though. They could have a kid building pens for 10c a day but if he screws up, it's documented someplace within quality engineering. I find it extremely odd though that the hardest part of the pen to make in my opinion, the nib, has been Jinhao's strong suit. My 3rd pen came in today and the nib is great! That beats even Omas who legitimately had a program were a sample of nibs were tuned. I've only benefited from this with 1 out of 6 pens though. All untuned pens looked the same. Nibs turned on the feeds slightly. Omas 1 for 6 and a Chinese $10 pen 3 for 3? There's always the great statement on QC from a famous dictator "Quantity is quality" maybe that's what happened here. I've got a statistically significant sample coming in here so we will see what the Chinese have in store for me