Our latest extravagant indulgence has arrived at last, a Baoer 388 for which we had to splash out a massive £1.97  –  delivered. Rediculous!!

And what a great little pen it is – we can’t fault its appearance, balance, feel in the hand and so on, but the nib is truly horrible. Nothing wrong with its looks –  well, we could live with it anyway, considering what we paid for it. Nothing wrong with the ink flow either, but scratchy? Scratchy is not the word. Abrasive would be more like it.

Maybe we’ve just got a particularly bad example.

That doesn’t matter in the slightest though because the main purpose of buying the pen was to find out if a Baoer 388 can be upgraded with a Bock nib. Not a week goes by when we don’t get asked if a Baoer will take a Bock nib, so we decided it was time to find out for ourselves.

It can. A size 5 Bock nib to be precise. We had to remove the Bock from its housing and fit it in the Baoer housing, but the geometry of the two nibs is identical and the new one is a perfect fit, and so is our own Beaufort size 5 nib.

Bock size 5 fountain pen nibs
Beaufort size 5 fountain pen nibs