Let’s be honest. Many of us when we started down the slippery slopes of the fountain pen world discovered a plethora of cheap Chinese pen on eBay and tried a few out. These mainly worked, but over time we realised they are just cheap copies of other makes and while some people do continue to use/buy them, others like myself stop. Thing is for disposable starter pens to give to friends and colleagues they are hard to beat, so the question I set myself was could I buy pens just as good on the UK high street for £5 or less. The only stipulations being that the nibs had to have tipping (not just a butterfly fold) and the pens had to be refillable. As I know some of you may raise the question over the Pilot VPen V4, which in theory you can refill, I have included one of those as well as a bench mark, though you will have to pull the nib and feed once empty for it to really count.