Pilot Kakuno Fountain Pen – Test

The Pilot Kakuno fountain pen is a smooth writing and smooth drawing beginners fountain pen with a great medium nib and available in a wide range of great colours. Read our review below.

Vishal: Hello and welcome to Stationery Test Drive where today we’re looking at the Pilot Kakuno Fountain Pens. It looks lovely and plasticky but not in a bad way.

So what we do on Stationery Test Drive is we take tools like this, tools that you’ve used, maybe tools that are artistic and things that are not so artistic, like this one’s just an ordinary fountain pen, but we put them on artistic test drives. Minjal and Samir why don’t you tell us about the Pilot Kakuno because we’ve reviewed Pilot stationery products before, haven’t we?

Minjal: So, in the first episode of Stationery Test Drive we reviewed the Pilot Parallel Pen. As a calligrapher I can endorse that it is a great tool for lettering artists, it very convenient and the nibs are fantastic!

We also reviewed the Pilot Frixion Pens, which we were fairly conflicted about whether they’re actually good to write with and good to erase with.

While the Pilot fountain pens are superb to write with, if there is a problem it’s with the ink cartridges supplied with the pens, and we’ll get to that later in detail.

Vishal: Well, the Kakuno’s come with one cartridge and so you kind of have to get a extra pot of ink for this and know how to refill it or get more cartridges. The Pilot Kakuno fountain pen is kind of fun to look at, it literally has a smiley face in the Kakuno nib.

Minjal: The smiley face indicates the angle of the pen! The Kakuno is marketed as a pen for kids, it is a beginners fountain pen. So, the smiley face on the nib is actually very useful for kids to hold the pen in the correct angle for writing.

Vishal: Oh okay! Minjal, why don’t you show us your test drive? So, you have used a sepia ink, is that true?

Minjal: Yeah, now I’ve been using Pilot fountain pens for a while and I don’t quite like the ink that is a part of the cartridges that Pilot sells. The ink is very, very flowy? If that is the correct term.

Even when I was testing the Kakuno pen with the cartridge that came along with the pen, I realized the ink is so flowy that within a few seconds my fingers were covered in black ink.

Samir: The general issue of Pilot inks is that they have always been a little quirky to say the least.

Vishal: But getting back to the actual artwork, Minjal what is this? Because this is lettering, but it’s not quite calligraphy, and it’s not quite a poem and it’s not quite a piece of graphic design. What is it?

Minjal: I’ve been experimenting with Calligrams as I’ve mentioned in the earlier episodes which is just a graphical representation of words. When I was doing more research on Calligrams I came across this concept called Concrete Poetry.

Concrete Poetry is a visual, graphical representation of poems where the artists lay stress upon the the meanings of things, not really the words, so that’s what this is about. And I did actually enjoy writing with the pens a lot. I used the Ecoline inks, my standard go – to ink.

Samir: So did you fill the cartridge in or did you do the dip method?

Minjal: I did the dip method because the black ink was a little too flowy, I wanted to get the sepia effect, so I dipped the Kakuno nib with the existing Pilot cartridge in Waterman brown ink.

I must also add that the Kakuno fountain pen costs Rs. 1000 in India, I think it’s cheaper abroad.

Samir: So about $10 outside India.

Minjal: Yeah, I remember that when we were in school we were using the Hero pens. I don’t know if you’ll used the Hero pens? That was the beginners pen that kids in Indian schools used.

Samir: And that was not a friendly beginners’ pen.

Minjal: No, it wasn’t! So give this to kids and they’ll be happier and maybe they’ll write a little more.

Vishal: Speaking of writing a little more, I’m not known for my writing, nor my handwriting, but in a strange bit of serendipity both Minjal and I went for these spirals of lines. I did a little page of a cartoony man at a typewriter with handwritten scribbles in spirals.

This was the most fluid way of putting down a fountain pen line that I have experienced certainly since starting test drive. Off the pens we have used so far the Pilot Kakuno is definitely the best for drawing.

My favorite writing pen is the Pelikan Twist, purely because of how you can hold it and it’s weird shape, but it’s not the greatest fountain pen for drawing. You have to kind of hold it at a very specific angle and then you get the line otherwise it’s just fighting with you.

Whereas the Pilot Kakuno, you can literally just move it around, the ink in the cartridge is very liquid, which means that basically we ran through this cartridge very quickly. You’re not going to get mileage out of this pen, you’re going to get quality.

Samir: Considering this, it seems to be a full size international ink cartridge, it doesn’t end up stretching for that long compared to what you would see with the pen with maybe a finer nib like the Hauser Jazz INX Fountain Pen that we’ve covered.

Vishal: And especially when you do that thing where you press it down to get a nice thick line, it’s very satisfying to do but yes it eats through ink. You will enjoy using the Kakuno, but be prepared to just either buy a bunch of cartridges or just travel with a ink pot and a refill.

Minjal: Also, the Pilot Kakuno we used is the medium nib, Pilot has these pens in fine and extra fine. It would be very nice to get the extra fine and test it. I think that it may probably not be as good as the Tachikawa that we tested.

Vishal: Yes, the Tachikawa School G Fountain Pen is just insanely good! But, if you’re looking for something to draw with, they’re certainly not as easy as this, I will say that.

If you’re starting out drawing with a fountain pen, I would say just go and find our episode on the Hauser, especially if you’re in India that’s just a 50 rupee pen, that’s less than a dollar, comes with a refill, you can bash it about and it’s great for drawing. But if you want to spend a bit more and somewhere in the country where you get this, the Pilot Kakuno is a wonderful, handsome pen.

Samir: I think the the one thing that I will say about the Kakuno fountain pen that is better than pretty much any other fountain pen we have tried is that it is one of the best pens to start with for both drawing and writing. We’ve found a lot of pens where they’re better at drawing or they’re better at writing whereas this one does both well.

Minjal and Vishal went for a lot of writing. Vishal did some drawing, I stuck to just drawing and I pretty much used this as just kind of a line art tool and it was just a great experiment to do – to use fountain pens for that. This is something these days we’d use a fine liner for but I was quite surprised by the range of pressure and line weight that can be had with the Kakuno fountain pen.

Vishal: Yeah, the depth and the variety that you’re getting just by the same pen, you would probably use three or four different fine liners for that whereas here it’s just one.

Samir: And there are certain parts of it like these kind of flowy, squiggly lines that you just can’t do with a fine liner because it’s a little too precise.

Vishal: I do notice you had a bit of smearing which we did not.

Samir: Yes, I did, because again because of the fact that it is a medium nib and it does put down ink quite heavily you do have to watch out for where your hand is.

Vishal: Yeah, I think the ink flow is a double – edged sword because you want that liquid line, it’s so easy to put down but it also then runs through and you need to be careful about going over stuff in again and otherwise you do risk that.

Other than that it’s a great pen, it’s a beautiful pen, you get it in a whole range, like some of them are dual tone colors, I’ve seen like a nice pastel blue and cream.

Minjal: Also I do like the snap cap. I know that I had a lot of problems with the Pelikan Twist Pen, this one is fortunately very easy to handle.

Samir: Yeah, because they have all these small little details. Like they have this little notch here, an indentation here, that makes this easy to hold and pull apart. They have this tiny, little nub of plastic which I’m not even sure you can see on camera, it’s this thing, this little bit here, and all that’s for is you can just keep your thumb on it and push away.

Vishal: And it also keeps it from rolling around a lot.

Samir: So Pilot has really paid attention to some really fine details about this and it shows when you’re using it.

Minjal: I mean while you’re talking about details, we don’t expect anything less from something that is made in Japan, right?

Vishal: No and especially not by Pilot who whether we like their pens or not usually have impeccable engineering.

Samir: Yeah, and I think if I’m not mistaken they are one of the largest, if not the largest manufacturer of pens in Japan, so you don’t get there quickly or easily.

Vishal: And without paying some attention to your quality and this is a quality writing instrument, it’s a quality drawing and writing instrument. What else can we use it for? Journaling, signing checks and contracts and things, it’ll be great at all that!

Samir: As long as you sign the check and then wave it around for a good few minutes.

Vishal: Yes, that’s true! You don’t want to smudge your checks!

Samir: The one thing I will say about every Pilot pen we’ve tested and maybe this is true for most of their products, they find a way to make each one unique. And unique not just within their collection but unique from any other pen.

There’s nothing quite like the Pilot Kakuno which is why if you go online and look around for best beginners pens, you are always going to find this on that list. If you go online and look for best calligraphy fountain pen, you are always going to find a Pilot Parallel Pen on that list.

They come up with these very, very specific, unique things that no one else can quite replicate including the Frixion which yes, rubbed us the right or wrong way, you can watch our episode for that, but it’s unique, you can’t argue with the fact that no one else has done something like that.

Vishal: And no one else as far as we can tell has done something quite like this show. So if you like it please like, subscribe, tell other people to subscribe, share it around because we are very much a growing channel. We hope to be for a long time and for a long time we will continue to bring you artistic test drives of things like this.

Samir: And if you liked this episode about a beginner friendly fountain pen, especially for writing you should check out our Pelikan Twist video which is another great writing pen. And if you want to go in a completely different direction and have great difficulty writing but a lot of fun drawing maybe you should check out our Reed pen video.

1. Pilot Kakuno Fountain Pen, Medium Nib – https://amzn.to/3BRHeqq
2. Pilot, FriXion ColorSticks Erasable Gel Ink Pens, Fine Point 0.7 mm, Pack of 10, Assorted Colors – https://amzn.to/3ZKJgAS
3. Pilot Parallel Calligraphy Pen Set, 3.8mm Nib with Black and Red Ink Cartridges – https://amzn.to/4gKfymq
4. Pelikan Twist Fountain Pen with 1 Ink Cartridge, Medium Nib, Pure Gold – https://amzn.to/49QjwaA
5. Hauser INX Jazz Fountain Pen – Pack of 6 – https://amzn.to/3VQluCf
6. Bamboo Reed Arabic Calligraphy Qalam/Pen set – https://amzn.to/4gq2IKj
7. Hero Fountain Pen – https://amzn.to/3DqSQRU
8. Waterman Fountain Pen Ink Serenity Blue 50ml Bottle – https://amzn.to/3VLiV4w
9. Pilot Fountain Pen Ink Converter Screw Type (CON-40) – https://amzn.to/3BIO29V