Faber-Castell Twice multipen review
24 November 2014
The Faber-Castell Twice is a chrome-plated metal-barrelled multipen. It takes two D1 refills and costs about £25 ($40).
The pen comes with blue and red ballpoint refills which aren’t too bad at all. Being D1, there are a very many other options if you’d prefer something else.
The metal barrel is shiny and gives the pen some reassuring weight. The grip though is soft and squishy and comfortable but not entirely to my taste. It seems a little plasticky.
The clip is firm and clippy and overall construction is very high quality.
Refills are deployed by twisting the barrel one way or the other. This works well but leads to the two failings on this pen.
The refills are accessed by unscrewing the barrel open. I find that when I’m swapping from one refill to another I twist too far and begin to unscrew the barrel. This is a bit annoying.
More annoying is that there’s no ‘off’ position. If you don’t want a refill deployed then you have to carefully find a position between the two. This is tricky and seems a little lazy of Faber-Castell in a pen that costs this much.
Overall the Faber-Castell Twice is a well made pen but seems as if it was designed by someone who’s never going to use it. It looks great and, I suppose, if it lived on your desk you might be able to forgive the difficulty in retracting it. As soon as you want to carry it around though it becomes a major irritation.
That’s a nice looking pen! Thanks for the review 🙂
I got one free about a year ago from Cult Pens when I brought an Ambition fountain pen, I find it too narrow for comfortable use, I suppose I’ve become used to using wider bodied fountain pens. It sits on my pen rack, waiting for a chance to shine, which I suspect will never arrive. I might just try a different D1 refill at some time to see if my indifference can be altered. I hardly use the Ambition either, too narrow and a very short section, which means I can’t hold the pen with my normal grip, much prefer the bulkier ‘Basic’.
I don’t mind a slim pen myself but the whole not-being-able-to-easily-retract thing is what puts me off this one. The Ambition though… it’s one of my favourites – I have two! But I must get myself a Basic, it’s been on my list for a very long time.
Y’know, I really want to find this wondrous landscape where marvelous things like high-end pens and digital cameras magically appear out of the ground, from highway railings, from garden paths and on beaches. Surely, a Nerd Nirvana. Ah, to be in England now that the sprouting of the pens is there, and so is bathed every veyne in swich lycour
Of which pens engendred is the flour.
Yeah. I know. I shouldn’t mix pens and poetry. Especially two poets of imperfectly remembered works dragged forth from what I call my mind. My roommate calls it “that septic system.” Alas, he knows me too well. Of course he is the one who thinks my having twelve wooden pencils and nine mechanical pencils in use at the same time is “borderline perverse.”
What can one expect from a football jock.
I shall continue on my quest to find such a place and let you know when I’m successful.
These particular photos were taken in Italy, which is worth visiting lots and lots even if you don’t find pens sprouting from the ground.