Wing Sung fountain pens offer incredible value in a set of pens ranging from $1 to over $50. Despite the low price of many Wing Sung pens, the company almost always includes a converter with them. But what if you don’t want use the converter and would prefer to use an ink cartridge?
Wing Sung Cartridge Size
Wing Sung fountain pens don’t use a standard international cartridge as you might expect. It turns out that the post — the part of the pen that punctures the cartridge and holds it in place during use — is quite wide and is far to stout to accommodate the small hole found in some cartridges and far too small for others.
Wing Sung and many other Chinese fountain pens use what is known as a 3.4 mm or “big bore” fountain pen cartridge. Some other Chinese fountain pen brands use a “small bore” cartridge, but those aren’t as common and we won’t get into them in this article.
The 3.4 mm cartridges look just like standard international short cartridges with a similar shape and contours, but the 3.4 mm ones are actually a good deal larger. This means it’s easy to confuse the two cartridge types if you don’t have them next to one another, but as soon as they are placed side-by-side it’s easy to tell them apart.
3.4 mm Cartridges
The most popular type of 3.4 mm fountain pen sold in the US in 2022 are the Hong Dian cartridges. These are affordable and easy to find on Amazon.com. On Amazon they might be sold as Asvine cartridges or as “Hongdian” cartridges, but they are the same reliable, consistent items which write nicely and work with a wide variety of Chinese fountain pens.
The cartridges are manufactured by ZheJiang Lishui LanTian Pen Industrial Co. Ltd.
These cartridges will work with pens from:
- Wing Sung
- Hero
- Yiren
- Hongdian
- Asvine
3.4 mm cartridges are also sold using the label:
- Hero 359 cartridges
- Gullor cartridges
If you want to shop around for the best price and availability.
What About Other Brands?
Other brands have cartridges with bores that are quite close to 3.4 mm, will those work? We did extensive testing to find out.
- Lamy: Works, but the cartridge will crack, meaning leaks are possible
- Parker: Works
- Aurora: Works (the same as Parker cartridges)
