Ystudio Brassing Review: The Brass Pen You Sand Down Yourself
Ystudio is described as a brand founded in Taiwan in 2012, making simple, long-lasting stationery mostly from brass. This article looks at its signature "Brassing" line and what specialist pen reviewers have said, alongside the data PencilDB holds.
What is brassing?
On these pens the black coating on the barrel wears off with use, exposing the brass beneath. You do not have to wait: a sheet of sandpaper comes in the box so you can sand the coat off yourself. Several reviews say it is an extra-fine 600-grit paper.
So the pen is unfinished when you buy it, and the owner shapes the result. Even two pens of the same model never end up looking alike.
The ballpoint
Brad Dowdy of the US blog The Pen Addict reviewed the ballpoint in 2016. The barrel is a hexagonal piece of solid brass, and he praised its weight and balance. Twisting the end cap pushes the refill out, and a Schmidt P-900 (Parker-style) refill is included.
His notes on sanding are specific. Starting near the grip, the tops of the hex ridges polished up cleanly. The flat faces between the ridges were much harder to shine, and he never reached the full brass look he wanted. He put the price at about $77 and called it fair.
The fountain pen and the desk pen
In 2018 he also reviewed the Brassing Desk Fountain Pen, a large pen that stands in a heavy base and carries a #6 Schmidt nib. It wrote smoothly and wetly out of the box. The barrel weighs about 1.25 oz against 1.00 oz for the standard model, yet it is balanced enough that the weight hardly shows.
The prices he listed were $160 for the standard pen and $180 for the desk pen, from a US retailer at the time. He was frank that neither is cheap and that a steel nib might give buyers pause. If he could keep only one, he said, it would be the standard model.
In PencilDB
PencilDB lists 15 Ystudio models and 47 part numbers in total: the brassing pens, a resin fountain pen, and the Classic Revolve (some retailers present it as a 10th-anniversary project). Founder names are left out here because I could not confirm them in more than one source.
Sources
Brassing is hard to compare with numbers. Still, if you enjoy the sanding itself, there are few pens like it. I drew on these articles: