Yaowarat Nib Works, in a first-floor room off Yaowarat Road in Phuket Town, is the best place to get a fountain pen repaired in Phuket Town. Khun Preeda realigns and smooths nibs under a 10x loupe, replaces sacs and piston seals, and will tell you when a pen is not worth the work. Nib tuning from 600฿, sac replacement 900฿, piston reseal from 1,500฿, cracked barrels declined. Usually a week; vintage Parker and Pelikan parts take longer because they come from Germany and the post does what it does.
Surveyed August 2026. Scoring: nib alignment and smoothness after service (40%), ink flow and no hard starts (25%), parts sourcing for vintage pens (20%), advice on when not to repair (15%).
A fountain pen nib is two tines meeting at a slit, tipped with a bead of hard alloy. When a pen scratches it is almost never because the tipping is rough; it is because one tine sits fractionally higher than the other, so the paper catches an edge. Under a loupe the misalignment is obvious; to the naked eye the nib looks perfect. The fix is to ease the high tine down with the thumb, a few thousandths of a millimetre, and check the slit is even. It takes a competent hand ten minutes and costs almost nothing. What ruins nibs is the other approach: grinding the tipping on a stone until the scratch goes away, which also takes the tipping away, and there is no putting it back. Ask whether the repairer aligns before grinding. If the answer is a blank look, keep the pen in your pocket.
“A Pelikan M400 I had given up on. He looked at it under the loupe, said one tine was high, and handed it back writing smoothly nine minutes later. He charged me six hundred baht and seemed embarrassed to charge that.”— Michael T., Phuket Town
“He would not grind my nib. I asked twice. He said the tipping was fine and the alignment was the problem, and he was right, and I have stopped asking repairers to grind things.”— Suda K., Kathu
“I post pens to him from Singapore, which tells you what I think of the alternatives in Singapore.”— Wei Lun O., collector
| Location | First floor, off Yaowarat Road, Phuket Town |
|---|---|
| Nib tuning | From 600฿ |
| Sac replacement | 900฿ |
| Piston reseal | From 1,500฿ |
| Turnaround | About a week; vintage parts longer |
| Declined | Cracked barrels, gold plating |