Every year, Pilot comes out with a limited edition Vanishing Point, and this year’s one is out! It’s Charcoal Marble, a very interesting pattern I’ve never seen before in a VP.

Pilot Vanishing Point, 2012 LE Charcoal Marble

 

There are 2012 of them being sold worldwide, 850 of them in the US. The serial number is engraved on the centerband (look below). We have a few of them, and I must say, they look very nice. I don’t even know exactly how to describe what they look like, and the pictures hardly do justice. The video shows it a little better.

Pilot VP Charcoal Marble, engraved with an individual serial number

 

One thing worth pointing out, these pens are only coming with medium nibs, so if you want to keep it for the sake of collecting, you’ll need to buy a medium nib to have the nib match the label on the outer box. Because rhodium-plated 18k gold nibs are available on their own, we (and other retailers may, too) offer the pen with an extra-fine, fine, medium, or broad nib. There may be a little confusion about the nib itself, some retailers were advertising it as white gold. This has caused a little bit of confusion as Pilot has been calling their current nibs “rhodium” or “rhodium-plated”. I’m definitely no jeweler or metallurgist, but I did a little research about what ‘white gold‘ actually is, and it’s essentially an alloy of gold with nickel, manganese, or palladium. Sometimes rhodium is used as a plating overtop of white gold. Now, I don’t know about the exact compound of Pilot’s nibs (and frankly it doesn’t really matter in this context), what’s important to point out is that the nibs on these pens are the same as the rhodium nibs Pilot has been offering, they’re not anything special or new just with this pen. They are the same 18k gold nibs, with rhodium plating to give is a silver color, and their performance is identical to the 18k yellow gold VP nibs.

This rhodium-plated nib has been the common nib color for previous LE VP pens, and for the black matte VP that came available last year. It wasn’t until around January 2012 that Pilot began offering their rhodium nibs individually (at least in the US), apart from these special pens. The case for this pen is special as well, matching the design of previous VP LE pens, but with a brown crackled material:
Case for the 2012 Charcoal Marble Pilot Vanishing Point
Case for the 2012 Charcoal Marble Pilot Vanishing Point
Included with the pen is the nib, Con-50 converter (the new and improved one with the metal insert to help maintain proper ink flow), a cartridge, and a metal cartridge cap. The metal cartridge cap is used to cover over the cartridge to keep the click action working properly without putting stress on the plastic cartridge.
Pilot Vanishing Point, broken out with all its parts

 

We were initially expecting this pen to arrive mid-September, so we were a little surprised ourselves when it showed up to us on August 17th. This pen arrived a little before expected (which is rare!), so we may be catching you a little off-guard. If you’ve been saving up for this pen, you might not have been ready to spring on it until next month, and I’m sorry that it arrived so much ahead of when we expected. I don’t anticipate these will sell out immediately so you do have a bit of time, but as with any limited edition pen, once they’re gone, they’re gone.

If you’re interested in the Charcoal Marble VP, the list price is $240, and you can find it at GouletPens.com (my store) for $192, as well as other retailers around the world at varying prices.

Check out my other VP overview video, as well as my video on how to fill a Vanishing Point.

What do you think of this year’s color?

Write On,
Brian Goulet