Cross Aventura Fountain Pen Review
The Cross Aventura is an attractive and cheap fountain pen. Does its performance justify even the low cost?
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My Short Video on My First Fountain Pen
Design
The Cross Aventura I’m reviewing comes with a medium nib and at first glance is attractive and solid. With much more design flair than, say, a Lamy Safari, it may fool you with its good looks. In fact, if the Lamy Safari and the Cross Aventura walked into a bar together, the Aventura would definitely be more beautiful, but you’d be happier with the Safari.
My husband bought a blue one at an office supply store for me for Christmas and the short story that follows firmly demonstrated why it would’ve been easier just to order it on the internet.
The short version: the Aventura’s ink cartridge was completely dried up when he unscrewed the body, the ink had all evaporated it had sat on the shelf for so long. Also the store didn’t offer to put any new cartridges with the pen to replace the dried up one until he asked, at which point they gave him black Cross cartridges instead of blue, but hey at least they opened a box and gave him a few.
The pen is made of plastic, has silver-colored metal banding at the back of the pen that ties it in with the metal cap band and metal cap end. The cap end is covered in metal and forms the base for the flexible pen clip.
The body is metal where your fingers hold the pen to write with the part of the body resting on your hand being plastic.
Branding
The Cross Aventura has Cross inscribed on the cap band, nib, and pen clip.
Cap Fit
This cap does not fit well when posted.
What you’ll notice right out of the box is the lightweight of the pen body the heft of the cap. Most of the weight of the pen is in the very tip of the cap which makes it wiggle off as you write. If you look at the cap in the photo, almost all of the weight is in the metal assembly of the pen clip on the tip which is held on by a phillips-head screw under the cap.
Cross Aventura Fountain Pen Total Weight |
The Aventura cap wiggles off as you write, most of the heft is in the top of the cap. |
Because it was a gift, this became my daily writer. As we will get to in a moment, the pen writes well, but has the extremely annoying habit of the cap wiggling its way off as you write, no matter how hard you shove it onto the pen.
This doesn’t seem like a big deal to the uninitiated, but if you plan to use a pen regularly to write longer letters or to take a full page of notes with, this isn’t the pen for you.
I tried pushing the cap down extra snug, but it still fell off. I would have to basically splay the cap band to get the darn thing to stay put so I just leave it off as I write. But occasionally after not writing with it for a while, I forget and post the cap and begin writing. When I do, the cap inevitably falls to the floor and I have to chase it down to retrieve it. Because the cap is so heavy, I prefer to write with it off anyway as the pen is then lightweight and balanced.
The only place the cap does fit well is closing and capping the pen. The cap does snap into place when you close it, and hung by the clip just fine without the pen coming out of the cap during a day of carrying it around in a pocket.
Performance
The Cross Aventura showed some bleed-through on notebook paper.
When tested, (and I do mean tested, I filled up 10 pages of notes with this pen!) it bled through the pages, mainly on the down-stroke.
I took a picture to show you the backside of a full page of notes with some writing on the front to show the amount of bleed through.
I also used the Cross Aventura on the heavily-fibered pages of my journal.
It didn’t bleed through the heavier paper at all, but it did have some trouble skipping and starting on both the heavily fibered paper and the notebook paper.
I figured maybe the ink was gummed up in the nib so I took the pen apart and washed out the nib. When I put it back together it wrote better, but it still does not always start up right away.
Sometimes you need to retrace a letter or two when you first begin to write, (annoying but tolerable in cheaper fountain pens.)
The Cross Aventura has a uniform line as you write, there is not much line variation and looks similar to the writing a ballpoint or gel pen.
The medium nib lays down a truly medium line and the horizontal and vertical strokes are consistent with each other.
Maintenance
Getting the Cross Aventura fountain pen apart to clean and change cartridges was a breeze. The Aventura does not come standard with a converter and I just swapped out cartridges. What I did notice is how much smaller the cartridge is against a Lamy Safari I had just cleaned. You’ll have to change cartridges more often than a Lamy for sure.
Overall Value
This pen is not a good overall value. The cap falling off repetitively made writing frustrating when writing with a fountain pen should be fun and inspiring. Although the pen does write pretty well, the occasional skipping and ink starvation (after thorough cleaning) is annoying.
If you choose to remove the cap completely and risk losing it, I would recommend the Cross Aventura for writing long notes, but only with the cap removed from the body.
The Cross Aventura would be useful for occasional writing or as a backup fountain pen to your daily writer. Back to the bar analogy, if you’re looking for a beginner fountain pen, you’d be happier with a Safari because it won’t frustrate you even though it isn’t as pretty.
Get the price on the Cross Aventura at Amazon.
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