Pilot V-Ball Extra Fine Pens
April 24th, 2005
I have a thing for pens and pencils and other things that write. It’s not quite a fetish, but it’s not entirely healthy, either. The problem is that I tend to objectify nice pens and pencils and as a result, they don’t get carried because I might (gasp) mar them and then they don’t get used, and, well, that’s just stupid.
As a result, I’ve ended up with a fair collection of decent pens that sit in drawers. I’ve given a lot of them away to people who might actually appreciate (and use) them, so I’m feeling better about my pen habit these days. And I’m not buying new pens. Mostly. I got a Space Pen a while back, but it writes IN SPACE and UNDER WATER. How could I resist?
But there’s one pen I really really like, and since it’s disposable and plastic, I don’t feel bad about carrying them around and using the hell out of them, and if I lose one, or it ends up in the dryer still clipped to my collar (9 or 10 times, so far, and no collateral damage yet), so what? It’s a disposable pen.
The Pilot V-Ball Extra Fine (in blue) kicks ass. It’s a roller ball pen, liquid ink. It rolls smoothly, without any of the scratchiness I’ve experienced with some other roller ball pens. I write pretty small, so the extra fine tip keeps my handwriting from looking like more of a shapeless blob than it normally does.
It’s easy to tell how much ink you have left, the clip throat has enough depth to clip to most clothing without getting mangled, and they last forever, if you don’t wash them. They generally stand up well to airplane travel, which has caused more than one liquid ink pen I used to leak profusely.
My only complaint is that the ink runs when it gets wet, but that’s true of all liquid ink pens. It’d be nice if they could come up with a waterproof ink that writes as well as the regular kind.