Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uni-Ball Develops the First Paper Pen Refill

unsharpen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–7 of 7 posts

Re: Uni-Ball Develops the First Paper Pen Refill

#2

Post by themodelplumber »

Whoa, that's a really wise and applaudable move.

BTW I really like pens from this company. I remember living in Japan in the late 90s and wondering what stone age country I was from, where we didn't have such amazing writing products available from the quality stationers, let alone the shack of a corner store.

Uni makes the best normally-priced office-stationery pens I've ever given away as gifts, to this day. I used to get them sent free for blog reviews but unfortunately ran out of time for that. Still a happy customer.

Re: Uni-Ball Develops the First Paper Pen Refill

#3

Post by WCSTombs »

themodelplumber wrote: post #2

Whoa, that's a really wise and applaudable move. BTW I really like pens from this company. I remember living in Japan in the late 90s and wondering what stone age country I was from, where we didn't have such amazing writing products available from the quality stationers, let alone the shack of a corner store. Uni makes the best normally-priced office-stationery pens I've ever given away as gifts, to this day. I used…

Totally agree about the company. Specifically, the Uni-Ball Signo UM-151 black gel pen (0.38mm) is my all-time favorite non-fountain pen at this point. (The most popular competitor is probably Pilot's Hi-Tec-C/G-Tec-C, but the Uni-Ball is just superior IMO.)

About the article: this is really cool! One thing that I can't help thinking about though (not to be a negative Nancy) is the opacity of the barrel is probably going to make it much more difficult to tell when the ink is running out. To be clear, though, that's a secondary concern to the plastic reduction, which is amazing.

The ultimate combo with this would be affordable and durable third-party (or first-party) compatible pen bodies themselves. There are third-party metal pen bodies compatible with many of the popular pen refills that are sold, but last I checked they were so expensive that the economics didn't make any sense unless you really burn through the refills.

Re: Uni-Ball Develops the First Paper Pen Refill

#6

Post by nonfxnl »

throwaway55421 wrote: post #4

Is the paper actually biodegradable or is it basically just plastic coated paper?

The (possible) patent has some good details (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a4/8c/8c/934f5a5...)

> The ink storage pipe includes an at least two-layer structure of an inner layer in contact with ink and a base layer, the base layer being formed of a paper base material and the inner layer being formed of a resin. The resin is preferably an acrylic resin, polystyrene, a fluorine resin, silicone or a mixture thereof.

> In case of applying a resin film, the inner layer 4 has a thickness of typically 3 to 90 micrometre and preferably 5 to 60 micrometre.

This honestly seems like the coke cans (https://youtu.be/uQHFQoFoxvQ?t=25). In any case, this should be easier to recycle than the cans.

Post reply on HN