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The Uniball Signo RT Gel mini Hack

by Mike Rohde

In my creating a custom Moleskine planner post, I mentioned a Uniball Signo RT Gel 0.38mm pen, for both creating the planner and writing agenda and task items.

Initially I'd purchased a 4-pack of Pilot G2 mini 0.5mm pens for pocket-ability, but found the ink bled a bit too much through the thin Moleskine pages, so I picked up a 4 pack of Uniball Signo RT Gel 0.38mm pens. The thinner 0.38mm gel pens work well with Moleskine paper because the line is thin and quick drying.

This weekend I was looking at the Uniball Signo and G2 Mini, when I wondered if I could hack the Uniball 0.38mm refill to work in a G2 mini pen body. When I took the two pens apart, I realized it could be done, with a flick of a utility knife to trim the Signo's cartridge down to size.

In the spirit of DIY, I gave it a try. The G2 mini to Uniball Signo mini conversion worked so well, I've decided to to share the easy conversion process with other Uniball Signo fans out there, complete with photos:

1. Here you can see how the G2 mini and Uniballl Signo compare side by side. The G2 mini is about 4.5 inches long, compared to 5.5 inches for the Uniball Signo. For pocket-ability, that reduction of an inch means quite a bit — making the G2 mini well-suited for pockets.

2. Next, I opened up the two pens to compare the length of the cartridges, and as you can see, the Uniball Signo is about 1 inch longer, but has room for trimming. I've noticed that new Uniball Signo cartridges have ink at or above the location you need to cut them down without creating a mess. The easiest way to remedy this is by drawing with the cartridge until the ink level drops enough that a slice is reasonable.

3. Using a utility knife , x-acto knife or other sharp instrument, trim the Uniball cartridge down to the same length as the G2 mini cartridge as shown in the photo above (see the dotted line). I've that the Uniball Signo cartridge uses a much thicker outer wall compared to the G2 mini, so the G2 may actually have close to the same volume of ink even though it looks like less.

4. Here you see the nicely sliced Uniball cartridge, ready for insertion into the G2 mini pen body. If you want to be non-wasteful, you can keep the G2 mini cartridges for backups, or use clear tape to adhere the chunk of Uniball cartridge you've sliced off to the top of the G2 mini cartridge, and use this in a standard G2 pen. The G2 plus clipped cartridge combo doesn't work in empty Uniball Signo pen bodies, because of the G2's nib.

5. Use your new Uniball Signo RT Gel 0.38mm mini pen, and enjoy! :-)

Related Links:
Moleskinerie by Armand Frasco
Recording Thoughts by Steve Duncan

Zen and The Art of Ink Fade Testing

by Leonardo Menderes, Guest Writer

Editor's Note: Leonardo left some intriguing results to his own pen fade testing in the comments of the Pen Freak post on my own Weblog. I felt this information was interesting enough to have Leonardo write up in detail, so his findings could receive more exposure on Journalisimo. Thanks Leonardo! — Mike Rohde

Important work notes on the wall of my cube were fading fast recently, so I decided to embark on a search for quality archival pens. All of the cheap ballpoint pens I've used in the past 5 years or so turn out to be faders, so I clearly needed to upgrade.

The first test-set was a card with black-pen writing, taped against a basement window for the South sun for a few weeks.

Set 1 (South window, 2 weeks)

The Zebra Sarasa and Jimnie pens were a lasting and deep black. However, they are a bit wide, even for the spec 0.7mm, run down fast, and take extra dry-time. The Sarasa is very hard to start after dis-use too. The capped Jimnie is better.

Fountain pen lovers might love the richness of Sarasa. If you can dip the tip in melting candle wax it will keep well.

The Rose-Art X500 is a pricier ball-point. It is not as dense as a gel, but the lines are small, and it hardly faded. Very nice! (for a ballpoint). Slight skip at work...not sure why.

The Pentel RSVP is a popular fancy ballpoint, and it was smooth and dense going on, but had almost completely faded away....oops! Not good for notes, methinks.

(Then I migrated to nicer pens for my tinier notes)

Set 2 (A card leaning against a fuorescent bulb, 10dy x 24hr)

The Pentel RSVP was faded badly... at this point, it was valuable as an indicator of how much light exposure there was. This was equivalent about a year on my cube wall.

The Sanford uni-ball Onyx is a popular gel office pen, very dense, and quick-drying. It takes some pressure to avoid skip until broken in, and bleeds slightly, but is a great deal if you want a cheap high-grade gel. Perhaps a bit thin for some. Anyway, its fade performance was good: still quite black, slight loss of a blue tossed in for noble looks.

The Pilot P-500: Nice steady lines, finer than other 0.5s! ...a slight 'pebbly feel'....this is the best for writing very small notes..long lines will blob..drying good. Fading: completely unaffected, like new.

Itoya XE-100PU "Xenon" writing: smooth, oily feel, nice! ...angle-sensitive, and needs pressure. Density good for ballpoint. Tip wobbles a little. This means despite the small line, it is only really good for larger writing. Slightly smudgy...lefties beware. Fading: density stayed good, but a little of the loss-of-blue like the uni-ball. Small skips showed up.

Set 3 (5 days, fluorescent bulb touching card)

• The benchmark RSVP pen was well-faded.
• The Pilot G2 (an 0.5) has rock-steady blackness, no fade. Nice writing too: retractable with no tip wobble!! Not quite as tiny as P-500..close though.
• Uni-ball Vision Exact (0.2) to the testing. More precise than onyx..nice. Liquid ink. Lasts super, in true Sanford style. It got juicy with 2 days of use though.. ..too bleedy for my little notes. Bummer. Good for moderate cursive, larger letters.
• The uni-ball Signo micro 207 ..a nice smooth pen, if not as super skip-free as the P-500. Feel is great. No fading (added-on later, after 7 days testing).

Overall Personal Opinions

• Cheap ballpoints are risky these days. A big exception is the uni-ball Onyx. well worth the step-up from 20 to about 50 cents each in bulk!!


• The 0.7 uniball signo 207 (non-micro) is super-smooth and crisp... that's my baby for retractable.


• The P-500 is still unbeatable for tiny block-letters (hard on almost other all pens!)


• The G2 is very nice, but it gets edged on precision by P-500 (its capped cousin) and by the signo on smoothness. If the P-500 cap gets annoying, I will shift the G2 0.5 — but not yet.

Notes: Sanford says capped pens are a bit easier to make skip-free than retractables... ink formulation. Also, larger Hallmark-type stores seem to carry nice pens.

Leonardo Menderes: Meander Around With Me

Jefferson's Hipster PDA

"In his pockets, Jefferson carried such a variety of portable instruments for making observations and measurements that he’s been dubbed a “traveling calculator.” Among his collection of pocket-sized devices were scales, drawing instruments, a thermometer, a surveying compass, a level, and even a globe. To record all these measurements, Jefferson carried a small ivory notebook (pictured) on which he could write in pencil"

43 Folders

The Sailcloth PDA

"Rather than bind the cards with a binder clip, I wanted to do something a bit different, fun to use, and meaningful. So I took some sample of stiff sailcloth I had and cut it into 2 3x5 pieces to match the size of the cards. The cards are stiff enough to protect the cards a bit. I punched holes into the lower corner of the cards and sailcloth and bind them together with a small carabiner. This allows me to flip through the cards without having to unclip. I also clipped on a small cross pen soI always have something to write with."

SolutionJunkie

Murakami's Writing Style

"He wrote "Kafka" in six months, starting, as he usually does, without a plan. He spent one year revising it. He follows a strict regimen. Going to bed around 9 p.m. - he never dreams, he said - he wakes up without an alarm clock around 4 a.m. He immediately turns on his Macintosh and writes until 11 a.m., producing every day 4,000 characters, or the equivalent of two to three pages in English.

He said that his wife has told him that his personality changes when he is writing his first draft, and that he becomes difficult, nontalkative, tense and forgetful.

"I write the same amount every day without any day off," he said. "I absolutely never look back and go forward. I hear Hemingway was like that."

Unlike Hemingway, Mr. Murakami leads a healthy lifestyle. In the afternoons, to build up his stamina to keep writing, he works out for one or two hours. Whenever he is in Tokyo, he also visits old-record stores, especially ones in the youth mecca of Shibuya, which appears to be the unnamed setting of "After Dark," published last fall to relatively little attention here."

A Rebel in Japan Eyes Status in America
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
New York Times
(Registration required)

Look Smart

"Obviously the work of Hemingway and Picasso had about as much do with their Moleskines as it did with their khakis (which both men wore, according to that Gap campaign). Yet the Moleskine just looks like a thing that holds interesting, and possibly important, jottings and sketches. Even if you're carrying it to another boring staff meeting to take notes about sales projections, the notebook makes for a fantastic emblem of creative possibility. Of course, people who actually write for a living sometimes have a different relationship to blank pages. One quotation that probably won't be used to sell Moleskines is John McPhee's 1996 sardonic remark in the journal Creative Nonfiction: ''Anything beats writing.'' Maybe he wouldn't have felt that way if he'd had a cooler notebook."

"Look Smart"
by Rob Walker
NYT Sunday Magazine
(Registration required)

A Review of Five Journals

I love journals. I love opening up a blank book and running my hands over the grain of the paper. I love surfing the internet seeking new and high. I love thinking about the great potential of a blank notebook. I love knowing that the same construction for notebooks today hasn't really changed for seventeen hundred years. I love knowing that the words I capture may last another seventeen hundred years, to be read by a future I cannot even comprehend. Few share this strange and often expensive drive, but those that do know exactly the feeling I mean when we open the cover of a new notebook for the first time.

We like to think how much greater computers are than the written word, but any archivist will tell you, the only way to preserve our writings is to store them in the only reasonable medium proven to last for thousands of years: paper. Hard drives freeze. CD's rot under the corrosive gas we all breathe. The internet runs on a delicate balance of precarious machines. Anyone who has tried to restore data from as short as ten years ago knows how hard it can be to recover old information. Yesterday I opened a book over fifty years old, seventeen years older than I am, and it looked as good as the day it came off the press. Books are the only reasonable way to store information.

For the past two years I have been a great fan of Moleskine plain pocket notebooks. I have carried one in my pocket for twenty four months. I have filled twelve of these books from cover to cover. I have a stockpile of nearly fifty blank ones, enough to last a good long while should the company ever change them or go out of business.

Continue reading "A Review of Five Journals"

Are You a Crayon BREAKER?

"Read over the following 32 human traits and check or mark the ones you believe are you at work or school, if you are not working full-time. You may choose as many or as few as you want. Some definitions are provided for words that are often mis-understood or may be unfamiliar to you.

Once you have completed reading and marking your choices total up how many you chose and write that number down. Then continue reading.

Some Definitions

can synthesize
you see patterns or the big picture quickly

divergent thinker
look at things in many different ways at the same time
flexible
willing to try things in many different ways

fluent
produce lots of ideas or possibilities when working on a challenge or simply choosing a restaurant to go to..."

32 Traits of Creative People
Robert Alan Black
cre8ng.com

The New Vanishing Point

"The trim is a bright chrome, which goes well with the barrel color, a very vivid yellow. This is a color that comes quite close to the same shade used on the Parker Mandarin yellow Duofold. In other words, it's not a soft pastel yellow. Pull this pen out of your pocket and folks will know it! It practically lights up the room.

So, the new VP isn't a subtle pen. But it is a very practical one, no doubt about that. The ability to go from a closed pen to one ready to write in a split second is almost too good to be true. Push the button on the end of the barrel, and the nib slides out.

Push it again, and the nib is retracted. Safe from drying out. Click, write. Click, don't write. Click, click, click. It gets hypnotic! If you often find yourself fidgeting with stuff as you sit in meetings, the VP is the perfect pen for you. Of course, your fellow meeting attendees may end up beating you over the head and prying the thing from your fingers... "

The New Vanishing Point
by Phillip Tucker
Stylophiles Online Magazine

[via Christopher Meisenzahl]

The D*I*Y Planner: Hipster PDA Edition

"The D*I*Y Planner project was thus born as a way of providing a wide assortment of forms at little cost. (Although, my wife might argue that I was just being cheap.) With the realization that others might find it useful, I decided to create a system that could be tweaked to suit almost any methodology or situation, relying heavily upon user feedback for ideas and direction.

The latest member of the D*I*Y Planner family is the Hipster PDA Edition, a set of 34 organizational and planning templates designed specifically for 3x5“ index cards. I've received hundreds of requests for a kit like this, many claiming it was an important option for creating an ideal customized system. At first, the demand took me by surprise; after all, why would you want to print so tiny on cards that contain so little information and are so hard to file?"

Douglas Johnston
43 Folders