Saturday 12 February 2011

Pilot Frixion Pens

Well, I feel like a late-comer to this party! Everyone and their brother seems to have discovered these before me.
For those other latecomers (and I was gratified to be able to explain them to a colleague at work who is usually as geeky as I am about pens and paper...) these are erasable rollerball pens. It's the heat of friction (hence the name) that deletes the ink and apparently the heat from a hairdrier also works (making them useful for craft purposes too).
Whilst I am far too wedded to my fountain pen to write letters etc with a Frixion pen, they really are fantastic to keep my diary up to date and neat. I don't particularly like having to write my appointments in pencil because that's a bit too faint, but then, my schedule can turn on a sixpence and if I write things in ink I am then left with either a load of crossings out, or a page whose thickness is doubled from the application of tippex.

Then I heard about these pens. I was a bit sceptical at first having bought erasable pens in the past and either taken them back to the shop or binned them because they didn't erase. But having heard good things about these Frixion pens I tried them and I'm converted. You will have guessed from the rest of my blogs that I'm no fan of cheap paper and I think the pens might struggle on anything without a decent surface, but for my purposes they are great. They're perfect for my appointments diary and also for making notes on the run (I love my filofaxes too much to risk tucking a fountain pen into them - not that they really fit in the pen loops anyway!).

Just as long as I don't leave my diary on the radiator, huh?

8 comments:

  1. I love the Frixions too! And I got a really good deal on them. Now I just have to remember to take them to work with me!

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  2. @CP
    Where did you get your good deal?? Do you have different coloured ones or just all the same? Mine are all black at mo but might get different colours if there was a special on somehwere.

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  3. I have different coloured ones. Google pilot frixions and it will be in the first few hits. If you can't find it email me and I will look for the link :-)

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  4. So has anyone who has these experimented with what happens if you erase, then write over the erased ink, then put the page in a cold place (freezer perhaps)? I assume the old writing re-appears and competes with the new, but then when it is warmed again, does the old recede again and the newer stay? This is a fascinating technology!

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  5. @Petra
    LMHO.... but nonetheless have a piece of paper in the freezer to test it! Let you know once it's frozen whether the words come back!
    :-)

    I think once it's gone, it's gone, but, as a scientist, I have to test that!

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  6. I was just wondering, because the website says that cold will make the writing reappear. Let me know what happens!

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  7. Right... well... I wrote on a bit of paper, erased it and then wrote at 90 degress to it across the "erased area". Put the paper in the freezer last night and looked at it this morning...
    The erased writing had indeed reappeared, faintly, but legibly. The paper is slowly warming up now and both lots of writing are still there.

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  8. Wow! Just thought to check back on this experiment -- guess you better not erase any sensitive info and think it's gone for good! But at least it means that if you DO write something critical and leave it on the radiator, you can get it back :-)

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