Pen 15 Club: For Tim Donaghy: On Changing a Zebra -- OR -- When the Record Isn't Spotty Nor Checkered but Striped -- AND -- Hot Zebra F-301 VERSUS F-701 Comparison

Pen 15 Club: For Tim Donaghy: On Changing a Zebra
-- OR --
When the Record Isn't Spotty Nor Checkered but Striped
-- AND --
Hot Zebra F-301 VERSUS F-701 Comparison

"Sadness." -Tinzeroes, texting me when New York City's cobblestones juddered his freakbike's DNA fork beyond cohesion or repair.

One of the reasons I have enjoyed using my (second) Zebra F-301 pen is that it's (mostly) metal, and promises to last a long time and keep stuff out of the landfill. However, it's not entirely metal, it's only mostly metal, metal joined to plastic, and where metal and plastic join, there you find weakness, with the unyielding weight and strength of metal able to stress the lighter, brittler plastic.

One easy way to verify this weakness is to drop your F-301 on the streets of San Francisco while trying to promote democracy. If a person needed to re-verify, a solid option would be drop the pen onto the mighty concrete of the Berkeley Bowl's floor. First time, the results were ... shattering. This time, a subtler damage obtained.

(The F-301's obtuse angle.)

The bend isn't something that makes the pen not work. The stability and solidity of the unit are substantially lessened, however, and the way it creaks and shimmies under pressure of writing make it very difficult for me to enjoy using.

(The Zebra F-701.)

Luckily, I have options. I swiftly yoinked from my quiver a pen I've used only occasionally thus far, another Zebra model, the all-metal F-701. I bought it in a frenzy of anxious need a couple months back, along with some F-301 refills, and several—nearly multiple—instances of graph paper. I was very anxious that day. I haven't used the F-701 too much. It is very heavy. I think the ink might be the slightest bit different than the F-301 inserts, and the tip is listed as .8 mm, as opposed to the .7 mm of the F-301, and the writing seems a little smoother, lighter, waterier, and blobbier (at least in the notebook I'm currently using).

Fiddling with the F-701 initially, I discovered that F-301 refills seem to work in it, but F-701 refills do not seem to fit into an F-301. I also discovered that the spring in the F-701 is very stiff, and (thus) incredibly satisfying (to click). A weird fillip: post-click, when the tip is deployed into Writing Mode, there is apparently a secondary spring holding the plunger erect. The F-301, in Writing Mode, offers no (such) support to the plunger. I go back and forth on this. I'm not used to it, on the bad side (I do loathe change). It's quiet, when waving the pen around, and allows a second stage of fiddling—pushing the plunger down, but not enough to engage the tip-retraction mechanism—both of which are on the good side, indeed, on the side of good.

(Note the variance: tip out, plunger down vs. tip out, plunger up. Intriguing.)

The aforementioned ink issues aside, the F-701 isn't the easiest thing in the world to write with. It's heavy as all hell, and it's noticeably thicker than the F-301, which is a bit of an issue for my small hands and extraordinarily short fingers.

• F-701: 24 grams on the digital scale
• F-301: 11 grams on the digital scale

It may well be worth trading away lightness and overall ease of use for incredible durability—which I do expect a fully metal pen to embody—and just that much less waste. But if the use of, the writing with, will be slower, more awkward, more tiring, perhaps I should explore other channels of less waste.

Let's take a little break to listen to some great new French prog-metal.

I have two main tracks of writing by hand: work, and not-work. For work writing, please see the recent approach to writing less by hand and more by computer I pioneered in the following effort: Vim (for non-programmers) Section DCLXVI: Automating Making a To-Do List and Crossing Off Make a To-Do List on Your To-Do List Automatically. Work writing is usually notes, from a meeting or interview, or lists. Not-work writing, like, not to put to fine a point on it, this thing that I'm writing now, tends to be much more connected, and extended, which is to say that the writing tends to go on longer and have fewer breaks. This all means that a less wieldy pen, a heavier pen, is less desirable. And that all means...maybe I should investigate one last option for keeping my F-301 in my hand and out of the landfill.

You see, something you likely don't know about me, unless you're reading this, in which case you almost certainly do know me and thus know or can predict the following about me, is that I throw...little away. When my last F-301 died, I actually saved its busted guts, in case its parts might come in handy. I dug it out recently to see if I could kit-bash the situation together into something fitter, happier, more productive. It appears, though, unfortunately, that what I have here is two broken pens, with three pieces apiece, that share a broken piece.

(Two Donaghys, artist's rendering.)

It should maybe not surprise me that the critical flaw of the F-301 is a piece of plastic: a critical flaw of our civilization itself is dependence on plastic (and other petroleum products) and often can the part reveal and replicate the whole. But even if it's no surprise, it can still be a stone bummer, and indeed and in fact I am bummed, a little, that I can't cobble together one satisfactorily operational F-301 from two broken ones. I can, more or less, use the more recently and less severely damaged model, with...some psychic discomfort (and a likely physical failure impending, as my heavy hand imposes more pressure on the compromised plastic piece.

I find it difficult to disprove my assessment that what I should do is:

1. Use the F-701 at work, where its durability will be great and its drains on my stamina will be less of a problem
2. Deploy another new F-301 for my personal uses, hoping that if—when?—it fails, a different part will be the problem, and I can join fragments of three to make one, where I now can't make a broken two into a one entire

(Two Donaghys, documentary evidence.)

Or maybe I should learn to throw things away, when they're broken?

—Fat, pondering abandonment