Saturday, September 01, 2007

Peculiar Printer and Pen Problems

This week, I've had two annoying problems:

My HP 7410 all-in-one printer decided that it didn't want to turn on this morning. It's normally on all the time, but I found it off. Actually, I only noticed it was off after I carefully lined up two pictures to scan them. Eventually, unplugging it and replugging it in at the wall seems to have fixed it. Unplugging and replugging the power supply from the printer had no effect.

Just about every time I picked up my Swiss Army pen with its Fisher Space Pen cartridge this past week, it had a blob (or perhaps a glob) of ink on the tip. If I didn't notice and blot it somewhere, that ink got on my paper where I was writing and ended up smearing rather spectacularly. It's kind of sad, because I really enjoyed writing with the pen up until now and it was the best pen I'd ever used. As I've mentioned before, since I'm left-handed, gel roller-balls tend to smear and for unknown reasons ordinary ball-points seem to skip or just quit writing.

Apparently, the Fisher Space Pen ink cartridges are pressurized with 35 pounds per square inch and I guess it's constantly pushing ink out, whether or not it's in use. Do any of my readers have experience using Fisher Space Pen cartridges? Is this something that regularly happens or is this an anomaly? I had intended to order one of Fisher's rainbow titanium pens and I'm surprised that this problem started before I shelled out my money.

2 comments:

  1. I had exactly the same problem with a Fisher Space Pen, and had to remember to rub off the little gob of ink before writing with it. I'd read somewhere that the ink is sheared off by the carbide ball, so you'd think it wouldn't extrude by itself under the pressure, but it seems like that's exactly what happens.

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  2. Anonymous7:23 PM

    finally broke down and bought one of the Fisher Matte Black Bullet Space Pen With Clip . Originally, I was reluctant to get one of these because from the pictures on the web it looked to be too tiny for a writing instrument. I thought it was about 2/3 the size of a normal pen. I have big hands it might not translate into a comfortable pen.

    Cheers,
    Jaime

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