If someone asks me, “What’s the use of studying the patents of these pens?” Well… The seller first shared its prototype with us. At that time, he seemed to be facing troubles in mass producing it. Since I certainly hoped to see such product come to market, I sent some relevant patents of UNI to him for reference. A few months later, he sent me one as a gift!
It’s $80, so not really cheap, but still a steal for people who want the ff-matic can be involved in your actual daily writing. I am not worried about mechanism failure for long term use at all: It’s almost full metal, except for the tiny rubber tubing.
The ff-matic mechanism or structure is much simpler than others (pn3015, e500, etc.). It’s somewhat like a heavily modified slide pipe (It makes me think of the difference between stems and tubers). In practice, I find ff-matic more convenient and less likely to interfere with the writing itself, when compared to push-matic.
I find ff-matic to be effectively like if the TK-matic had a ‘collar’ attached to the guide pipe. Pulling on the ff-matic is very much like pulling back the sleeve on the TK-matic. I.e. a manual override for the ‘automatic’ clutch before the sleeve hits the paper.
I now have a 3051 and I do like it though I probably won’t keep it because I just prefer the “archaic” top knock way of knocking.
It is truly a cool mechanism once I figured out how to knock it with the way I personally hold the pencil.
I use my middle finger to knock it and it only requires a very light quick pull/flick of the tip of my finger.
It’s for sure a great idea in functionality but simply
requires a “rewiring” of the brain to get used to it.
