Smash Discontinued?

The kind of feeling offered by the typical Smash MP is very weird to me.

Allow me to repeat here the opinion I put together a few days ago, in an email to a fellow collector (the newer part follows, as I’ve attempted a different strategy).

When I start writing with the Smash, I find the rubber bumps even comfortable, and pleasant to play with the tips of my index and thumb. After a while, however, the feeling changes into a vague unevenness, and I end asking myself what is the point of these weird, soft protrusions rubbing against my fingertips. They become annoying, and ultimately unpleasant. This tends to alienate the pencil from me, and puts it into a very strange category, namely the one of pencils which I can like only if the time I spend with them is sufficiently limited. Very unusual indeed.

After this email, as I said, I tried something different, namely removing the rubber bumps at all — which fortunately can be done by unscrewing the grip/tip portion, and twisting out the rubber bumps cylindrical section with a pair of tweezers.

At the moment, the grip contains a pigeonhole, chequered pattern of hollow squares, and when I handle the Smash I feel that all the unevenness has disappeared, whereas the pleasant sensation is still there. It might be yet another illusion, but if this removal results in an actual improvement, it might become a feature rather than a bug of my Smash.

(I know, I know: I now have a pencil which can quickly become a receptacle for any sort of dirt, debris, and other trash in my EDC pouch; so far, it is a price I am willing to pay, if the end result is a MP with all the great qualities of the Pentel Smash, without the only hassle I could find in its design. We’ll see.)

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Try a Person’s Collection PQ6. It is a Smash with a smooth grip.

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Yeah, the Smash is much better without the rubber grip, I also think it improves the general feelin.

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Interesting piece. It might actually solve all my issues with the Smash grip area (even though the removal of the rubber grip seems to have improved the feeling quite a bit).

I checked the prices available online, and found some collector’s level figures. These Smash are really sought-after. I’ll try to snag one at a more accessible price, should I be able to find one at some moment in the future.

Thanks @nimrodd ! :slight_smile:

Just a thought - if you remove the rubber grip insert, you then have a tiny amount of free space; you could theoretically fold a thin layer of plastic or paper to form a sheath that fits inside the grip, and it would be visible through the checkerboard holes.

It would be pretty subtle, but you could basically create new color combinations and at the same time reduce the potential for dust to make its way into the barrel.

No idea if it would actually work in practice.

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Seems a solution worth a try. I’m terrible at colour combinations, but at least I may try to better protect the inner barrel from accidents. I’ll see what I can do…

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