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.)
