Editing The Pen Addict 551/transcript (section)

== Pilot Friction pen review ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Let's do it. The newest Pilot Friction, we've been talking about this for a little bit, but I finally got my review up on Monday. I love everything that Pilot has done with the Pilot Friction lineup. And that's kind of what I wrote in this little review. It wasn't... I don't tend to do just like straight up technical reviews, right? Like I just kind of chit chat, tell a little bit of story, tell what I think about my, you know, my life of experience with the Friction. Like the Pen Addict blog has been around longer than, you know, almost as long as the Friction has existed, which it came out in 2006. The Pen Addict has been around since 2007. So we've spent a lot of time with the Friction over the years. And it's always been a fascinating product to me because as I let off this review, the theory of an erasable pen should be immediately written off by everybody, right? Just the idea of an erasable ink pen is like, oh, that's got to be terrible, right? There's no way that it works. Or if it does, it's just kind of half-baked and just kind of terrible experience. And the Friction changed that, right? They came in and they made a thing that was really good. It wasn't great at the time when they launched it. And now they've just continued to work on it over the years. They like actually figured something out that their customer base, mainly in Japan, like really latched onto. And now it's like a tentpole item in their product lineup, which I never would have guessed in the beginning. And now it's just this core piece of their product lineup. So much so that other companies are like designing products, which I talk about in this, the Hobonichi, is making decisions in their planner paper lineup because of how much usage the Friction has in the Japanese market. And that just blows my mind thinking about just the Friction in general. Like what are your thoughts before I get into the ball knock zone completely? Just on the idea of the Friction. Have you ever used one? I'm sure I've asked you this like 10 times. And I can't remember your answer. Yeah, you don't like it. And I get that. Like this is not a pin for everyone, right?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I mean, for me, the Pilot Friction fails in every department. Like for me, like I'm not a big fan of the way it works anyway. Like I don't think that the gel ink is as comfortable or as smooth as others. The colors aren't as good. Like even in your article, like you praise the work that they've done. But the comparison image of the black Pilot Friction to just the black G2, I mean, it almost looks like brown, like gray brown. Like it doesn't look black to me at all. Yeah, it's really not close when you put them side to side. And it doesn't erase well enough. So it's like for me, like it just doesn't work. Like for me, I understand that people love it. And under certain circumstances, you can get this thing to work for you. But like, and it mostly does the job. But I'm like, why do you even need an erasable pen? Just like that's how, that's where I come from. Like this to me doesn't do a good enough job of a thing that I don't want anyway.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. And I think what interests me so much, and I don't disagree with any of your statements. Like I don't often choose to use the friction over anything else because of all the reasons you said. But it's such an interesting case study that no one has been able to compete with this pen. Where all of these companies try to jump on the bandwagon of whatever's popular. Like take the Uniball Jetstream and hybrid ballpointing technology, right? Well, now Pilot and Zebra and Pentel all have to come out with their, oh, you know, Uni did this great thing. Here's our version of it. And some of these companies have tried with the erasable item. And they're like, nah, this ain't it, chief. We can't compete with the friction. It's just like they've kind of let Pilot, you know, dominate this market because they can't make a good enough product. And that's, I think that's what fascinates me the most. Along with just how purely popular the friction is, which is still kind of mind boggling for like all the reasons you mentioned. There is no point where a Pilot gel ink, a Pilot friction gel ink is going to be better than like a Pilot G2 gel ink as far as color goes, right? Color and smoothness. It just, it doesn't work that way because of the ink formulation. But I got to admit, it's pretty darn good. Like it's good for what it is. And people seem to love the friction. And I'm here for it. You know, I love the stuff. So to get to the ball knock zone, particularly, the end conclusion of this review, which y'all could go read the review on the blog. We'll have the link in the show notes. I'm sure a lot of you have seen it already. Is there's no way you should ever choose this pen if you're a friction fan, right? Because it is ridiculously expensive for not much added value. So the added value that they want to bring to the table with the ball knock zone over, Myke, the ball knock, right? There's, we have the ball knock and we have the ball knock zone. So the zone is the upgraded barrel where you have a more silent clicking mechanism and a, quote, clutch mechanism on the tip of the pen to prevent tip rattling. Neither which I find to be game changing in any way, shape, or form, especially not for a 100% price upgrade. You know, there's $7 for just the base pen for the ball knock zone and the regular ball knock, which is my preferred model. That's what I'm actually using here today in a blue black ink, which is really, really good. It's $350, right? It's half the price and you're not losing any ink technology or erasing technology, which is what the friction is built around. So do you need the twice as much ball knock zone for a quieter click? It's slightly quieter. No one really notices. And for a clutch mechanism, that is fake. Like, it does the job of, like, keeping the tip rattle down. But tip rattle wasn't a problem in the other pens because they had it designed, they had the front end of the pen designed correctly. Like, I've never had a, you know, tip rattle issue with the regular ball knock. So it's an interesting concept. And then they even, like, doubled and tripled down on the ball knock zone by having these ultra premium barrels with a wooden grip, which Pilot is very popular for. You know, you've seen, a lot of people have seen these kind of dark cherry woods that they use for. They've used it in the Vanishing Point fountain pen before. They've used it in the S-series mechanical pencils. They've used it in all kinds of popular product lines as a different style and a different upgrade barrel. So you can buy that model for $28, something like that. Or you can go to the highest price one, which I also purchased for review, has the marbled acrylic barrel, which we talked about, you know, a few weeks ago when I first got them in. And that one's like $41. And I was like, you have to be, really be, like, a friction lover to spend $7 on a friction, much less, you know, $40 on a friction just to have the premium barrel. Like, is the eraser, I mean, is the erasability that, like, that important to you where you would buy that? Clearly it is, Myke.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Well, you know there's going to be friction super fans, right?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' There, yeah, there are.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And so, like, giving those people more options, why would you not?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, Hobonichi sealed that deal for me, making me realize that if a brand like Hobonichi is calling out the friction specifically in their paper change articles, right? They're having to change paper, right? This whole Tomoe River thing, switching over to the sands in Tomoe River. And for Hobonichi to actually call out the friction as a consideration, that tells me everything I need to know. They didn't mention any other. They didn't mention the Jetstream, right? They didn't mention pencils. They didn't mention regular gel pens. But they said the friction is so popular that they had to consider it when choosing a new paper for their planners. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Did it work for? Does it work well with Tomoe, like, specifically? Yeah, it's fine. Okay. So they wanted to make sure they could retain those qualities when switching to their new paper options?