Have you had an item with a rubberised surface that turned sticky after a few years?
Well, unfortunately branded pens aren’t immune to this issue ..as this is exactly what happened to this Faber-Castell rollerball.
I hope that has this happened often enough by now and has annoyed enough people so that manufacturers know what to do to avoid this happening to pens made today.
I have seen a similar issue with grips gathering lint. The Zebra G-402s I’ve had always did this. The cheaper G-301s with hard plastic grips do not. Even the relatively new G-450 grips seem to stretch and loosen over time.
I have tried swapping and improvising grips a few times. I’ve had not great success. The fixes have always looked and felt like amateur bodges.
indeed…my FC grip plus suffered the same fate…maybe about 6 years old. I rarely buy rubber grips after this experience.
Not the Faber Classic but in contrast, the handles of THREE of my rather expensive umbrellas developed the same ‘disease’, rendering them unusable. Disaster.
i’ll rub the grip with a damp cloth and baking soda.
Thanks, Matthias, I’ll give that a try.
Thank you for your kind comments.
Penelope, we have an expensive “Knirps” umbrella which shares this fate, but it is not too bad, so it is usable. The worst case I had of a rubberised surface that went sticky was with an expensive radio – but other things also started going wrong with that radio….
ID00092, thanks for this tip. I’ll try that.
Ouch, that’s nasty. So far I have not observed this with my writing instruments but now I am afraid to take a closer look at those with rubber grips that I have not used for a long time.
I have just noticed that the four rubber feet on my other Carl Angel-5 crank sharpener I haven’t used for a while have turned into a gooey, sticky something
Oh no. Is there any residue where you kept the sharpener, like in a drawer?
The sharpener stood on an IKEA expedit shelf but being sceptical I had put a piece of paper underneath so there were only a few marks on the shelf and I was able to remove these with rubbing alcohol.
I hate these rubberised coatings for just this reason. The fifth-generation Buddha Machine had one of these coatings and the white one would end up absorbing black colouring from the cardboard sleeve after a while. I have one this has happened to.
I wonder if the feet on Gunther’s sharpener, and the various other rubberised coatings being discussed here, are actually some kind of oil-derived manufactured product? I don’t think I’ve heard of natural rubber doing this kind of thing. It seems more likely to dry out and become brittle with age. That’s certainly been my experience of it.
Supposedly you can strip the incompletely polymerized soft-touch coating, which is merely painted on hard plastic, using isopropyl alcohol (isopropanol) and a mildly abrasive paper towel or similar to speed the process. I wouldn’t recommend a magic eraser (melamine foam) as it might scratch the underlying plastic.
Hi, Can anyone help me to get the Faber Castell Cedar Wood Roller Ball Pen same as shown in the Image. I am from India, please help
Happy to help you get this one, but sending it to India will probably be expensive.
I’m not sure how to help. Try an online shop that ships abroad.
For anyone still trying to remove the stickniness on Faber-Castell fountain or other pens – the tip above to apply bicarbonate soda (baking soda) with damp cloth and even gentle brush worked on a very sticky pen!
Thanks