It seems the only “refillable ballpoints” I’ve ever come across are refilled using cartridges, but that seems kinda wasteful considering the cartridge itself isn’t recyclable or reusable. Bottle ink seems to be only used for fountain pens. Unless if I’m mistaken, why can’t ballpoints be refilled with ink? Is it not possible to take an ink syringe and bottled oil-based ink and use those to refill the cartridge?
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The biggest thing is just practicality.
Three ink used in ballpoint pens is very thick and viscous – this is partly how it stays in place in the cartridge however much you shake your pen about.
This also means it is very hard to get into the cartridge – easy enough to to in a manufacturing plant with big bits of automated machinery, but virtually impossible to do on a small personal scale. It just isn’t practical for example to syringe in new ink into a cartridge by hand – and the equipment to allow it would be so expensive as to be uneconomical.
It is also notable that opens are designed as a unit, so the hardware making up the open will be designed to last as long as the ink supply, but not necessarily any longer. Keep refilling a ballpoint and you may eventually have issues with the ball and fittings wearing out too.
As an alternative, fountain pens do use more liquid inks, which are available in both cartridge format for speed and ease of use, but also in bulk formats you can refill yourself.
It would however be nice to see more options for recycling spent ink refills…
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