Hello,
During the month of September, I have ordered the pens above on Aliexpress. I thought the barrel would be a bit rough since there is a slightly mate effect on the pictures of the product (see >here<) but it is slippery, actually. A set of 12 different colors costs 6-7 USD.
Immediately I have seen these pens in sale, I got the idea of my future project : making a special version of the TBG Paper MX which I will call Aurora MX.
Naming speaking, I removed the “paper” part because the original name was a reference for the brand of the body used (which is a flexgrip pen ) : PaperMate. Since there is no Papermate pen anymore into my mod, I decided calling it Aurora MX. I keep the MX as reference to the original mod. I am sorry if you feel it confusing to RSVP MX naming.
When looking at my mods, I can’t stop thinking at this kind of place : Aurora on icing landscapes. I would loved to get the green constellation pen combinated with white and lighter shade instead of black and dark shade. It would have been the perfect last color for this project.
If you are looking for the tutorial of the personal Paper MX of TheBeyGeek, the link is >here<. Even though the language used is French, I think pictures are easy to follow.
Earlier in the year (2021), I made a white version of his mod. I replaced the flexgrip barrel to Legami rubber pen, replaced the Carrefour grip to metal rings.
Where do the metal rings come from ?
I was looking for metal rings on the Internet some years ago (iirc 2017-2018). After a quick search, I noticed that the product called “metal bra strap adjuster oring” is perfect for what I need. >Here< is a similar product that I bought for the mod above. It has a rounded shape, is cheaper than airfit metal rings and does exist in a lot of sizes !
Because the tip of the constellation pen fits perfectly into the Reynolds cap and can be screwed on its own barrel, I found out the overall structure in a very short time.
If you look closely at the original version of the Paper MX of TheBeyGeek, you notice a tiny piece of black supergrip coming from the inside of the white G2 grip
From this moment, I encountered some issues about choosing the part under the white G2 :
– I didn’t want to use any black part for my Aurora MXs
– I wanted to use a different color than white in order to get a contrast of layers
– I thought that getting supergrips sub with the same shade of the violet, pink, skyblue and darkblue color below would be a very hard task and I was not sure to be satisfied of the final result.
I finally decided to use a piece of aluminum (pipe of 1cm thick) for the external part. Because the extremity of a supergrip grip is rounded, I worked on the aluminum pieces with flat file and some polishing tools. This is the exact same process than my VT KT caps :
Cutting step :
Filling and rounding piece with flat file :
Final step : Polishing !
The two main reasons that I didn’t use a longer aluminum pieces are :
– I didn’t want the mod to be too much heavy since alu is already heavier than supergrip and the barrel is slippery (slippery barrel makes the mod with more momentum in my opinion);
– The alu pipe doesn’t fit on Reynolds caps.
For a better weight distribution, I replaced Flexgrip tip with an Impega tip : they have the same shape (Impega one is very slightly thinner), but Impega tip is lighter.
For a better aesthethic result (which looks like more the original Paper MX), I also decided to replace the Supergrip grip with a piece of thick Supertip barrel as shown below :
Again, for a better weight distribution, I made a vortex/vgg structure for the barrels, using Airblanc underbarrel as connector. Thin metal ring at the middle is the same I used for the back of my >Powehi< It is a bit thinner than the thickness of the barrel but it is the only metal rings I have right now which works the better.
It is from a Taiwanese mech pencil called Hidden Nib from the brand Tomato.
Above is the final result of my Aurora MX project !
19 grams and 21.5cm
They are all for sale. If you like one of them, please contact me on Discord at vore_tex#5102 😄