I usually have a plan for what I’m going to write about at least a week or two in advance, but I couldn’t help an impromptu post about the old discontinued Uniball Signo bit .18mm today.  It came up in conversation a few days ago with a friend, and then today when I was packing up my office preparing for a move, I stumbled across two of them so I figured it was some kind of sign to write about them today.

The Uniball Signo bit .18mm is the smallest tip I’ve ever written with, which is saying a lot since I regularly carry some .38mm and .28mm pens with me.  For the record I picked these up from Jetpens a while ago, but they don’t have them any longer.  The picture above shows the red version of the Signo bit .18mm on the left as compared to a relatively small Pilot Precise V5 which looks pretty thick in comparison.

Writing with the Uniball Signo bit .18mm is a little bit of a challenge if you are a fast writer because you definitely need to keep a consistent steady angle to ensure it doesn’t skip.  I wouldn’t recommend these (if you can even find any or dig them up somewhere like I did) for long writing sessions, but in the past I’ve really enjoyed using them for marking up and editing printed documents.  They are great for squeezing in notes in the margins of books or presentations and even better for marking up a printed out spreadsheet or report thats crammed full of data.

As I referenced in the title of this post, the Uniball Signo bit .18mm is also just fun to play around with.  You can find plenty of people that write on a grain of rice, but I decided to go a little smaller with one single grain of quinoa which is even smaller.  The picture above with it sitting on a penny should give you some perspective on how tiny one grain of quinoa is if you haven’t seen one for yourself.  I was able to scrawl OSG on the face of it, although if I was to critique the quinoa like I do some paper, I’d say that its not ideal to write on because as you can see, the ink tends to spread a little…take note anyone thats thinking of making some sort of quinoa based paper. 🙂

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