I’m a fellow Livescriber. I guess I’m an early adopter since my first Livescribe pen is a Pulse. I’ve recently gotten a Sky Wifi as well. The automatic sync with Evernote was the reason I went with Sky.
I don’t have to tell you how miserable the actual writing experience can be with ink refills from Livescribe. Scratchy, having to press down hard, skipping… hard to believe, but some people don’t even notice!
I found posts on the internet giving instructions on DIY refills for Livescribe. Pretty simple to find a refill with the correct diameter and then use a jeweler’s saw and jig to cut them to the correct length. Remove any burrs with a fine tooth file and you’re writing with nice ink! You have to be careful, you can damage the pressure sensor in the Livescribe and then it won’t detect any refills. I used to use refills from Monteverde, very nice ink and a nice selection of colors but more than $2 each from my local pen & paper store.
Went exploring for other options. Asked manufacturers to send me samples of their refills. I was interested in how easy they were to customize and how smoothly they wrote. There is some variation between manufacturers! the metal used for the tube, the type and color of ink, the tip size, etc. Some were easy to cut but not nice to write with, some were really hard to cut but wrote like a dream and then ran out of ink after five pages 😦
Most all of these were “generic” ball point pen refills. I suspect that every major brand of refill has a generic equivalent. I found a refill that I was willing to customize and ordered some, customized them to fit Livescribe and went to eBay to see what kind of response we would have. Well, it was obvious after a month that I wasn’t the only one looking for nicer ink!
So I took the plunge and plunked down a chunk of change to have a custom run of pen refills manufactured to fit Livescribe pens and filled them with the premium German ink that everyone is so pleased with! I started with blue ink because I used to work in a bank and back in the day, a fast and reliable way to tell the difference between an originally signed document and a photocopy was the color of the signature! no color copying back then! Don’t worry, black ink is coming!
Well, now I’ve got more smooth-writing Generic Refills in Fine and Medium tips with premium blue German ink than I can possibly use! That’s how I became Generic Refills!
Generic Refills 