May 2024

Fitting a chinese twist pen ballpoint refill into a real A.T. Cross pen

Original A.T. Cross Century ballpoint refills for twist pens cost about 7$ to 10$ but they last and fit well. China started to produce some Cross ballpoint compatible refills and pens and to my big surprise they even managed to sell them via my local Staples store. The chinese refills don't actually fit into an original cross pen and they cost only a few cents when you buy them in china via aliexpress. At the local Staples store they are now sold for the same price as original A.T. Cross ballpoint refills. As a customer you can't identify the difference while you are in the store. There is only a very small difference between the chinese version and the genuine cross version.

Here is a photo. The refill on the left is the chinese one and the two on the right are genuine cross refills.

Twist pen refills: left chinese version, center and right genuine cross refills

If you look carefully at the above picture then you see that the main difference is found at the front of the refill. This thin section from the tip to the main refill body is shorter in the chinese version.

Chinese imitation cross pens do not have a hub that holds and guides the ballpoint refill. Real cross pens look on the inside as shown in the drawing below. There is a hub that holds the refill in place and minimizes the wiggle of the refill.

Schematic drawing of a genuine cross pen. The blue part is the refill and you can see that there is a hub at the tip of the pen.

The net result is that chinese refills (even when sold for a high price a Staples) don't fit into a genuine cross pen. The chinese refill emerges only a little bit from the pen and you end up hitting the paper with the metal of the pen especially when you hold it at an angle. The first photo shows a genuine cross pen with a chinese refill installed and the second photo shows the identical pen with a genuine cross refill:

Chinese refill in genuine cross pen, the tip barely emerges from the pen.

Chinese twist pen refill in classic cross century stirling silver pen, the tip barely emerges from the pen.

Original cross refill in classic cross century stirling silver pen, the tip of the refill protrudes about 3 mm from the pen.

Original cross refill in classic cross century stirling silver pen (pen was made in the 1960s). The tip of the refill protrudes about 3mm from the pen.

Is it possible to fix this and make a chinese refill fit? We need to make the thinner section at the tip of the refill a little longer. If you look carefully at the chinese refill then you notice that the tip section is pushed into the metal pipe that holds the main ink reservoir but there is a bit of metal before the pipe starts and we could file that off.

So here is what I did: I removed the plastic cap at the end of the chinese refill and I installed the refill into an electric drill. I got a second person to run the electric drill at medium speed. I put on a leather glove to hold and stabilize the refill while it was turning and then I took a small file (I used a round file) and pressed the file against the metal that needed to be removed while the refill turned. Essentially I was using an electric drill as a lathe.

The result is shown here. The refill in the front is an unmodified chinese refill and the one in the back has been filed down with my "electric drill lathe":

front: unmodified chinese refill, back: chinese refill with filed down tip area, it fits now into an original cross pen

front: unmodified chinese refill, back: chinese refill with filed down tip area. This modified chinese refill fits now into an original cross pen

The modified chinese version fits actually surprisingly well. It has this cone shape because I used a round file to trim it down and this results in the refill sitting very tightly in the guiding area at the tip of the pen. This modified chinese refill does not wiggle at all while writing and it feels actually better than the original cross refill.

The tips of original A.T. Cross ballpoint refills are made from stainless steel. The tips of the Chinese twist pen refills are made from brass and then coated to look like stainless steel. If you write a lot then the A.T. Cross ballpoint refills will last longer but for most people the pen ages by drying out before the ink runs out and in those cases the chinese refills will be as good as the original Cross refills (as long as the chinese are modified to actually fit into the pen). That being said, original A.T. Cross ballpoint refills don't really dry out. I have some that are 20 years old and still working. I suspect that the Chinese refills, like most ballpens, dry out after about 5 years.

References

https://www.cross.com/cr_en_us/refills/by-collections/classic-century, A.T. Cross Classic Century refills
c1-refill-size.jpg, C1-type ballpoint refill, dimensions, exact sizes and dimensions of an original Cross twist pen refill
Vintage newspaper adds by A.T. Cross. The started as the Cross Pen company but tried to diversify into other areas:
- Oct 21 1885, A.T Cross add
- Dec 19 1892, A.T Cross add, they produced also oil burning appliances

Cross had originally a more natural lion face design as a logo. The current logo of the A.T. Cross Company is an abstract design:

A.T. Cross Company logo