Lamy M16 Ballpoint Refill

Name: Lamy M16 Ballpoint Refill
Item: Lamy M16 Ballpoint Refill
Rating: 3.5

02/18/19 Check Price Video

The Lamy M16 is a proprietary ballpoint refill used with Lamy pens. It’s the only full-sized ballpoint refill Lamy makes. The M16 is sold in fine, medium, and broad sizes. The most common color is black, but it’s also sold in blue, red, and green.

The fine size is said to be able to write for up to 8000 meters, with the broad reaching 4500 meters.

The main characteristics of the M16 that make it unique are a small point on the top and a plastic fitting towards the front end. This plastic fitting acts a spring-stop on most models and it’s the single part of the refill that makes it so hard to swap for another refill. The extremely long, thin front section allows for some of Lamy’s distinctive designs but also means a standard refill, like the Parker-style G2, can’t be used in place of the M16.

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Lamy M16 Alternatives

Unfortunately there are almost no Lamy M16 alternatives. The one that exists is from Monteverde Soft Roll, which uses the same exact shape as the M16. For a time this refill was seen as a better quality writer than the Lamy, but most opinions today (after Lamy has improved ink qualities) see it as an equal or worse option.

No other alternatives to the M16 refill exist and no other refills can be used in M16-based pens without considerable modifications.

Why The M16 Is So Hard To Hack

The Lamy M16 has a few features that make it very difficult to replace with another refill. They are:

Very long, narrow front
The section of refill from the ball to the plastic spring stop is quite long, much longer than normal
Front section is very thin
The section from the ball to the spring stop is thinner than normal refills — around 2.0 mm instead of 2.4 mm
Plastic spring stop
This part is more complex than it looks. Not only is it held in plastic extremely securely, it’s placed higher than normal on the refills and it’s non-symmetrical. It works with gates inside of the refill so that in some positions it will slide up and down freely (for retraction), and in others it will be held down with the tip extended (for writing)
End piece with rotation
The plastic end piece at the back of the refill has a small groove in it that is used for rotating the refill with each click. The turn is used so that the plastic stopped will either go through a channel in the grip area and then be held down (for writing) or recede through a channel and retract the refill.