With the Rocketbook smart notebook technology capturing the attention of the masses with its social media marketing campaign, sales of the rocket book have skyrocketed to catapult the Rocketbook to be one of the most popular notebooks in the world. With the cheap, simple, easy to use erasing system for the notebooks that generally performs extremely well it is not surprising that the reputation of the Rocketbook is second to none.
Although the actual Rocketbook itself tends to perform flawlessly, we have noticed more and more people reaching out to ask why their Rocketbook pen is not working. Although the Pilot Frixion pen is generally an excellent piece of equipment too, it can have some common issues that may cause it not to work correctly with your Rocketbook.
Thankfully, the vast majority of these problems are quick and easy to fix and you should easily be able to get your Rocketbook pen working again without having any major issues. Please note that there are a few very rare issues that can occur with your actual Rocketbook to cause issues with the pen, this is very rare and the problems are almost always with the actual pen rather than the book.
Why Is My Rocketbook Pen Not Working?
My Rocketbook Pen Is Skipping
One common issue with Rocketbook pens is that they can start to skip, especially once they have been used for a few weeks on a regular basis. Although we already have a dedicated article going over how you are able to stop your pen from skipping online, we will offer a short explanation in this article to try save our readers time.
The most common issues that may cause a Rocketbook pen to skip is due to the pen not being broken in, using your Rocketbook pen on low quality paper in addition to your normal Rocketbook, and storing your Rocketbook pen incorrectly when not in use. Although these can be very common with other pens, when it comes to the Frixion that comes with your Rocketbook, these do tend to be rarer.
The main issue that usually occurs with your Rocketbook pen is issues with the actual ink flow or nib. The majority of time this is down to dust and paper particles breaking down and building up behind the ball of the pen causing it to skip. You can usually fix this by cleaning the nib of your pen on a regular basis but this problem can be an issue with the Rocketbook as the sheets of paper in the notebook can be wrote on over and over again breaking the paper down due to the erasable nature of the Rocketbook.
The Pen Tip Has Dried Out
If you don’t retract the tip of the pen via the clicker when not in use it is common for the tip to dry out and not work correctly when you try to write in your Rocketbook with it. Thankfully, this is a very quick and easy fix and licking the tip of the pen to moisten it and then scribbling on some spare paper for a minute or two will often correct the issue and get your pen working again.
If you have left your Rocketbook pen with its tip exposed for weeks rather than just days you may have to repeat the process above a few times before it will start to work normally again. Our advice would be to lick the tip, scribble with it for a minute and then repeat until you have gone through the process three times. More often than not, you will find that this will get your Rocketbook pen working again without any further action being required.
There Is An Air Gap In Your Pen
Although this is less common, if you have stored your Rocketbook pen vertically with its nib up for more than a few days without use, the ink movement in the ink cylinder can cause an air gap to form between the available ink in the cylinder and the pens writing mechanism. Thankfully, this can be an easy fix but it is rarely quick as the easiest way to fix your pen is often to put it back into your vertical stationary storage but keep the nib facing down and leave it for a few days.
This causes gravity to work its magic and pull the ink back towards the writing mechanism but the process is slow so if you have to write with your Rocketbook pen right away then this is not a viable fix for everyone. Some people have reported that shaking their Rocketbook pen can help with this but due to the way the ink is formulated and stored, we doubt that shaking will offer much benefit.
The Writing Mechanism May Have Seized
This is an even less common fault with the Rocketbook pen but it can still happen in a number of situations where the actual writing mechanism for the pen will seize up and store rotating and not transfer ink to your Rocketbook when writing. Depending on the causes of the seized writing mechanism on the pen, it may be totally broken and require a replacement pen to be ordered.
Our recommendation for trying to fix your Rocketbook pen with a writing mechanism that is not rotating would be to try and write on a surface that will offer you as much traction as possible. Simply scribbling on some spare paper will often do little to nothing as there is not enough traction on the ball to force it to rotate.
Trying to write on an eraser or other rubber surface does tend to offer enough traction on the ball to encourage it to rotate but this still does not have a high success rate. If you are able to get your ball to rotate via writing on a rubber surface though, it should rotate correctly on normal paper so you are able to scribble for a few minutes to normalize the rotation before writing as usual again.
Issues With Feathreing, Bleeding, and Ghosting
Due to the amount of ink released when writing with your Rocketbook pen being controlled and optimised for use with the notebook, it is very rare that you will have any issues with feathering, bleeding, and ghosting with the pen. If you have noticed that your pen is starting to have issues though, it is almost always due to the pen being damaged in someway and it releasing more ink than it should.
Unfortunately, there are very few fixes available for this as the number of ways that the pen may be broken can vairy wildly. If you are having these issues then simply getting yourself a replacement pen for your Rocketbook will almost always be the best option as it is highly likley that your current one is damaged beyond repair.
Your Rocketbook Pen Ink Is Not Disappearing
This one is very rare but can still happen and it is all most always down to the ambient temperature where you are bing too cold for the heat generated by your eraser to cause the ink from your Rocketbook pen to disappear. As we said, this is rare but if you are outside in a location that is lower than -10 degrees then it will be too cold for the ink to erase.
Thankfully, this does not mean that your Rocketbook pen is actually broken or damaged and once you warm your Rocketbook back up you should be able to use the eraser to erase its ink as normal. Due to this one being location-dependent and very few of our readers living in areas where it is cold enough for this to happen, it is unlikely that this is the reason that your Rocketbook pen is not working but we wanted to include it anyway.
Conclusion
That brings our article going over how you are able to get your Rocketbook pen working again to a close. We have tried to organize each of the fixes for your Rocketbook pen in descending order to put the potential fix for your issue closer to the top of the article to prevent you from having to waste time.
If none of the fixes above have managed to get your Rocketbook pen working again then it is highly likley that it is due to the pen being broken in someway and you will probably have to order a replacement pen. Thankfully, they are cheap enough so it shouldent cause any problems for the majority of our readers and you will be able to write in your Rocketbook again once you have your new pen.
