Mr. Pen Tape Gun Review: Sealing Boxes With a Sore Thumb

I spent twenty-seven years behind a post office counter and never once sealed a box myself. I handed people their tape and watched them wrestle it. Then I retired, started selling thrifted clothing and vintage kitchenware out of a spare bedroom, and found out exactly what they were wrestling with. It is not the tape. It is the bare roll. Pin the loose end with a thumbnail, stretch, press, repeat, and by the fourth box your hand is sore and the seam looks like it was chewed.

I packed that way for two and a half years, starting in spring 2021 when I listed my first few pieces. In October 2023 I bought the Mr. Pen heavy duty packing tape dispenser gun, the two-inch model, and I have not sealed a box by hand since. That is about three years of steady use now, eight to fifteen packages a week depending on the season, more in November and December. It hangs on a hook on the shelving unit in my shipping room. It is the least dramatic tool I own, and it is the one Mr. Pen tool I would replace first if it disappeared.

How I've Used It

My shipping room is a spare bedroom with a six-foot folding table, a wire shelving unit holding labeled bins of inventory, and a rolling cart for supplies. The tape gun lives on a hook at the end of the shelving unit, at hip height, where my right hand finds it without looking. I do not set it down between boxes. Hanging it up is a half-second habit, and it means I am never digging for it under a pile of poly mailers or knocking it onto the floor.

A box gets one strip down the center seam, then a shorter strip across each end where the flaps meet. The gun carries two-inch tape, which is wider than the one-inch roll I used to buy at the hardware store, so one pass covers what used to take two. I go through fewer rolls now, not more, which surprised me. On a ten-inch by eight-inch by six-inch box, the old one-inch tape needed three passes down the seam and each pass was a fresh chance to go crooked. The two-inch tape takes one pass and lands square, because the full width of the gun is riding the box edge instead of your eye guessing at it.

The tape feeds off the roll smoothly, and the strip lies flat instead of curling under itself the way it did when I was pulling tape off a bare roll at an angle. That curl was the thing that used to cost me real minutes. I would get a strip halfway down a seam, the roll would twist in my left hand, and the tape would fold back and stick to itself, and I would have to start over with a fresh strip on a box that already had a wrinkled one on it.

I seal everything with it. Clothing orders go into poly mailers and never touch the tape gun, but the boxed orders do: the vintage Pyrex, the stoneware bowls, the shoes still in their original boxes, the odd lamp base I could not resist at an estate sale. Some weeks that is eight boxes. Some weeks in December it is closer to twenty. Three years of that is a fair test of a small plastic tool, and it has passed.

One Saturday last March I had eleven boxes to seal before Gene could carry them out to the porch for the carrier pickup. I started at a quarter past nine and had the last one taped by twenty to ten. I did not stop to rest my hand. Two and a half years earlier that same run of boxes would have taken me closer to an hour with a bare roll, and my thumb would have been throbbing by the sixth one. I remember the timing because I wrote it on the back of a packing slip, thinking I might mention it somewhere. Eleven boxes, thirty-five minutes, no ache.

The Blade Does the Work

Every tape gun is three things. A handle, a place to hold the roll, and a blade. The first two are easy and nearly every maker gets them roughly right. The blade is where a cheap one reveals itself. The Mr. Pen has a sharp steel blade, and it cuts the tape clean on the first pull, every time, without me angling the gun or sawing at the strip. I have used dispensers where the blade went dull enough that I ended up tearing the tape with my hands anyway, which defeats the entire reason for owning one.

A clean cut matters more than it sounds. Torn tape looks torn. On a package going to someone who paid real money for a vintage dish, a ragged tape edge reads as careless, and careless is the impression you least want a buyer to carry into the two minutes before they open the box. That sounds fussy. It is not. I have repeat customers. I would like to keep them.

The blade is genuinely sharp, and it sits right where your fingers go when you are hurrying. I nicked the side of my left index finger in the first month, in the middle of a run of six boxes on a Sunday afternoon, because I was pulling the gun toward me instead of along the seam. Not badly, and I have been more deliberate since. That is less a fault in the design than a fact of it. Treat the front of the gun the way you would treat the business end of anything with an edge, and you will be fine.

Loading It, and What Comes in the Box

The gun arrived with one free bonus roll of tape, which covered my first month of packing and let me put off reordering. Since then I buy standard two-inch rolls with a two-inch core, and they drop straight on with no adapters or shims. Loading is not difficult once you have done it twice. You open the gun, seat the roll, feed the tape out to the blade, and close it back up. My first attempt took a couple of minutes and ended with a length of tape stuck to itself. My second attempt took about thirty seconds.

What I got wrong the first time was feeding the tape over the top of the roller instead of under it. The gun closed fine either way, which is why it took me a second try and a stuck wad of tape to figure out. If you load it and the tape pulls tight against the frame instead of feeding free, you have threaded it the wrong way round. Stop, open it, and start again. It will feel obvious the second time and you will never think about it again after that.

The one habit worth building is this. When you hang the gun up, leave a short tail of tape stuck down at the blade. Then the next box starts with a loose end already waiting for you instead of a roll you have to pick at with a fingernail. I picked that up from a woman at a church rummage sale who packed books for a living, and it has saved me more time than any single thing on the tool itself.

Three Years Hanging on a Hook

The gun weighs a little under eleven ounces, which is light enough that my wrist does not complain and heavy enough that it does not feel like something from a dollar bin. It measures about ten and a half inches long, five and a half wide, and three and a third deep, so it hangs flat against the shelving without knocking into the inventory bins when I reach past it. I have dropped it on the linoleum twice. It survived both times with nothing worse than a scuff, though I would not make a habit of it.

Here is where I should mention my right thumb. I have mild arthritis in it, and the reason I bought a tape gun at all, instead of continuing to fight bare rolls, was that a packing session was leaving my thumb aching into the evening. Gripping the handle and drawing a strip across the seam is a different motion than pinning tape down with a thumbnail and stretching it by hand. It is not zero effort. It is simply less effort in the exact place that was hurting. Within a week of switching I stopped noticing my thumb at the end of a packing day, and I have not thought about it since.

The handle deserves a word of its own, because that is the part your hand is actually in contact with for the whole session. It is comfortable and it is shaped so your fingers wrap rather than pinch, and the manual operation of it is a squeeze of the whole hand rather than a press of one joint. That is the difference between a tool you can use for an hour and a tool you put down after ten minutes. I have not once had to shake my hand out mid-session the way I used to with the bare roll.

Nothing on the gun has loosened in three years. The handle has not cracked or gone tacky the way some rubberized grips do after a few summers in a warm room. The blade still cuts on the first pull. I have never had to take it apart, adjust anything, or replace a part, because there is nothing on it to adjust. For a piece of plastic that lives on a hook and gets used a dozen times a week, that is most of the review right there. My scale and my printer have both needed a wipe-down and a new cable respectively in that same stretch. The tape gun has needed nothing.

Where It Falls Short

It is a plastic-bodied gun and it feels like one. If you were sealing two hundred boxes a day on a concrete floor, you would want metal in the frame and a wider tape path, and you would probably want a different tool entirely. That is not my life and it is likely not yours. For a spare-room operation doing a dozen packages a week, the plastic body is not a problem I have actually run into.

The two-inch width is the only size it takes. If you have a stack of three-inch tape in the basement, this gun will not help you use it. That happened to me in reverse. I had four one-inch rolls left over from the hardware store habit, and they sat in the supply cart for a year until I gave them to a neighbor who was moving. Buy your tape to fit the gun, not the other way around, and check the core diameter as well as the width. A three-inch core roll will not seat on a two-inch core spindle.

Once the bonus roll is gone, tape is a separate purchase, so work that into whatever you are comparing it against. My other small complaint is the blade, which is exposed and unforgiving when you are moving quickly. I keep the gun on a hook rather than loose in a drawer, partly for that reason and partly so I can find it.

Two and a half years of bare rolls left my right thumb aching after every packing session. Three years with this gun and I do not think about my thumb at all.

Who This Is For

This is for the person packing eight to twenty boxes a week at a folding table, in a spare room or a garage or the corner of a basement. If your thumb aches after a session, or your seams come out wrinkled and torn, or you have ever re-taped a box because the first pass went on crooked, this fixes all three at once. It also suits anyone who wants one less thing to think about: there is no maintenance, no adjustment, and no learning curve past the second attempt.

It suits a particular kind of seller, too. If you are handling glassware, dishes or anything else that needs real cushioning and therefore a real box, you are sealing boxes every week whether you planned to or not, and the tape gun earns its hook. If your inventory is all sweaters and blouses, you are mostly mailing poly mailers and you will barely touch it.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if nearly everything you ship goes into poly mailers, because you will not use it enough to justify the space on the shelf. Skip it if you pack at warehouse volume and need a metal frame, and skip it if you already own a tape gun that cuts clean and does not hurt your hands, because there is nothing here you are missing. And skip it if you are still buying three-inch tape by the case. This gun will not take it.

The honest summary after three years is that nothing about this tool is remarkable except that it has never given me a reason to think about it. It cuts, it holds, it hangs on its hook, and it has outlasted every other small thing in my shipping room without needing a single repair. That is a quiet kind of good and it is exactly what I wanted from a tape gun.