DIY Planner - The Write Tip - Comments

Pen Mechanisms

john cook — Wed, 1 Mar 2006 12:23:52 -0500

I'm doing a project and am looking for a drawing of a mechanism that is used for a pencil and pen "cartridge." Twist one way from nuetral, the "pen" will go down. Twist the other way the "pencil" will go down. Of course the pen/pencil will go back to nuetral.

johnc

New Use for Traditional Pencils

innowen — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:24:39 -0500

Now I don't advocate the illegal use of anything, especially writing tools, but here's a good (worksafe) and interesting use for pencils:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2254198494269174156

/innowen

Pentel QuickerClicker

Foo Fighter — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 16:28:02 -0500

Frankly, if you are using any mechanical pencil other than the Pentel QuickerClicker (0.5 mm) you are using the wrong mechanical pencil. Any office supply store in the U.S. will have a 2-pack available for around $6.

They are comfortable in the hand, the lead advance is right under your index finger, the lead and eraser are easily refilled, and it will probably last forever.

Sharpener in the advance button

Alexandre Lemieux — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 08:43:32 -0500

Thanks Sardonios.

Yep, I knew the button was a sharpener, but it doesn't give you a sharp point as the other sharpeners for those pencils do. They also sell sanding paper to sharpen it the way you like, but it's really messy.

The Pencil

Anonymous — Sat, 7 Jan 2006 18:04:40 -0500

I read this many many years ago when it was first written. The Pencil : A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski got great reviews by the Wall Street Journal and I found it very interesting. But you have to be a different type to find these things interesting.

You're right about the

Anonymous — Fri, 6 Jan 2006 23:00:27 -0500

You're right about the different composition--I tried to use the red leads for grading student papers and they weren't satisfactory at all. Would still like to find good colored leads, tho.

Mars II: Return of the pencil god...

Sardonios — Fri, 6 Jan 2006 21:51:22 -0500

Great article as always Jaymi. Perhaps I can annswer some of your questions - modern mechanical pencils 0.3 - 0.9mm came from Germany in the sixties hence markings in metric. Clay like polymers (synthetic plastics) allowed a thinner, stronger lead core to be produced. Traditional clay cores are 2 - 3mm thick by comparison.

The term black-lead comes from the belief that graphite was a new type of lead ore latter chemical analysis proved it is a carbon. The name graphite is from the Greek too write - graphein.

All modern pencil leads derive from Conte's method of combining graphite, wax and clay. Originally an expediency to use poor quality graphite during yet another war between England and France.

My favorite pencil has to be the Mars Lumograph by Staedtler, It comes in a great range of degrees, although the EE for drafting films is no more. I do however like to sketch with a fountain pen as I find it a most interesting discipline.

Any colour as long as it's black...

Sardonios — Fri, 6 Jan 2006 19:55:33 -0500

If I remember correctly green, blue and red mechanical leads are designed for reprographic work on tracing paper and differ in composition to artists colour pencils.

Mars, god of pencils...

Sardonios — Fri, 6 Jan 2006 19:42:49 -0500

Bonjour Alexandre, If you are using the Staedtler Mars technico 780 C leadholder (clutch pencil) there is a sharpener in the lead advance button. Staedtler also make mechanical pencil leads in 7 degrees from 2B - 3H and 2mm leads from 4B to 4H.

You've done a great job in

Anonymous — Fri, 6 Jan 2006 10:33:13 -0500

You've done a great job in everything you've posted--it's really a service to get the discussion started so we can learn about good products and get more information about things, so I'm really grateful to you for everything you've posted. I just wonder what you'll write about next, that I wouldn't have been thinking about, but will help me in some way I don't even know about now.

And I really love the possibilities you've opened in the bookbinding series!

Staples stocks the B leads

Anonymous — Fri, 6 Jan 2006 10:26:47 -0500

Staples stocks the B leads in their stores--in the boxes with 12 tubes of leads. Sometimes I can find the B leads at Office Depot but only 3 tubes to a pack.

I used to get the .5 exclusively but recently found that the .9 is more durable and isn't that different from .5, so it looks like, for the reasons you mentioned, .9 is much more practical and my collection of .5 pencils will go into storage.

Does anyone know of a Japanese stationery store in the Dallas area?

I think you've opened up another topic that is important to many of us--I use my mechanical pencil many times a day and it's an important tool for me as an accountant. Despite the computer, I still have to annotate workpapers, compute adjustments, etc., and I have to have a pencil for those tasks.

Mechanical pencils and hardness

dougj — Thu, 5 Jan 2006 20:21:10 -0500

Unless you're in a very well-stocked office supply store or some place with an excellent selection of art supplies, you're generally only going to find HB leads. Places carrying drafting supplies (as in, for engineers and architects) might also carry H or 2H. B leads are fairly rare, and softer leads are even more so. In my experience, there tends to be a good reason for this, as 0.5 and 0.7 mm leads break extremely easily, and any good knock of the pencil or even the shipping box might cause the leads to shatter. (Using wide cores in a holder is a better option.)

all my best,
dj

The mechanical pencils

Anon — Thu, 5 Jan 2006 19:55:40 -0500

The mechanical pencils aren't marked with a hardness rating because it's the lead, which is interchangeable, that has the characteristic of hardness. Almost all common lead in retail stores is marked with the hardness - on the package and on the plastic lead box.

There are some mechanical pencils (Rotring at least used to) which have a sleeve near the end of the pencil that has an opening in it, and hardness values are inscribed under the sleeve. When the lead is changed out with a different hardness, the sleeve can be rotated to frame the appropriate description of the hardness of the lead. This feature isn't that common, but it does exist.

Thanks for pointing this

innowen — Thu, 5 Jan 2006 17:15:40 -0500

Thanks for pointing this out. I did do some reasearch on the web while writing this article... however the one thing I was not really able to find is why most mechancial pencils aren't marked with the hardness rating. They seem to prize the diameter over the hardness.

Also wasn't really able to figure out why they use the millimeter as the standard and when that really started. I'll be checking out a few more of the sites people posted as comments to see if they answer my questions.

/innowen

All about

Anonymous — Thu, 5 Jan 2006 14:53:52 -0500

All about pencils:

http://pencilrevolution.com/

The Write Tip

innowen — Thu, 5 Jan 2006 06:00:26 -0500

I realize that pens and gel pens aren't the only writing instrument out on the market. While I prefer to write in brightly colors inks, pens aren't the best utensil for designing my D&D characters, erasing quick calculations and drawing or sketching pictures in my sketch books. In these cases, I switch to a pencil. We've all used them in grade schools when learning our letters and doing homework and passing notes to and from each other. However, when was the last time you took a good look at your pencil and thought... what exactly does this writing implement do? Why do pencils get stamped with numbers or random letters? Well, look no further as this week we take a look at pencils, both traditional and mechanical.

Traditional pencils are manufactured from wood or plastic bricks and contain non-refillable cores. They're put together like a sandwich, a slim rod of lead stuck between two sheets of wood or plastic, which is then cut down to small hand-sized rounded rods. Once the lead has run out, these pencils are thrown away. Pencils can be manufactured from plastic, tropical rain forest wood or incense-cedar wood. To identify which type of pencil is made of what material all you need to do is look at the material that surrounds the "lead" center or writing core of the pencil:

Plastic pencils have a pinkish color near the writing core. They bend easily, and snap cleanly if you break it in half and have no scent.
Tropical rainforest pencils have a brownish color as well as tiny flecks of brown and read in them. They also have a slight woodsy scent to them.
Incense-cedar pencils have a reddish brown color to them as well as a visible seam from their manufacturing process. They also smell like cedar when they are sharpened.

The part of the pencil that creates the marks on paper is known as the writing core. While many of us grew up thinking that lead pencils were made of lead, they are not. Instead they are made of a mixture of nontoxic graphite and clay. Therefore, the grade of hardness a traditional pencil has, is dependent on how much more clay or graphite is added to the core. Manufacturer's mark the hardness of the pencil on the outside with either a numbering or a letter grade. Numeric grades go from 1-4, while there are several different letter marks. An H represents hardness, a B designates the color the tip writes with and an F represents the pencilâ€™s ability to sharpen to a fine point.The most common grade here in the States is a #2 or HB grade pencil. Pencils with harder grades are used most often for drafting means while softer pencil grades are preferred by artists for their ability to shade or soften pictures.

Since traditional pencils donâ€™t last very long, can be a bit messy, and take some sort of sharpening device to expose the graphite inside them people started finding ways to conserve their favorite writing device. In 1822 two Britons (Sampson Mordan and John Hawkins) developed and patented the first mechanical pencil mechanism to propel a writing core thru a shaft allowing people to write with it. We call this device a mechanical pencil. Growing in popularity across the globe, Tokuji Hayakawa, a metal worker in Japan refined the casing using metal and sold his version as â€œEver-Sharp Pencilâ€. It sold in such great numbers that he founded a company based on the name of the pencil... Sharp.

Like itâ€™s traditional cousin, there are 4 different types of mechanisms that make a mechanical pencil push the graphite out from the tip:

Ratched-based pencils that advance the lead to the tip with a button on one end or the side of the pencil.
Screw-based pencils that advance the lead by twisting a screw which moves a slider down the pencilâ€™s barrel.
Screw-based pencils where the lead is advanced using friction inside the screw.
Twist-based pencils that advance the lead when the pencil is twisted in some fashion. These pencils sometimes allow the lead to slide back inside the pencil as well so that the lead does not get wasted.

What makes the mechanical pencil so popular was the ability to refill the pencil case with different types of graphite. It needed no extra sharpener, created no wood shaving waste and people didnâ€™t have to purchase a whole new pencil when their last one ran out of lead. The writing core for a mechanical pencil is composed of graphite, clay and wax. They appear as long thin rods and are usually sold in small bundles in a plastic container. Unlike a traditional pencil whoâ€™s grades are marked in hardness and blackness, mechanical pencil grades are marked in terms of their diameter, in millimeters. Iâ€™m not sure why this is... but I do know that itâ€™s because of their popularity with drafting that theyâ€™re marked in millimeters.

The most common thicknesses include 0.5mm and 0.7mm. However, the writing core can be made as small as 0.3mm and as large as 2.0mm. The rule of thumb for selecting size goes: the smaller the core the finer the line these pencils yield. 0.5mm pencils are more practical for general writing purposes and 0.7 -0.9mm pencils work best for sketching and writing.

I prefer to use a mechanical pencil unless Iâ€™m coloring in a picture with a colored pencil. I tend to lose pencil sharpeners to my cats who think they are play toys. Electric sharpeners are fine and dandy, but they cost and are quite loud and sometimes not as portable as my current lifestyle is. Which is why Iâ€™ve been favoring my green Sanford Clear Point 0.5mm ratchet-based pencil. It handles all my needs from writing up my character sheets to sketching images from my imagination onto paper. It has a slim case and an ergonomic, soft rubber grip at the tip of the pencil that fits nicely in my hands. It also slips into my gaming clipboard. Some of my friends use those fat ergonomic pencils like EZGrip or Dr. Grip but they feel large and awkward sitting between my fingers. No matter what pencil you choose, whether itâ€™s a traditional-tried and true #2 pencil or a fancy ergonomic grip mechanical pencil, make sure that itâ€™s a tool youâ€™ll enjoy using and will want to use over and over again.

D*I*Y Planner - The Write Tip - Comments