Mechanical Pencils
I used to use mechanical pencils much more than I do today. My earliest memories of mechanical pencils were the Staedtler 2mm clutch pencils (and the fancy canister pointers) sitting around the drafting room at my dad’s office when he would take me to work on weekends as a little one. I was fascinated by the clutch mechanism, and I think this is why I took a drafting/engineering class in middle school. When I became a pencil collector, this also became the first non-woodcase pencil I bought: both the Staedtler of my childhood and a Caran d’Ache Fixpencil. They look very nice in my pencil jar, but rarely see use.
My actual experience with recurring use of mechanical pencils hails from the era when I didn’t have constant access to quality pencil sharpeners, especially when I was a remote worker living on a boat. Having pencils I didn’t need to sharpen meant going through quite the number of highly disposable cheap mechanical pencils. I apologize to the earth for this.
In later years I acquired some more durable Pentel .9mms that I still use today in the rare cases where I need a light and no-hassle every-day-carry. I have a really heavy hand when I write, and smaller-diameter leads are no match for my arm plus gravity. With frequent rotation of the pencil, I find I get a neat and readable line without any problems in this diameter. Pentel seems to merchandise these more than any other brand I’ve seen in shops here. Pentel is also probably the most easily found mechanical pencil brand here in Canada that manages to be both affordable and of reliable quality.
Being a fan of European brands, I also sought out some others when I started my pencil obsession, trying to stay in the wider-gauge range, with a .7mm Faber-Castell, Ballograf, and Caran d’Ache. I also accidentally bought a smaller-gauge .5mm Derwent piece, which these days collects dust alongside one of the early Pentels I bought before realizing that .5mm doesn’t do well in my gorilla grip.
Upon receiving some oddball-sized leads with some auctions for other items, I became curious and sought a couple other even larger-gauge pencils that might accommodate these vintage bits. One was in red, which is useful when I grade student papers, and the other appears to be copying pencil lead, which I will likely avoid using. The problem was that none of my current pencils accommodated them. They were larger than .9mm but smaller than 2mm.
What I found in my searchers were these specimens: a 1.1mm Autopoint and a 1.3mm Staedtler. The Autopoint turned out to do the trick, and I have since learned that this brand makes quite the name for itself in the neo-vintage market.
They even appear to use the same technology for their advancing mechanisms that were used in the earliest mechanical pencils many decades ago. I was only able to find a “Jumbo” Autopoint for sale anywhere, but would love to get my hands on a standard-sized one eventually.
The Staedtler 1.3mm was thus just an extra bonus. Whilst I find it to be a comfortable pencil, I find at this diameter the lead is just a bit too wide for everyday writing.
Interestingly, I also stumbled onto an old Soviet/Ukrainian mechanical pencil on Ebay recently, and it uses the exact same leads (both the length and the 1.1mm diameter) as the Autopoints. I also much prefer its size and build, though it’s a much more fussy mechanism to reload.
Finally, I had some other old leads from an auction that were larger than my 2mm clutch pencils could accommodate, but smaller than the 5.6mm Koh-i-Noor clutch chalk-holder I have. I ordered a couple 3mm-ish mechanical pencils from Cult Pens: the 3mm Caran d’Ache Fixpencil, and also my first foray into the fat and stubby world of Kaweco.
Both of these did the trick on the old leads, and also seemed to accommodate Faber-Castell’s “3.15mm”-labeled leads, so I now feel I pretty much have every iteration of the different mechanical pencil types I’m likely to want. Again, not sure how much I’ll use most of these in the future, but it’s nice to know I have them just in case….
