Latest Update: Added some brief notes on the Faber-Castell e-Motion, and the Caran d’Ache Fixpencil, and a link to an article I’ve spent a lot of time working on recently – The Cult Pens Guide to Mechanical Pencils.

• For more information about mechanical pencils than you can shake a stick at, go read The Cult Pens Guide to Mechanical Pencils. I know it’s good, because I wrote most of it, with lots of help and suggestions.
• See also: Pencil Hardness: What those letters and number mean – HB, 4B, 2H, etc.

Some of these link to full reviews of our own, and some link to reviews elsewhere (especially Dave’s Mechanical Pencils.) Others just have a few notes. We get to try lots of pens and pencils now, but don’t get chance to fully review them all. Most of the ones we’ve tried are via Cult Pens, Michael’s employer. Opinions here are entirely our own, etc.

Types

There’s two main types of mechanical pencils – Leadholders and Automatic pencils…

Automatic Pencils

These are the type most people are familiar with now – usually quite thin lead, with a clicking mechanism operated by a button at the top. The most common ones around today take 0.5mm leads.

Leadholders

Relatively unusual these days, leadholders have been around a long time – in fact, early leadholders were around before pencils. Some sort of clutch mechanism grips the lead in place inside a tube, usually made of plastic or metal.

Specific Models

Bic

• Matic – We’ve not tried any Bic pencils ourselves, but our comrades over in the revolution have just posted a review of the Bic Matic. Cheap, but good and useable. Sounds quite similar to the Pilot Super Grip, but without the grip, and with a plastic tip.

Caran d’Ache

• Fixpencil – I’d never even seen one of these before, but Cult Pens managed to get hold of some. The mechanism doesn’t feel as over-engineered as the Staedtler Mars 780, and it’s much lighter. For me, the Staedtler is still the nicer pencil, but if you prefer a smoother grip or a lighter weight, or just need something that doesn’t look quite so retro-geek, it’s a very nice pencil, and takes the same lead as the 780.

Faber-Castell

• e-Motion – a thick pencil with thick lead. Takes 1.4mm lead, and twists to advance, as most mechanical pencils used to years ago. You can fully control how much lead is exposed, and the thick lead runs very little risk of breaking. Good for quick scribbling, but not so good for detailed work, as it’s tricky to keep a good point on it. I handled a couple of these when working on the Cult Pens guide mentioned above, and ended up buying one. I keep it handy all the time, as it’s be best thing around for quick notes. (Available, of course, at Cult Pens.)
• Grip 2011 at Dave’s. One that goes against everything Dave likes in a pencil, but he ends up liking it anyway. A bit like Staedtler’s Mars 780 for me, I suppose. I’ve only had a quick ‘feel’ of one of these, but it has nice balance, and a good solid feel to it. It has a nice width, too, and I think it would be very comfortable. I’d expected it to feel a bit cheaper than it actually does.
• Grip Plus – Sam’s favourite. A nice comfortable pencil for doing a lot of drawing.
• TK-Fine Vario – soft or hard – how do you like it? Some mechanical pencils have cushioned lead, so it gives a bit as you write. Others don’t. Soft is usually good for writing, hard for drafting. Drawing probably depends on your style and preferences. Well, the TK-Fine Vario can do either. I’m actually not all that impressed with this feature, but it does seem to make writing feel a bit smoother, whilst still letting you press on as hard as you need to when you’re drawing really dark stuff. Apart from that feature, though, it’s a really nice pencil. Not cheap, but not too expensive, either. It’s a shame the tip isn’t retractable, as that limits how you can carry it, but it does have a really nice balance to it, with the centre of gravity good and low. Add a twist-up eraser that’s quite effective, and the classy Faber-Castell green and metal styling, and I actually really like it. £7.50 from Cult Pens. (The 0.5mm is on the site, 0.3mm should be along soon. Other grades should be coming later.)
  • Update: After a bit more use, I’m less impressed – still feels great to hold, but the grip is a bit too slippery for me in use. The shiny metal lets my fingers slide down, and I find I keep having to reposition – Pentel’s GraphGear 1000 is much better from that point of view. If only it was knurled. Nothing beats knurled metal, plus ‘knurled’ is just a fantastic word.

Lamy

Lamy are best known for their fountain pens – one of the few independent companies still making such things, I think. They do a few interesting ballpoints and mechanical pencils too.

• Lamy 2000 – the fountain pen version is one of my regular objects of drooling. Maybe if we find ourselves with a bit of spare cash at some point, I’ll get to try one out. Anyway, I’ve not tried the pencil version either, but it’s another of Dave’s favourites, so you can read all about it there.
• Lamy Scribble – a dumpy little thing, which rather appeals to me, but not one I’ve had chance to try yet. Dave has, and wrote about it on Pencil Revolution. He’s also written a bit about a ‘day in the life‘ of his Scribble, taking it with him to do conservation work near where he lives in New Zealand.

PaperMate

• Technician II – a guest review on Dave’s Mechanical Pencils. Eric does like his PaperMate.

Pentel

• EZ#2 AX17 – not one I’ve even seen around here, but Dave has reviewed it. A very cheap, but reasonably decent pencil.
• Sharp P205 – we’ve not tried one, but Dave has, so go read his review. It’s a fairly basic, but very well made pencil.
• GraphGear 500 – one I’ve only played with briefly. Very similar to the GraphGear 1000, but with a plastic barrel, and without the retracting tip. Because the whole top end is so much lighter, I actually find the 500 better balanced for my tastes than the 1000. Quite similar in a lot of ways to Faber-Castell’s TK-Fine Vario. The switchable lead cushioning on the Vario is a nice touch, though, and I prefer F-C’s styling.
• GraphGear 1000 – solid and metal, with fully retracting tip. Looks cool too.
• Kerry – more class than most. Resembles a nice pen more than a pencil. Convenient and totally pocket safe. I love my Kerry.

Pilot

• Birdie – very thin, but surprisingly solid. If you need something to fit in a Filofax or notebook pen loop, the Birdie is nice and shiny.
• Super Grip – cheap and cheerful, but works really nicely.
• Easy-Lead – a slightly odd sort of lead – soft, black, and slightly squeaky.
• H32 – a ‘professional’ pencil from Pilot. See the photos on its page at Cult Pens, but don’t take too much notice – in the pictures, it looks a bit cheap and plastic to me. The reality is better – looks and feels quite good. I’d have bought one if there had been a 0.3mm on the shelf at the time, but I really wanted to try a 0.3, so I grabbed a Staedtler Mars Micro instead.

• The Shaker – just shake to advance the lead – a meh answer to a question I never heard anyone ask.

• Croquis- thick, thick lead, for sketching. Nice dumpy shape – not good if you like a long bodied pencil, but I like it.

Rotring

• Core – by Dave’s Mechanical Pencils. A bit of a nasty-looking thing. Good and grippy, but I think there’s better looking pencils around for the money. Unless you like that ‘extreme sportz’ look.
• Tikky II – a fairly small update to the classic Tikky. I only actually own an old Tikky, but I’ve tried the new one, and it’s very similar. At an RRP of £2.19, these things are great value (even better – only £1.99 at Cult Pens). Apart from the lack of a retractable tip, they’re as solid-feeling and reliable as almost anything else. I’m not keen on the grip, personally, but at that price, it’s not too much to risk.
• Newton – another review at Dave’s Mechanical Pencils. This Newton is actually a three-in-one pen and pencil. Personally, I had a lot of trouble with the pencil mechanisms in the very similar Quattro Data Pen snapping leads, so I couldn’t recommend either of these if you mainly want a good pencil, but they’re very handy, and you get three or four ‘devices’ in a single pen that’s no thicker than a normal pen.

Schmidt

• Schmidt Converter at Dave’s Mechanical Pencils – a mechanical pencil built in the shape of a Parker ballpoint refill, so in theory you can use any ‘parker-compatible’ ballpoint you happen to like as a mechanical pencil. Doesn’t work with all of them in practice, but it’s still an interesting idea.

Staedtler

• Triplus Micro – Cult Pens sent me one to try, and I wasn’t all that impressed. Dave has tried the same pencil, though, and really liked it. Just shows how much tastes can differ. It’s a very good eraser, especially for such a slim pencil, and the triangular shape does make it quite pleasant to hold. I can’t quite work out why I’m not keen on it, but they’re reasonably cheap, so it might be worth a try – see if your tastes are more like Dave’s or mine. I want to say that I don’t like it because it’s so long and thin, but the 780 is more so, and I love that one.
• Mars 780 Leadholder – an old favourite of mine. Long and thin, which I usually don’t like, but there’s just something nice about the 780 and its 2mm leads.
• Mars Micro – I’ve always liked Staedtler stuff, and when I wanted to try a 0.3mm pencil, it was a Mars Micro I ended up with. I wasn’t too impressed on the whole. You get a lot for the money (£3.80 at Cult Pens, £4.25 RRP) – a rubber grip, and a retractable tip. The balance is good, and the grip isn’t bad. Retracting the tip is surprisingly hard work, though, and prone to snapping the lead. After only a few minutes of trying it out, mine stopped working entirely. It turned out that snapped lead had jammed its mechanism. Unscrewing the tip and feeding a lead through the guide tube cleaned it out, and it works again now, but it doesn’t seem as well made as some others. If you don’t need a retractable tip, I think the Rotring Tikky II is better value. If you do, and you want a ‘drafting style’ tip, I’d spend the extra for something else – a Pentel GraphGear 1000, perhaps – or even save a bit and go for the cheap-but-decent Pilot Super Grip (0.5mm only). Part of the problem may be that this is the first 0.3mm pencil I’ve used, and they’re bound to be more prone to snapping.
• Graphite 779 – at Dave’s again. Looks fairly run-of-the-mill, but it’s got an ‘auto-advance’ feature that Dave reckons actually works ok.

Uni-ball

Uni-ball is the Mitsubishi Pencil Company.

• Shalaku DX – the button is on the side, not the top. Unusual design that works ok, but I’d still go for Pilot’s Super Grip if it’s a cheap one you’re after.

Mechanical Pencil Leads

Dave’s Mechanical Pencils has done some thorough testing, in the form of running a World Cup for pencil leads. If you just want to know who the final winner is, you could just skip to the end, but you’d be missing out on some quality entertainment…

• Pool A: Pentel, Parker, Staedtler and Student’s Choice.
• Pool B: Faber-Castell, Rotring, Waterman and Zebra.
• Pool C: Caran d’Ache, Cross, Micro and Mont Blanc.
• Pool D: Insung Hands, Lamy, Papermate and Pilot.
• Elimination Round: I won’t give the game away by sayint who is in the other rounds, but there’s a strong showing from the Japanese ready for the Semi-Finals.
• Semi-Finals: One expected result, one unexpected.
• The Final: Where the winner is declared. No great surprise to me – it’s been my favourite for a long time, though to be honest, I use whatever we happen to have. Unless I’m testing side-by-side, I can’t tell the difference.
• The Review: Dave takes a look back on the testing, and shares his thoughts on the results and the people who think he’s mad.

Refilling

It’s pretty easy with most modern (clicky) pencils, but quite a few older pencils used odd twist-to-advance mechanisms, and needed filling in some odd ways. Dave explains further.

Other Resources

• The Quest for the Best in Mechanical Pencils at MetaFilter – lots of suggestions for good pencils. Found via Slow Burn Productions.
• Dave’s Mechanical Pencils – an excellent blog all about automatic pencils. Dave tests different pencils and leads regularly, and struggles to overcome his dislike for rubber grips. A few of the reviews listed above are at Dave’s – no point in us both reviewing the same pencils, unless we just happen to have one around.

Leadholder.com

Leadholder.com is the online drafting pencil museum, and if you’re a bit of a pencil geek, it’s utterly fascinating. I’ve just spent an alarming amount of time there, and I’m nowhere near finished yet. There’s leadholders in here dating back to 1860, right up to current models.

In addition to the actual museum, there’s a nicely written history of leadholders and the development of the clutch mechanisms – more interesting than it sounds. Even if you are a pencil geek and you already think it does sound interesting.

My Staedtler Mars 780 is there, along with the history of its model range, even down to left handed variants (left handed pencil? Yes – the printing is the other way up so you can still read it.) Some of the Caran d’Ache pencils in the specialist section are quite beautiful designs, but part of the criteria for being a real drafting pencil is to be made to be used, not looked at.

My favourites in the museum? Well, I’ve still got a soft spot for my Mars 780, but mainly because it’s available. The prettiest and most solid-looking ones take the award for me – the David Hayward Design pencils. A solid, usable pencil that looks amazing.

• Leadholder.com – online drafting pencil museum.
• David Hayward Design Pencils.

Thanks to Dennis for letting me know about the site in a comment on my Pilot Croquis picture on Flickr.

Latest Update: Added a geekier alternative to the wine glass stem charms.

• Geeky Wine Glass Stem Charms from Evil Mad Scientist Labs. Made from old LEDs, resistors, etc. Nice. Geeks can have friends too. (Found via ReadyMade Blog.)
• Light-up Coasters – made from clear plastic, with LEDs inside, wired up so they glow when you put a drink on them. Handy if you party in the dark. (Via Gizmodo.)
• Napkin Folding 101 – Some useful links from Lifehacker – including designs to sit in wine glasses, stand up on a plate, and to hold the cutlery.
• Wine Glass Stem Charms – those things you can attach to the stems of wine glasses so people can identify their glass when they’ve left it lying around. (Thanks to Make:.)

Moleskines and Cute – together at last.

Here is a little more instruction on reaching squeevana. Today I thought about things that shouldn’t have happened, to me and to my special friend. It sucks when bad things happen and you can’t do anything about it. You have to cry sometimes. And I did. When that happens to you, when you finish crying or worrying, or whatever bad thing, don’t despair – just squee!!

Now go put on some music. I just finished listening to Emerald Eyes…oh my good god…what a fabulous song, and it’s all Jimmy. No singing, just my favorite thing in all the world, beautiful luscious Jimmy with no interruptions…guess where I am about to go??

Grab a pic! Oooo…look at this beautiful man. Now there is something that can take the rain and turn it into sun! Turn lemons into lemonade! Put a rainbow in the sky! He’s like a big yummy piece of chocolate that melts in your mouth! He’s yummier than plum yogurt, strawberries and cream, yummier than the yummiest thing you can ever dream!

All this hotness AND when he has a guitar in those gorgeous hands it’s a squeemergency! And if he gets that bow out, then it’s death by squee!!

Oh Jimmy Page…you are a masterpiece! Everything good rolled up into one perfect package of heavenly dynamite!! BOOOM!!! The Jimmy squee bomb has gone off…

…”Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, …for Jimmy Page omnipotent reigneth…

SQUEEVANA!!!! WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

A few treats for you here. First one needs no introduction:

And here’s some Aerosmith for you…

and finally, this’ll take you back ..

Happy Birthday, WOTW!

Oh Squeevana, the place where those of us who squee want to be! It’s a place where you are floating on a cloud of perfect serenity; brought on by the afterglow of a squee so massive it propelled you into ecstasy with your guitar boy in tow…ahhhhh…

It’s not so hard to get there. Practice of course makes it easier to reach. You see, over the years as Jimmy got hotter and hotter and I fell more and more susceptible to his innumerable charms, it just got easier to reach moments where he got me so excited and delirious I felt myself separating from earth and traveling away to Jimmy heaven. You can do it too! Come on – grab anything about the man you find brings on the biggest squee for you and let’s take a journey. You all know who I’m taking. I do apologize for going on and on about Pagey, but, what can I say? That gorgeous man has owned me since the 70’s and no one trips my trigger like he does. So once again, if Le Sex doesn’t do it for you, remove him in my lesson and insert your hottie where necessary.

My first Squeevana moment happened after I saw a picture of Jimmy in a fan magazine a long time ago. I can’t recall exactly which it was, but something like this:

I know it would have been something like this because any pic of his chest dripping hot makes me wild. As soon as I saw it I felt this flash of heat go through me and I let out this massive squeal. It was totally involuntary, my mouth just fell open and out it came! This pic is such a massive hit of Pagey Doll yumminess, it just whooshed my brain off to a lovely place…Has that ever happened to you? That’s Squeevana! Stealth squee is the best for whisking you away there. It’s that unexpected surprise that overwhelms you and makes it easier for you to let go. If your babe does that for you Squeevana is easily in your grasp! Jimmy’s good at that, causing me to let go. I just can’t keep it together under the force of a Jimmy sneak attack – like browsing a magazine and coming across a new pic of him, or he happens to be on TV. Oh when he appeared to pick up his UK Hall of Fame award late last year he nearly killed me with all his gorgeousness – that sexy sexy silver hair!!! Ahhhh!!! OMG HE’S HOTTER THAN THE SUN! Surprises like that are guaranteed to send me off.

One night several years ago while I was learning to use the internet, I landed on this site about Zeppelin that I started to read. I didn’t know it, but it had a sound bite of Jimmy talking in it. All of the sudden his voice comes on and he says something like ‘it’s time to get the Led out.’ Waaahhhh!!! That darling sweet as honey voice just made me completely lose it. Nutso. Gone. His voice went straight to my ‘on’ switch and BANG! I found myself in Squeevana.
It kind of works like this:

1. The squee hit – any contact with your Squee creator, sight or sound.
2. Massive squee bomb goes off
3. A halo of glorious light appears and angels start singing the Hallelujah Chorus.
4. Go with that feeling and enter Squeevana.

You have to be familiar with what trips your trigger with your guitar babe to get you to Squeevana without the element of surprise. It’s all down to your senses really…we tend to get stuck on pictures because, well, they are very, very yummy, but don’t forget the music. Oh …put a guitar in the gorgeous hands of Le Sex and the sounds he can coax out of it will send me to Squeenvana so fast it’s scary. I have to be very careful what I am doing listening to him play. Example: taking my daughter to the airport one day I was listening to Zep’s Remasters cd. I was driving into the car park listening to the solo from Stairway. Yes, I’ve heard it about 5 million times, but, it’s JIMMY PAGE and it’s just so fabulous, and that above pic popped into my head and well…I arrived back from Squeevana with my daughter looking at me saying, “Didn’t you hear me? I kept saying you’re going the wrong way! Hello! Earth to mom!” Sadly I had driven into the rental only car park and now had to pay 14 Euros to get out. For a trip to Squeevana with Pagey, it was cheap! You can induce your own Squeevana moments by going back to those things that produced it the first time. Oh watching any Zep dvds is deadly for me…they never fail to bring me there. Or listening to certain bits of his playing that also find their way directly to the aforementioned ‘on’ switch…

So there you have it, Squeevana. That blissful place of deliriously good feeling that blocks out everything except how much pleasure you get from your guitar babe. It’s great! Find something that gets you there, and just let the squee rip! It makes life happier for me to know that no matter what may be happening in my world, just one smile, one sentence, one little piece of playing, practically ANYTHING from the delicious Mr Page and I can be instantly and insanely happy. Who needs drugs, alcohol or any other substitutes? Not we who have mastered the art of squee! Woooo!!!! Now if you’ll excuse me…the Jimmy squee bomb is about to go off…bye!

• Discover Devon

So in they go…

Magnificent. Jeremy “Adler” Clarkson, Richard “Duff” Hammond and James “Dizzy” May.

A bit more fiddling with PigPog’s ads today. I replaced the Chitika ads at the bottom of the page with AuctionAds some time back, but it wasn’t working too well. The ads were theoretically targeted using the page title, but as with similar Chitika ads, our titles rarely work well as keywords. I’ve now implemented AuctionAds as another type of ad we can insert ‘semi-manually’ – we put a simple code into a page, and Drupal turns it into an AuctionAds ad unit. Like this one for “Parker 51″, for example…

If you’re interested in signing up for AuctionAds for your own site, and you go there by clicking the “Ads by AuctionAds” text on the ad above, we’ll get a bonus for signing you up. I think they’ll do well for some types of content. Setting them up is very similar to setting up Chitika ads – they don’t work automatically, so you have to push keywords to them. If you happen to have a site about things that also sell well on eBay, they’re certainly worth trying. Otherwise, maybe not. (Oh, and if you don’t like PigPog and don’t want us to get a cut, you can just go to AuctionAds, and we get nothing. We will be offended, though.)

A bigger change for most people is that I’ve removed the yellow ads from the top of each page. If you don’t remember seeing any yellow ads, either you have ad blocking enabled, or you’re a registered user – we show less ads to registered users, because we love them. I thought they were doing well, because we were making more than we had been ever since I added them. Checking which ads were making the money, though, showed that they weren’t actually doing all that well at all, we were just generally doing a bit better regardless of those.

I’ve added a section to the bottom of each page, too, entitled ‘What Now?’. You should see one at the bottom of this page, unless you’re reading this a couple of weeks later, and I’ve changed my mind again It’s got some links back to main parts of PigPog, and some affiliate links too, for Amazon, DickBlick and ThinkGeek. If you’re not a logged in user, you’ll also get a couple of Amazon ads and a Chitika ShopLinc unit. No idea if they’ll pay off at all. Previous experience of Amazon’s ‘Omakase’ link units hasn’t been good, and I’ve never tried the ShopLink units before. Might be worth a try, though. Since they’re at the bottom of pages, they shouldn’t be too annoying, and you only need to log in to get rid of them anyway.

As usual, any problems or thoughts, feel free to let us know in the comments below…

So then, who did those crazy gawky kids grow up to be?

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Give it up, ladies and gentleman for the one and only Kirk Hammett!

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Hubba, hubba and furthermore, hubba.

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So what happened to this ample-fro’d teen? Well…

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..see what a big ol’ dose of r n’ f-n r can do for you. It’s good for the soul. It was certainly good for the Saul. (badum-tish)

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Come on… the lips on this youngster were a dead giveaway!

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Yes, it’s Steven Tyler! Rock n’ roll’s sexiest grandpa.

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Invisible kid?

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Not anymore. Thank you Mister Hetfield, Sir. Please don’t bite me with those huge teeth of yours.

Meanwhile, in the comments…

The clue in this one is the person who posted it. It was posted by WOTW, so who else could this little cutie be but 8 year old Jimmy Page?

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Thank you to oneidafish for digging out this charming crotch… I mean, young fella. This splendidly-dressed high schooler grew up to become the incomparable Tommy Lee. Marvellous.

Thanks once again to hair-band.com.