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...

Dave has a post all about sketch pencils - leadholders taking very thick leads - over 5mm in some cases. I've got a couple of pencils that probably count - Pilot Croquis, and one from Boldmere, who I've otherwise never heard of. Nice solid thing, though.

Not quite sure where these should fit in (I think the Croquis has gone under Mechanical Pencils), but I'll pop this here for now and work it out later...