He kona ra 2008 (Goodbye 2008)
Hang loose [like the moose?] in 2009
2009 going to be a good year, kei ti pai (OK)
Stress free. 
Out of its packaging the Integrity is a reasonably good looking mechanical pencil. Nothing outstanding, but the clean simple lines and the black and chrome colour scheme go well together. Overall the look is both a little technical and business executive.
The pencil is of average weight and of course has a rubber grip. The grip is round with grooves cut into it that make it slightly triangular in cross-section. The rubber compound does have some grip factor and it is slightly soft to the touch. The grooves add another factor and as far as rubber grips go this is probably one of the better ones. Maybe I am going soft in my old age? Only a year or two ago I would have hated this rubber grip. I still don’t like them, but I’m a bit more objective now.
The pocket clip is a plain but efficient looking piece of chrome metal. It works quite well. Also up at the top end of the pencil we have the twist out eraser. The blister card trumpets a free 1 ¼ inch long replacement eraser. For those of us outside the USA, it is 33mm long and 3.7mm diameter, but only about 26mm of the length is usable. It is a reasonably efficient compound. I would normally have said it was a vinyl eraser, but I have recently come to believe there are some very vinyl looking “PVC-free” (i.e. non-vinyl) plastic eraser compounds around. Like most of these twistable erasers it erases relatively well, and the slim diameter core is good for precise rather than bulk area erasing.
The lead advance mechanism is a push top ratchet system. The eraser cartridge is the “push top” button and you pull the whole eraser cartridge out to access the lead refill chamber. Ten clicks of the mechanism will get you just under 7mm of lead. Now, the real feature of this mechanism, and indeed the whole pencil, is the double-clutch mechanism. You may well say “So what?” to all of this, but most mechanical pencil mechanisms are quite wasteful of lead. It varies, but usually they won’t advance the last 8 to 12mm of lead and you have to start a new stick. With a standard 60mm long stick of lead that’s around about 1/6th or 16% wastage.
The Integrity’s double clutch system holds the lead right up inside the pencil as normal, but also a second chuck grips the lead right down at the tip and enables 97.5% lead usage. What seems to happen is that as your lead nears its end, the next stick of lead feeds into the mechanism and continues to push the first stick out. Thus the mechanism will advance the whole stick and you get to use virtually its entire length. However, when you are on your last stick of lead and the refill chamber is empty, there is no new stick to push on the old one, and the lead will stop advancing with about 14mm of lead still inside the mechanism.
The lead sleeve is a short cone, suitable for writing but not draughting, and is not retractable. However it is not a particularly sharp point so the Integrity is not totally unsafe in your pocket. The sleeve is of course part of the double clutch. When you activate the lead advance it extends out slightly and splits apart slightly to advance the lead. It is actually a little set of jaws, not just a lead guide or holder as on most other pencils. 
This double clutch mechanism does theoretically allow close to 100% use of your lead, but I personally felt I had many more lead breakages than normal, so I am not convinced that it actually achieved more words per stick of lead than normal.
Marked on the barrel in silver lettering we have, “Staedtler 9505 0.5mm Pencil Japan”. Full marks for precise identification.
Dimensions – Length 146mm, diameter main body 9mm. Balance point about 75mm up from the tip.
For a full high-res version of the above photo you can click on this link to Flickr. Should have done some dusting before photographing it ! Live and learn.
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