Some New Leads

Arne, our man up over in Hamburg, hometown of Rotring and Montblanc, has left a comment or two on this blog, and knowing that I like my leads, he recently sent me a couple of containers of uncommon leads.

First is a container of Pilot ‘Lead For Film’.

I’ve never done any film work so don’t mistake me for someone who really knows what they are talking about, but along with paper, polyester (aka mylar) film was a common draughting substrate. Clear film is dimensionally stable and tear resistant, allows multiple erasings and revisions, and of course allows you to make overlays and you can draw on both sides to enhance artistic effects. Compared to paper it also has better archival and copy-reproduction properties. You can use ordinary lead to draw on film, and many brands claim their leads are suitable for ‘paper and film’ but these special film leads are optimised for drawing on polyester film rather than on paper. I don’t imagine they are big sellers, but for example Pentel USA still offer them, with hardness grades soft, medium and hard, rather than the usual HB scale.

For a quick comparison, I did a bit of scribbling with the Pilot Lead For Film 0.7mm grade H and with Staedtler grade H ‘ordinary’ leads. The film leads really are significantly harder and lighter than Staedtler 'ordinary leads' grade H, so perhaps a film lead H (for Hard) is more like a 3H in ordinary leads.

Right then, moving on, second in the parcel from Hamburg were some 0.3mm leads that are new to me.

Ecobra is a German brand of compasses and other such drawing supplies. Now, the name Ecobra is an acronym and I don’t know how to pronounce it. For example is it 'short syllable – long syllable', evoking imagery of turbans, hypnotic flute music and venomous snakes, or is it 'two equal length syllables', producing mental pictures of environmentally friendly 100% organic cotton supportive undergarments. Either way, here’s Ecobra's current lead offering. Apparently they haven’t offered 2B 0.3mm for 10+ years, so these containers are old Hamburgian treasure hoard.

The Ecobra lead containers look like generic Japanese ‘Sharp Leads’ so I imagine these leads are probably re-labelled standard production from some Japanese lead manufacturer. Arne also most generously sent a 0.3mm pencil to help test drive these leads. Now, before I took them for a quick spin around the block, here’s what I expected to write, “As you might expect with such thin leads in grade 2B they write dark and they wear down quickly.” In reality though I didn’t find them that much different from my Pentel Super Hi-Polymer 0.3mm HB, although you should bear in mind that I am an inexperienced user of 0.3mm leads. Certainly they were darker, although at times it wasn’t as obvious as it appears below.

Strength wise they were a little weaker than Pentel HB, but again it was a rather limited difference. As for wear, yet again less of a difference than I expected so whilst I would say the Ecobra 2B wore down faster, there wasn’t that much in it.

Whilst conducting this test I encountered a rather unusual problem. The Rotring 600 would not feed new leads through from the lead storage magazine. I clicked and clicked, stuck more leads in, shook things around, clicked and clicked, all to no avail. I then decided on the (for me) radical course of disassembly, and immediately discovered the cause of the problem.

All the leads were stuck to the walls of the plastic lead refill magazine by static electricity. I haven’t ever had this problem before. I’m under the impression that the manufacturers put an anti-static additive in the plastic of the refill tubes to eliminate this problem. Maybe this batch of plastic tubing got under-dosed, or Hamburg static multiplies many-fold when transported down under? Well I walked around the house sticking the plastic tube on all the bits of metal I thought might be grounded and it did seem to help, the leads became less inclined to stick to the walls, and with a bit of effort and shaking I could get new ones to feed through into the mechanism. Anyone else ever encountered this sort of problem? Are the extra light 0.3mm sticks of lead more prone to this than heavier thicker sticks?