Failure 3 & The Pelikan BR40 Eraser

Back when I put up my posting on the Caran d’Ache Fixpencil stamp, I wondered which eraser was depicted on the stamp. Roi commented that he thought the eraser was the Pelikan BR40. I didn’t know this particular eraser, and thought that the eraser depicted was a fairly generic style and thus there could be many possibilities. Roi, being a stamp collector, took up the challenge. Just which actual eraser is depicted on the Fixpencil stamp? Initial contacts with Swiss Post customer relations staff seemed promising, but in the end didn’t really achieve much. The Swiss Post website had some information relating to the printers and designers, but attempts to find and contact the stamp designer ended in frustration. So, despite Detective Roi’s dedication and best efforts, ultimately we have failed to confirm the exact eraser on the stamp.

Roi kindly sent me a couple of these Pelikan BR 40 erasers, so here’s a few quick comments on them. Firstly they are a rubber eraser, with one end for pencil and one for ink. When he sent them, Roi commented, “use them gently – the orange end might stain the paper, and the blue one will tear it up!” Now that I’ve tried the eraser I think he was being a little hard on it. The BR40 is a mid size eraser – 60mm long by 20mm wide by a rather thin 8mm thick. The colours are a bit dull, but the black printing on the eraser is very good. It’s a reasonably hard rubber, the blue end does feel a little more abrasive than the orange end. Erasing HB lead with the orange (graphite) end it did a fairly reasonable job, although it certainly leaves its fair share of eraser waste behind.

The blue end is for erasing ink, and I was actually mildly impressed. I haven’t got any real frame of reference for comparison, except I seem to recall that when I was back in primary school I thought these ink erasers were utterly useless. It certainly did do some abrasive damage to the paper, but it got the ink off. Perhaps modern inks are a bit drier and more erasable than the ballpoint inks of my school-days? Anyway, I started with rather low expectations of this eraser and was pleasantly surprised.

Photo: The word “Cross” was written in ballpoint at the end of the eraser. Just the last 's' is left un-erased.

So, all that remains now is a lightning commando raid on Swiss Post headquarters, the Swiss Postmaster-General will be cornered in his office, and the truth will finally be revealed.

Footnote: Pelikan are a big player in the luxury writing instrument market, and they have plenty of mechanical pencils. I’m sure you will be surprised to hear that I have a few Pelikans packed away downstairs, so I will have to get organised and get a few out for review. Rather bad of me to not have reviewed any so far.

Footnote 2: Detective Roi has come up with another lead, stay tuned.

An Early Finish?

I normally try to post something substantial every week, but the end of year rush and madness seems to have arrived early this year, so this blog is now officially on the back-burner until mid January or so. I do have a couple of postings that are almost complete so I will publish them over the next few weeks, but things will be a bit erratic.

A Colour or Two

Some of the research material in my search for good blue and other coloured leads.

Note the 8 different colours of Pilot Eno Color at the bottom of the photo.

Delta Dolcevita Medium Mechanical Pencil Review

Delta Dolcevita Medium Mechanical Pencil Review

I’m generally predisposed to think of Italian products as being of superior design and quality. To date my only review of an Italian pencil has been the Parafernalia Revolution, which was not an entirely complementary review, and this has always left me with a sense of unfinished business, that there are other Italian pencils out there, and I should at least give Italy a chance to even up their scorecard. It is therefore with much anticipation that I awaited the arrival of my Delta Dolcevita Medium Pencil, and its use as my pencil of the week – or even longer!

La Dolcevita – literally “The Sweet Life” or The Good Life as we more commonly say in English. Some might equate that to the saying about “Wine, women and song”. Now I’ve certainly got nothing against any of that, but there is plenty of the Good Life in other things, like for instance “Rugby, beer and pencils”!

Just a note about the photographs in this review. I had a lot of trouble capturing the colour and contrast of Dolcevita, and consequently a lot of these photos make it look a bit washed out - lighter and yellower than it really is. In real life it is a nice bright medium orange colour. Very bright and sunny. Very attractive.
First impressions then. The pencil arrives in a bright orange card box, about 155 x 140mm x 32mm thick. Inside the box is a plush presentation case which is covered in black velvet on the outside, and tan leather and black velvet on the inside. Inside the presentation case is the pencil, along with a small booklet extolling the glory of Delta and the Dolcevita collection – fountain pen, roller ball, ballpoint pen and mechanical pencil, all in several different sizes, e.g. small, medium, oversize, etc. I imagine I have missed out on another instruction sheet, as this Delta booklet seems a bit light on instructions like how to fill your fountain pen, change the rollerball refill, etc. More specifically, it contains no instructions on how to operate the pencil. Luckily I’ve owned enough pencils to figure it out, but I’d imagine a lot of folk would be a bit perplexed.
Onto the pencil itself – well it’s pretty good looking too. Big solid shiny black resin cap with silver metal trims, bright orange marble resin body and black tip with metal trims. The black caps of Delta instruments are individually sequentially numbered, mine being number 12146 to roll off the assembly line. The main cap-ring is made from 0.925 sterling silver, hand engraved in reproduction of an old Roman décor featured in paintings from the ruins of Pompeii. There are also some hallmarks on the silver ring. This silver central ring really does look antique, and certainly reinforces the general air of languid opulence that hangs around this pencil. Although it couldn’t have actually happened, I have no trouble imagining Fellini using a Dolcevita to sketch scenes for La Dolce Vita, well you get the imagery anyway.

Despite the lack of instructions, I can tell you this pencil is a twist action mechanism, you wind the whole cap around to advance or retract the lead. The whole cap also pulls off to reveal a small rubber eraser, and in turn the eraser pulls off to reveal the lead storage chamber. However, this is just storage, you refill the 0.9mm lead in through the tip like the pencils of old. How the average punter is supposed to figure this out I just don’t know, hence my suspicion that I missed out on some instruction sheet or booklet. The Delta website doesn’t seem to have any instructions, well at least not in any place I found with a quick scan through the site.

The pocket clip is platinum plated, and features an actual roller at the end to help it on and off your pocket, providing extra protection for those expensive shirts and suits. Yes, it works rather well. As there is no protruding lead sleeve, the pencil tip is reasonably pocket safe. In the hand this pencil is definitely “substantial”. It’s a bit shorter than average, fairly heavy, top heavy, the cap is quite wide – all these combine to ensure you feel like you have a real handful of pencil, and the 0.9mm lead supplied glides smoothly over the paper. The resin body is very smooth and shiny, but the grip is still quite good. However, I imagine things could change if you were sitting at the caffé, sipping Campari, sweltering under the Mediterranean sun. I like the orange marbled body, but one thing I don’t like is that because the resin body is translucent, the lower part of it is darkened by the threaded section of the black tip screwed up inside the orange body. I feel sure they could have done something to keep the colour constant.

Well, in conclusion, for a pencil, this is a nice piece of luxury or jewellery. I’m glad to own and use it.

• Best Points – This pencil definitely has character.
• Not So Good Points – The lack of instructions about lead refilling, locating the eraser, etc. The discolouration of the orange body down at the tip.
• Price Range – Stratospheric.

Dimensions – Length 138mm, diameter 11mm main body, 15mm at cap-ring. Balance point about 75mm up from the tip.

I took my Dolcevita away with us on a holiday weekend as part of this Good Life review; maybe it brought us luck, as we got upgraded to the penthouse suite at the Hyatt. Swweeeet - the Good Life alright - our hotel “room” was pretty much the same size as our house, and it had more bathrooms!

Photo - a page from my notebook, a quick sketch of part of the view from one of the penthouse balconies.

So, now our household has two important little possessions from Italy, one for each of us, His and Hers as it were – “Dolcevita & The Discus Thrower”

The Mysterious Kotobuki

There’s a lurker in the shadows.

Pentel, Pilot, Papermate, Staedtler, Faber-Castell – all familiar names, all significant players in the mechanical pencil industry, along with many others I haven’t mentioned. Off to the side though, in the “peripheral shadows” of the industry there are the component and contract manufacturers, less well known names like Schmidt and Gutberlet. But also lurking in these shadows there is a giant, a “600-pound gorilla”, the mysterious Kotobuki of Japan. If Pentel are the leader, the big boy of mechanical pencils, then Kotobuki are probably the ones keeping them on their toes.

Now, Kotobuki are one of those shy gorillas, so my knowledge of them is very sketchy and very limited. Much of what little I know is from “Japan and the Mechanical Pencil” (Dec. 2000) an Economics 230 paper by J Gregory, Colorado College. Web searches reveal a few other snippets here and there about Kotobuki, and my pencil contacts in Japan tell me that Kotobuki don’t even have a Japanese website.

So, what do we know about Kotobuki? Well from 1976 to 2000 there were 167 United States patents granted that relate to mechanical pencils. 117 (70%) of these US patents were granted to Japanese entities, and the two largest of the Japanese were Pentel with 28 patents and…you guessed it, Kotobuki with a surprising 37 patents, that’s 22% of all US patents were Kotobuki’s, making them the biggest “patenter” by far.

I found an online patent website, and looked up Kotobuki’s USA patents for the last 10 years (1997 onwards). From the patent header descriptions there were 15 Kotobuki patents for “mechanical pencils”, 10 for “double-chuck mechanisms for mechanical pencils”, 31 for “writing instruments” and 9 for “stick mechanisms”, e.g. cosmetic or eraser sticks. The late 90’s and early 00’s seem to be the time of most double-clutch mechanism activity.

Now patents certainly don’t necessarily equate to company size, but it does show who is busy trying to be inventive and innovative. You don’t keep all that R&D effort going for long periods of time if you aren’t a big player in the game. Trust me, on the list of patents most of the pencil brands you are familiar with are conspicuous by their absence or rarity.

Back in 2000 or so, Kotobuki had about 150 employees, that’s about 1/10th the number of Pentel employees, but they were much more narrowly focused on pencils, so the size difference is exaggerated. Ever seen a pencil branded Kotobuki? Thought not. Well actually I’ve got one, but that’s a story for another day. Obviously the vast majority of Kotobuki’s output is sold under other peoples brandnames. 10 bucks says many a Papermate, Staedtler or whatever started out in a Kotobuki factory. In Malaysia though, there is the PENAC Group who are the Kotobuki distributor for SE Asia. Their website claims Kotobuki has 700 employees and produces 1 million writing instruments per day. Other business information sites list the brand “PENAC” as being owned by Kotobuki. In Europe it appears Standardgraph distribute some Kotobuki product.

So, who knows who really makes what these days? Take a look at the Staedtler USA website and you will see they source a lot of their product from Staedtler Japan, but most of Staedtler’s other international operations don’t seem to have much Staedtler Japan product. Now, take a look at these two pencils (thanks Mark) – firstly the Staedtler-USA Elite 9705, made in Japanand now the Faber-Castell Grip 1335/37.
Oh yeah, look familiar? (Anyone out there actually got both these pencils? Are they totally identical?) So did both Staedtler and Faber-Castell independently design the same pencil, did one copy the other, is one making it for the other, is a third-party manufacturer making it for them both…?

Go looking elsewhere and you’ll find plenty of mix and match pencils, maybe even the “Staedtler 9705 – FC 1335/37” under yet more brandnames – take the pocket clip off that brand X pencil, put it on that brand Y one, and hey, it’s the same pencil. Or swap the end-caps over, and hey presto, two become one. So in many cases even though X and Y are both well known companies, either they didn’t make their own pencils or one of them is manufacturing for its opposition. Actually in most industries there are lots of contract manufacturers, and even the big boys buy some finished products from contract manufacturers and just have their brand applied to it. Sometimes decades of corporate deals and takeovers lead to crazy circumstances where a manufacturer’s exclusive agent in one country is the direct competitor of his agent in another country, and so on. Totally confused? – me too.

Hmmm, lately I seem to be writing posts about stuff I don’t know, rather than about stuff I do know.

Faber-Castell Grip Matic 1375 Mechanical Pencil Review

Faber-Castell Grip Matic 1375 Mechanical Pencil Review

Look, don’t ask me why, I can’t really explain it even to myself, but whenever I look at a German pencil and read “Made in China”, well, it just doesn’t sit right. Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not implying anything about inferior products standards in China, nor am I necessarily against international trade and subsidiary companies…see I can’t explain it, but it just doesn’t strike me as “right”. Putting that nagging incongruity to one side, let’s have a little about the Grip Matic.

Well, it’s a very lightweight plastic pencil, it surprises me nearly every time I pick it up just how light it is. Mine is a rather attractive fluorescent transparent green main body. It certainly stands out. The grip section is round rubber with grooves. There’s not much give in the rubber, but it is slightly “grippy”, so overall it does improve the grip. But its pretty marginal. The pocket clip is plastic, in a wave shape. Its quite good looking, but not quite so effective as an actual clip! Interestingly the faber-Castell website depicts a different pocket clip shape – a plain curved one.

The twist out eraser is a feature of this pencil. It’s a fairly hard vinyl compound, about 4mm (1/6 inch) diameter with 9m of usable length. The twist mechanism is a little disappointing. The eraser doesn’t actually move in or out - the eraser is fixed and it’s the covering sleeve that winds up or down to expose or cover the eraser. I feel a little short changed by it - compared to other twist eraser cartridges this one is no where near as satisfying winding in and out, over and over in a boring meeting!

Photo – eraser sleeve twisted out.
Photo – eraser sleeve twisted right in. Note how it is visible back down inside the green body.

You pull the eraser and sleeve off to access the lead refill chamber. My pencil is 0.5mm lead, but there is also 0.7mm available (the 1377!). The lead advance mechanism is an ordinary push top ratchet. 10 clicks to advance a might 12mm of lead. That’s a lot more than normal. The lead sleeve is a short tapering plastic cone suited for general writing rather than draughting work. The tip is retractable for pocket safety.

Despite all the lead clicking in the paragraph above, the Grip Matic is an automatic or auto-advancing pencil. When I’m using a pencil for review I keep a few notes to help write the review later on. Here’s one part of my notes regarding the auto-advance. “Auto-advance. It works. Really works. Feeds out smoothly – no “plunging” as with other auto-advancers. Lead sleeve is plastic – glides smoothly across paper – no dragging or scraping like some other auto-advancers”. Well, that’s pretty high praise from me. Unfortunately it didn’t last. Something happened and the dreaded “plunging” started to occur. It’s just so annoying. The whole tip sort of plunging back into the pencil, you just can’t write with any precision or constancy at all. Manually clicking mechanism to “start again” generally seems to help. Sometimes the plunging comes back, sometimes it doesn’t. So annoying, because when the auto-advance is working well, it’s great. One thing about auto-advancers is that they only allow a very minimal length of lead out of the tip, so lead breakages are very rare.

Overall then, a little bit of a mixed bag.

• Best Points – The fluoro barrel. When it’s working well, the automatic lead feed is good.
• Not So Good Points – When it’s not working well, the automatic lead feed is not good.
• Price Range – Low.

Dimensions – Length 148mm, diameter 10mm body. Balance point about 60mm up from the tip.

Disclaimer – this pencil was a freebie from Cult Pens over in the UK.