I’ve been reading through SD archives, and bumped into the discussion of pencil hardnesses How come you see #2 pencils but no #1 pencils? - The Straight Dope . For some weird reason I’ve always been a packrat with writing instruments, so that immediately got my juices flowing. At one time I used to carry tens and own nearer to two thousand pens, pencils, crayons, and so on, all different. I even went as far as to make a couple of quills and actually use them…
Of all of that what really got under my teachers’ skins were the automatic pencils. At that time you could still find a full complement of thicknesses and hardnesses, so that’s pretty much what I had. And as Cecil says, HB is good compromise for writing – the implication being that the rest of them are less so.
So you can imagine what happened when I started turning in my assignments at 0.9mm 6B. You can read it, yes, but it’s thick, black as night and it easily rubs of the paper. If you put your finger on the text and swipe, it’s replaced by a black smudge in one go. You’ll also leave visible finger prints all over for the next hour or two. Apparently people have lost their ability to handle text by the margins, because eventually I was asked to switch in no uncertain terms.
The replacement of course was 0.3mm 4H. That’s so ridiculously hard, light and thin that if you’re suffering from the slightest touch of presbyopia, you pretty much can’t see the text on paper. That particular experiment I had to cut short myself: with my coordination the lead would break once in a sentence at normal writing pace.
It’s too bad most of those exotic kinds of pencils eventually broke or were lost. I’d love to have at least some of the spectrum still.
i love automatic pencils, and drafters pens - i went looking for some seriously fine drafting markers that one used to be able to buy in staples and office max type stores and couldnt find them - ill have to look online for them.
I wonder if the different automatic pencils and leads are available online…
Long ago and not so far away, I had a job where we’d carefully study ancient undocumented software, hand-write draft documentation and design plans (for the replacement for this ancient undocumented software), photocopy our notes for the 5 other members of the team, and hand them around in working meetings.
My colleagues (who, this being a military organization, were also my superiors in the rank structure) ordered me to stop using my .3m 2H mechanical pencil for my note-taking, because it wouldn’t photocopy worth crap. I never really noticed I was essentially handing out nearly-blank photocopy docs. :smack:
I still like and use that pencil, 25 years later. But not for stuff that might be photocopied.
All that stuff is readily available at artist’s stores. Dick Blick is a good source both online & in person if they have a store near you. http://www.dickblick.com/