Cheap mechanical pencils can be refilled with colored lead

Originally published at: Cheap mechanical pencils can be refilled with colored lead | Boing Boing

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How do you sharpen them?

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On/with a little (or large, suit yourself) strip of sandpaper.

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Umm - it is 0.9mm lead (not 9mm FFS! That wouldn’t need sharpening it would need whittling!)

So it is self sharpening in use.

I have Pentels in 0.9mm 0.3mm (and 0.6mm, I think - but cannot find it right now - maybe 0.5mm)

@frauenfelder I think “9mm lead” is not stuff you write with

but why not buy a bunch of 9mm lead

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These are pretty great, though after following another BB’ers recommendation, I recently got the Koh-I-Noor Versatil 5228 clutch pencil and that’s become my daily driver. I like carrying them in my hip pocket and wood or plastic mechanicals end up snapping.

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good luck finding any in this wacky market!

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for reasons that are completely unjustifiable i cannot write with anything except the papermate sharpwriter which malfunctions frequently, jams, and inexplicably can’t be refilled or restored to functioning after being dismantled and reassembled. but, they remind me of my grandfather.

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Adam Savage uses these, too and it always makes me wonder why (I think he may have posted a video saying exactly why, but I haven’t seen it). Of all of the mechanical pencils on the market, it is by far my least favorite. Even the way the lead is kind of “squishy” because of the spring carriage drives me absolutely nuts.

ETA: Adam disagrees with me emphatically:

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