26. The
Great 1mm Pencil Lead Mystery.
17th April, 2009. Probably most of us, who are no
longer as young as we were, have the odd propelling pencil lurking about
somewhere? I just have the two illustrated above. (I also have many clutch
pencils, to which I have long been addicted, but those are not propelling
pencils, so need not detain us at this moment…) The upper one is quite recent;
it was part of a ball-point pen & pencil set sold by Past Times, and I only
bought it four or five years ago. I still have the companion ball-point pen,
and the ink has not yet run out. But I liked the pencil very much, so used it
extensively. As a result, the leads supplied with it were used up. The pencil
languished in one of the jam-jars on my desk in which I keep writing implements
&c., as you see below:
Oops… there’s a bottle of wine in the shot. Well, that qualifies
IMHO, as a writing implement, if not used to excess! Also, gentle reader, do
not be alarmed at the two hypodermic syringes you see there. There is nothing
sinister about them; they contain only ‘Three In One’ oil, which is used to
lubricate the sometimes reluctant key-work of my ~1936 Boosey & Hawkes
model 1001 clarinet. The Parker pencil in the top photo. is rather older. I was
given it in (I think) 1971; it was again part of a set: fountain pen,
ball-point and pencil. It was part of a leaving present from a company for
which I had worked for about 8 years. (How I managed to survive that long,
working in Industry, beats me.) Anyhow, I used up all the leads in that, and
may have bought some more long ago, but can’t remember. At any rate, that
Parker pencil too, has languished here & there for – gulp – 37 years. All
that sort of thing is now past, and as I am supposed to be ‘semi-retired’, time
has become available for ‘doing things long neglected’. E.g., obtaining new
leads for these two propelling pencils. And that is where the ‘Great Pencil
Lead Mystery’ began!
But before we expound this Mystery, we must turn, briefly, to
clutch pencils.
Here is a selection of mine. The one at the bottom, a
Faber-Castell 0.5mm, I have had for over 30 years. It used to have blue leads in it, because it was used to
write instructions on black-and-white artwork for photo-lithography. Blue was
not recognized when the printing plate was made. Nowadays, it serves the far
humbler task of writing the shopping list, stuff like that, with a normal lead.
The cream and the blue Pentel pencils, with 0.9mm and 0.7mm leads respectively,
were bought when a local stationer had a ‘bargain sale’ about 20 years ago,
along with leads of many grades. I found the 0.9mm with a ‘B’ lead ideal for
writing out routines & chord sequences for Jazz numbers. The high
reflectivity of the soft lead rendered it ideal for photocopying. The un-named
one at the top I picked up as a set of three, last autumn, in a ‘cheap
supermarket’, at a ridiculously low price, no more than 99p the three, IIRC,
plus a tube of 10 or 12 spare leads!
The point is, today we have 0.3mm, 0.5mm, 0.7mm and 0.9mm leads
available (most of them in a wide variety of grades) from any number of
suppliers, all of whom are anxious to solicit our patronage.
BUT!!! The two pencils illustrated at the top of this page use a
lead which is rather larger. I tried putting my 0.9mm leads in them, but they
just fell out. So I searched on the Internet for leads of, say, 1mm diameter.
These could not be found. To be sure, I found many comments on discussion
forums about The Quest for the 1mm lead. But they all tended to peter out in
uncertainty. More than one correspondent advised the use of the
readily-available 0.9mm lead as a substitute. Having already tried this,
unsuccessfully, I marveled at the naïvety of these commentators; but doubtless
they were motivated by the fundamentally good principle: ‘Any advice, however
ill-founded, is better than none at all’.
Once, though, in those early days, I did see, on eBay, an ad. for 1mm leads. The seller described them
as ‘rare’. That seller was absolutely correct, and I now kick myself for not
buying them there & then. What I did do, was to search for other leads,
rather larger than 0.9mm. I found that there had been, for many years, a very
famous kind of propelling pencil called the ‘Yard O Led’. This used 1.18mm
leads. I took this to be the ‘old British size’, and ordered some of the ‘B’ grade
from a supplier. This supplier had, quite reasonably, a minimum order amount of
£10. I therefore bought three tubes of ‘B’ grade Yard O Led leads, which cost
£12. Unfortunately, they were too big
to fit into the two pencils illustrated at the top of this exceedingly boring
web page.
Two consequences:
A. I still needed to find a source of 1mm leads for my two
pencils. I searched the Parker Pen website, but they do not seem to offer 1mm
leads. I wrote to Past Times, from whom I had bought the other pencil, only
about 5 years ago. They replied, very politely, that they were sorry, but they
did not have leads for this pencil. They helpfully suggested that I should try
asking for them in a stationery shop. Grrrr!
B. I also needed a pencil to use up the £12-worth of 1.18mm leads
we had bought. Knowing that they definitely fitted the famous ‘Yard O Led’
pencils, I searched eBay for such a pencil. It was discovered that there are
very many of these. They existed over a long period and in a great variety of forms:
round, hexagonal, square even. They were made in solid silver, in gold plate,
rolled gold, rhodium plate, &c., &c. I don’t doubt that there are some
in solid gold. Accordingly, they are very collectible, and may not be obtained
under thirty-odd pounds.
We bid on several Yard O Led propelling pencils without success –
unless you admit the vicarious satisfaction we derived on ‘driving up’ a number
of bidders from e.g. £25 to £37? In any case, coming second in an auction is
always an agreeable prelude to coming first… Accordingly, we are happy to
report that this afternoon, we finally won a Yard O Led pencil for £34. It’s a
square one; this seems a relatively unusual section. Some of them are cylindrical,
but most of them are hexagonal as far as I can make out. So at last we will be
able to start using the immense stock of leads we hold for this type of pencil.
Look! Here it is, together with a sample of my chronically deteriorating hand
writing (this was the fourth attempt to write this without some grievous error,
and even then, the ‘e’ in ‘below’ went wrong. I put it down to (a) drink, and
(b) the ill-considered use of roller-ball pens – surely an invention of The
Devil Himself).
Still, this success is much like ‘using a sledge-hammer to crack
a walnut’. All we really wanted, was to obtain leads for pencils we already
possessed, rather than to purchase a relatively expensive pencil in order to
use up leads we had mistakenly purchased.
The fundamental problem of obtaining 1mm leads for the Parker and
Past Times pencils remained. So, to pass away an hour or two of spare time, I
wrote this web page. It had only been uploaded for a few days when to my
surprise and pleasure, an email arrived from
http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/PEN-SELLER-FROM-FRANCE
I at once sped to the above page, and found Rotring 1.0 mm
offered at a reasonable price, as long as you made the minimum order value,
which was no problem. The following soon arrived:
They fitted the pencils fine! End of My Quest. Mind you, some
dedicated people have gone to great lengths to circumvent the problem by
themselves. They have ground down 1.2 mm leads to fit 1 mm, and others
have gone to the impressive length of coating 0.9 mm leads with a substance of
their own devising (a clear varnish perhaps?) which increases their diameter to
1 mm so that they will stay in the pencil. This coating, when you write, simply
breaks up and has no effect on the writing! Of course, you can’t just coat the
end of the 0.9 mm lead to hold it in place inside the pencil, because the
‘writing tip’ of the lead, being 0.1 mm smaller, will rock about as you write.
It may not seem much, but I tried it & it was not at all good to have a
‘wobbly’ lead.
Finally, it is clear than when we are forced to it, we will not
rest until we can use our treasured old (and not so old) propelling pencils
again. I was lucky, because I am not clever or patient enough to manufacture or
create my own: Emilio kindly told me where to get them.
So do not give up hope! Try the pen seller from France – or else
monitor eBay. The best of luck, and may success soon reward you!
Page
written 18th April 2009.
Revised
10th October 2009.