The WORST Mechanical Pencil Ever

In the lower right hand corner of the photo of The Cluttered Desk you might be able to discern a black Starbucks Networker mug with rubberized handle and base. It used to be the mug of pens I kept on my desk at work, and it now functions as the "boneyard" of my fleet of pens by being the home for many past and present All-Stars and old veterans. Many are weathered and some are even disabled in that they don't work too well in delivering ink or lead/graphite, but they can still work in spurts or for some specific uses like tracing or sketching. Some of them I'm keeping for spare parts. But there's one in the bonetard that's just plain dumb.

I bought the Sanford Clear Point in green with a 0.5mm point in a Staples in Annapolis, MD on a whim. To me it looked so grotesque it was beautiful, and I wanted to see how it handled. Right out of the blister pack it looked and felt like an amateur design job. Basic tubular design and axially symmetric contouring for low cost production. Really brittle and slippery clear acrylic was used for the body, and some rubber ribbing texture was added at the grip almost as an afterthought apparently.

There was a huge and unwieldy eraser housing at the top of the pencil that, to its credit, housed an impressive rotating eraser advance mechanism but made the pencil so top-heavy it really unbalanced the pencil for me. The pencil clip was also attached to the eraser housing. A critical design feature of the eraser housing is that it's held onto the pencil body via a "male" peg on it that attaches to a slot on the the pencil body. Either this slot will loosen after repeated openings and closings or the peg will wear down, but I can already see scotch tape in the future. A really good example of a twist-advance mechanism for a large erasers on a mechanical is on the Pentel Twist Erase III, where the whole upper half of the pencil is twisted to advance the eraser and attaches to the lower half by sliding the upper half onto the lower half. There's so much more surface area friction working with this method that the chances of the pen body loosening up are much lesser.

The Clear Point features a side click button to advance lead, but, unlike the Pentel Quicker Clicker's, it's loose and feels sluggish in response to the touch. The most disappointing feature of the pencil's lead advance mechanism is that whatever prevented the lead from sliding out loosely failed completely after after only a few clicks. So now my mechanical pencil was basically a very thin-diameter lead holder. And one that broke more lead than it retained when I tried to push over-extended lead back in. All aesthetics aside, this broke the proverbial camel's back.

I've got one or two mechanical pencils in the boneyard with similar lead advance defects, but at least they look a whole lot prettier than the Sanford Clear Point.