Faber-Castell COLORMATICS mechanical pencils

Yes, I'm broke and hungry, but what is man if not a hypocrite?

So a while back I saw this listing for 1,000 Faber-Castell COLORMATICS 0.7 mm mechanical pencils for a song and I said, "F#*k it, I need it," and did the whole Buy-It-Now thing. I only wish I had more cash available, because the price was truly a song.

I bought my first COLORMATICS mechanical pencil while in school. They came in a pck of 10 and were brightly multi-colored. Maybe the 10-pack cost $8 or $9, either way it was cheap, and I thought the pencils would be also.

Not so. The body is quite rigid and with a decent grip. The pencil mechanism proved to be reliable and the lead sleeve allowed for both good drafting and writing. Of the 10 pencils I got, I reserved my favorite blues, blacks and greens for later use and selected the most undesirable fuscia-colored pecil to use first and break-in. I used for class notes, homework, and during a series of trips home for Thanksgiving and Christmas I used it to write poetry and journal entries in a notebook. Of the 10, I wound up using only 2 and giving one away to a friend in need. The rest are slumbering within the depths of my storage unit.

Since that fuscia COLORMATICS I've actually developed an affinity for brightly colored writing implements as well as the traditional darker-colored varieties. It's completely different aesthetic for me compared to other facets of my life and appearance, but one that's become a trademark in itself.

And here I go and get 1,000 more. And they're just as good as ever. I put 5-6 in the car the other day. Why? 'Cause I could. I've seen a lot of people put up listings on eBay for these pencils in way smaller quantities for much much higher prices. They give me a chuckl, because I know their secret.

Pentel Technica-X Pen and Mechanical Pencil

So I like to buy writing implemets in mass quantities. In addition to the per-unit cost savings comes the security of knowing that I'll always have enough of the low-dollar but hard-to-locate items I like and use.

I'd won two boxes of the Pentel Technica-X mechanical pencils, among other things, on eBay at a really low price even with combined shipping. But I was surprised to get a box of the pencils and a box of its counterpart ballpoint pen. I didn't even know they made a pen, but I guess it just shows what I don't know. So I contact the seller and ask her what we can do to fix things because I really was looking forward to getting two boxes of the pencil. She said that not only would she ship me out the pencils I should have received, but that I could keep the box of pens - for free! AWESOME! Actually, I would have mailed the pens back for whatever it would have cost, but after using the Technica-X pen for a day to take notes and write in my journal, I must admit they're growing on me.

The grip and tip of the pen are its best and strongest features. The rounded tip makes the pen easy to put in one's pocket without worrying about it tearing the fabric. The rubberized grip tapers back to the narrower upper body nicely in a way that I actually prefer. The clip is solid and the body is rigid. The pushbutton for the pen is smooth as well.

But I was after the pencils. Take all that was good about the pens and then there's more good stuff to them. The pencil tip is retractable, making the pencil pocket-safe (ever been stabbed by a mechanical pencil in your pocket while sitting down?). The pencil's pushbutton is the two-stage type. A hard push is needed to bring out the point, and then lighter pushes are needed to advance or retract lead. A hard push is also needed to retract the point. A relatively smaller eraser than what usually comes with Pentel pencils is included at the top of the pen under the cap, but I use a separate eraser out of habit, so no worries.

The only real "downside" of the Technica-X pen and pecil might be that they look too much alike. Personally, I need to check the labeling of the pen/cil or use the pushbutton to check the tip to identify them if taking them out of my pen cup on The Cluttered Desk.

But then that's probably why I got the free box of pens in the first place.

The Parker JOTTER (pt. 2)

So the Stainless Steel Jotter was a workhorse for me both in and outside the office for a lot of years. I can't remember exactly when, but it was on eBay that I saw a lot of used Parker jotters while shopping around for some mechanical pencils. Among the stainless steel ones and those with acrylic bodies I saw some that were stainless steel with gold tone clips and trimming. Gold tone? Really? Some bling to my SS Jotter? Cool. I got the lot for a song, and the SS Jotter with the gold trim became my new Ace. And through eBay I found a means to get more.

There's a handful of sellers on eBay who sell Jotters in trays of te.. Be they overseas or domestic, I usually get trays with the newest colors for about $35-45 shipped. For the older more common colors you can usually find trays for $25-30. When everything's said and done I get the new colors at domestic retail and the older colors at a discount. I own most of the colors available and multiple ten-packs of the SS Jotters. Lately a lot of different colors, old and new, have also come out with gold trimming. There are also now translucent bodies in red, blue, green, and purple.

In a personal note, there are also Parker Jotters out there with clear acrylic bodies and gold trim. I have one, but I'd love to find out where I can get more.

In 2004, Parker put out a line of 50th Anniversary Jotters that featured a new set of 5 bright colors and a retro look to the trim of the pen. Gone were the fletching and fine line detailing in the arrow clip. The ridged crown of the pushbutton was replaced with rounded edges and featured a "50" on the top in place of the new Parker "P" logo. Older Jotter users would actually find this "new" look reminiscent of the first Jotters' design. And the best thing yet: their cartridges now had gel ink. The same cartridge shape and size, only with a gel rollerball? I swear, Parker, you must be reading my diary.

Nothing compares to a SS Jotter with a gel cartridge, and very little approaches being able to beat it.

From as best as I can figure, the 50th Anniversary Jotters were only available in Europe. I didn't really find out about them until 2005, along with information on additional models of all steel bodies with two tone blue, black, and gold bodies, respectively. There were even some SS Jotters released that had yellow and gray plastic lugs, respectively, all along the length of their bodies. The price of all but the blue and black metallic Jotters have been too high for me so far. The gold and "lugged" models for for $30+ on eBay still, while the blue and black metallic ones go for $10-20 approximately.

Soon after, new Jotters were released that incorporated the rounded-corner pushbuttons of the Anniversary editions. More and more colors came out along with gold trim for more colors. Recenlty, as in a few weeks ago, I started seeing new Jotters on eBay that had all the features of the Anniversary editions, only in richer dark colors and with the newer Parker logo in place of the "50". With this new line, the Jotter continues to sustain its popularity as an elegantly practical instrument that one can easily acquire and confidently use anywhere.

As a fan and collector, the different Parker Jotter models and colors are a prize well worth the pursuit.

The Parker JOTTER (pt. 1)

Whether it was the singular cause or a contributor to my obsession with writing implemets, the Parker Jotter has been a part of my life since I was 8 or 9 years old. It was a pen my parents had grown up with as well, and in my family it was a typical gift given to kids for some sort of scholastic achievement or related special occasion, like graduating the fourth grade. My parents gave them to me for such events and also gave them to their friends' kids. It was a clasy, relatively neutral, and inexpensive gift that you could hand out indiscriminately to boys or girls. Plus, they came with a snazzy little gift box.

While I was not yet a student nor practitioner of the scientific method or deductive reasoning, I just knew there had to be something special about a pen that sold for a whopping $3.00 plus or minus some change. After all, with that much money I could buy multiple 10-packs of Papermates or Bics and start my own pen-based bartering/monetary system with them. So these Jotters had to be the bees' knees, right? Right.

They wrote smoothly. And didn't get all stuttery in their ink flow or dry up in spurts and require me to give my manuscript an Indian burn in the margin to get them going again. They didn't quietly explode and leave little ink bombs for me to discover upon uncapping them. Instead they had a continuously open mouth from which the tip of the cartridge emerged. So sure was the Jotter of its stability that it dared you to pocket it uncapped. Speaking of the ink cartridge, it was cool in itself, resembling a rocket of sorts. A depleted one often turned into my G.I. Joes' doomsday missile and became the basis of many an action figure adventure.

But the Parker Jotter was still a "special occasion" pen, for me, to be worn as an accessory like a tie or cufflinks or to be used for signing "important" things like birthday cards or endorsing gift-money checks. They really didn't get that regular a use.

The Jotter, and ink pens in general, took a backseat in my writing tool use and collecting when I went to college. As an engineering student doing a lot of equations, graphing, and drafting, I quickly developed a fetish for mechanical pencils, which became my primary tools at that time because of the need to erase. The Jotter made a cameo or two. Once, when I was home for Christmas holiday, and helping my mom clean out a closet, I came across a stash of things she had hoarded to use as gifts for my cousins that she had never used. Among the sundry knicknacks and toys were 6 pristine in-box Jotters! In their stately maroons and navy blues, they were shiny and untouched. I seized them in the name of jealousy.

The Jotter didn't experience a resurgence in my usage or collecting until I graduated and got my first job. There was a drug store in the mini-mall across from work where I would stop on the way home for snacks and or the odd mechanical pencil. While looking for a Zebra M-605, I came across something I had never seen (or noticed) before: a stainless steel Parker Jotter. I had never seen anything cooler for the same price. I bought three. I couldn't drive home fast enough to open it and test it out. It looked awesome. It weighed and balanced in a way I liked. And it wrote as well as its chromatic counterparts. I had my new weapon of choice.

If I could, I would have worn a bandolier of the stainless steel Jotters. Their all-metal exterior construction inspired me with all sorts of MacGuyver-esque ideas. I used my SS Jotter to stab open the tape on the seams of packages. I figured I could use them to slay the undead via some sort of modified crossbow (yeah yeah, silver, just let it go). Choking of food and the Heimlich maneuver proves ineffective? A properly placed SS Jotter, with cartridge handily removed of course, could be used to perform that impromptu field tracheotomy AND serve as a windpipe until the medics arrive.

I'll never understand why the Swiss Army bothers with those glorified letter openers when they could have this pen!

To be continued...

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.

Rotring Core Lysium Fountain Pen

A leading manufacturer of writing implements, Rotring has always offered superior quality products that are works of art in themselves. With the Core series of pens and pencils, they've outdone themselves by combining style with practicality in their design.

I first came across the Core series fountain pens last July while stalking the Golden Edition Parker Jotter. I decided to get one when I saw a set including the fountain pen, rollerball pen, mechanical pencil, and pushbutton ballpoint pen for under $30 on eBay. The pencil and ballpoint were great, but the fountain pen became my favorite.

The basic design sense of the series involves a rubberized coating over much of the pen body with contrast color "core" exposed for aesthetics in certain parts of the pen/cil body. For the fountain pen there are also holes along the pen body to keep tabs on your supply of ink.

The Core series has different color schemes that come in blues, black, red, orange, and grays. The Lysium line reflects the color scheme pictured above with sporty Tarheels light blue accenting metallic and matte gray cores. In comparison to the rest of my pen/cil collection, they really stand out and look cool.

The body of the fountain pen is entirely plastic, except for the nib, and really lightweight. I find the cap to be really heavy when posted on the body and it really throws the pen "off balance" for me. To me it's no problem to leave the cap on the table as it serves as a good place to rest the fountain briefly between uses, thanks to the fountain pen's narrower triangular cross-section. The same triangular grip also makes it comfortably impossible to not hold the pen the correct way.

The Core Lysium accepts standard Rotring/Waterman long and short cartridges (you can store two of the short cartridges in the pen body) as well as use an ink converter. I used the pen with an ink coverter and Parker blck Quink and found that the ink kind of accumulated in the plastic seams and crevices around the nib and really looked bad on the light blue plastic. So I would recommend a cartridge with the lighter colored Core fountains pens.

Core fountain pens go for around $20 - $25 shipped on eBay, but if you shop around you can get one for $15 shipped. Not bad for a pen that used to MSRP for $40 each. With so many color schemes to choose from, the coolness factor and the functionality of this pen make it fun pen you won't be afraid to use because of the price.