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What? A pencil is a pencil right?
Ok, fair enough, no need to read on then...
If you're still here, I'll explain. Pencils, like most things, come in different qualities. Not so noticeable if you're sat at a desk maybe, unless you're an artist or designer or something. But if you're in a workshop, on site or fixing stuff around the house it can matter.
Pencils suffer from gravity. Fact.
And it seems one of those inevitable things that the pencil you put down on the worktop, step ladder, toolbox or whatever WILL roll off the edge and fall on the floor. If you're in the living room with a nice thick carpeted floor then it's probably not a drama but if you're in the kitchen with a hard floor, out in the garage or working from your driveway, once your cheap low quality pencil hits the floor, the chances are it will become worthless and frustrating because more often than not, the pencil lead will shatter inside the wood shell and every time you sharpen it, this will happen
What to do then?
Buy a reasonable quality one!!!
Personally I use a Faber Castell 9000 or Gold series. They're not cheap but they save me some serious broken pencil lead annoyance. You can see in the picture, the one I'm currently using has taken some knocks, it's also about half it's original length because I've sharpened it lots of times.
I also bought the Faber Castell pocket clip and sharpener to go with it and it's great because the whole lot stays together, clipped to my notebook. I've had these for about 3 years now whereas if I just have a loose pencil it's invariably lost in about 3 minutes.....
There's a link to buy them on my tools page here
Next up is the carpenters pencil, a bigger chunkier thing that's ideally suited to marking up larger timber and board pieces or anything where you want a thicker more obvious line to work to.
The other HUGE advantage to the carpenters pencil is that usually they're flat so they don't roll off whatever you leave them on! I keep a couple in my toolbox and the rest on the shelf in the garage. Sharpening is easy, stanley knife, chisel, belt sander, disc grinder, whatever is to hand really.
There's a link to buy them on my tools page here
Alternatively you can always go the mechanical pencil route. As you can see from the picture below, I have a number of them in various shapes and sizes and they're good but I tend not to use them for the simple reason noted above that I put them down and lose them, albeit temporarily, whereas the Faber Castell I just clip back onto the notebook which is less easy to lose.
Nonetheless, mechanical pencils are good, I have 3 sizes: 0.3 for technical drawings, 0.5 and 0.7 for marking (timber, walls, whatever I need to mark). I also have a clutch pencil which takes a 2mm lead more equivalent to the carpenters pencil above. I'd show you it but I can't find it right now...
You can see the replacement leads in the little cases above. You can get all different grades. HB being the go to standard for general use and then personally I use a 3H for technical drawings.
No tool links for these yet, just google mechanical pencil!!
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