I mentioned these a while back. The seller on Amazon USA offering these has crazy price disparities depending upon the size. As cheap as $0.89 to as costly as $6.99, with free shipping if you have Prime. I don’t know what’s the logic. Seemed arbitrary.
Anyway, for us pencil nuts… what matters most is the compatible sizes for our mechanical pencils. As it so happens, the offering had a bunch at $0.89, so I bought 4 of them. I presumed 0.460 mm would be fine for 0.5 mm, but on the odd chance it wasn’t, I also bought 0.406. Luckily the larger one worked fine. I got 0.330 for 0.3 mm lead and yes–works. I also bought 0.228 for 0.2 mm, but I have just one pencil in that size and can’t find it right now. I’m betting it’ll be fine.
What’s nice is that on one end is the loop-hook attachment for securing to a guitar. This makes it a little easier to manage. When you coil up the wire, you can spin the end around and the hook will help keep it from unraveling.
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Hi how are things. Seems like a good way to unjamming leads, I remember you suggested it on Reddit. Maybe I will have to use this method to unjamming a .5 lead that got stuck in the sleeve of a P203, it has been like this for years and has already bent a couple of jamming rods. I have thought about a .3mm drill bit.
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Did this work to clear out the Tombow? I have two of those Tombows, and both have lead advancement issues.
Which Tombow pencil models?
The lead sleeve having a stuck lead is a different story. The long wire is more about clearing out the whole lead channel. However, there might be a way with the wire. The raw end of it isn’t perfectly cut. It’ll be a little “chisel” like. You can snip it again on an angle for an angled chisel that could work like a mini drill bit. Take the nose cone, insert the wire end, and then rotate repeatedly. See if you get any lead dust coming out. If you do? Keep going…
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The precise one in your picture (which I have in both gold and matte black trim).
Ah. I didn’t have any lead jam problems with this one. Just a bit of pitting on the gold tone accents. I had both of these pencils displayed just for effect, but actually neither of them had any lead jams.
With yours, do you not get any advancement at all? If you have any other Tombow pencils with a similar nose cone shape/diameter, try swapping and see if that changes anything.
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