Nice! Congrats, Stu. The Mechanica is quite a special breed of pencil.
Yes, the “PENTEL” in serif font is from the earlier production release, but unfortunately your clip doesn’t have “PENTEL” on it as well. So it’s not the first. But still, it’s a great thing to have. Hopefully your sleeve moves smoothly with a nice little bit of tension at the end of retraction (almost a detent). Seeing how the sleeve nestles into place and looks like it’s part of the fixed design is just a thing of beauty. And then extending… you start… and that cylindrical sheath arises… like titan of strength to protect that fragile tip.
The sleeve is working exactly like that! Very smooth and just a small tension at the end. I’m amazed at the Mechanica, and specially that mechanism. It will make for a great fidget during exams.
You can hypnotize your fellow classmates by consistently but smoothly extending the sheath up and down, up and down, up and down… while you’re reading the exam details and getting ahead.
Oh and more than just the beauty. You know that hypnotist trick of the pendulum swinging watch? The idea is to simulate the same sort of back and forth with the MEC sleeve.
No. You have what appears to be a 1st gen MEC, but a later PMG.
All of the 1st gen PMGs I have seen just have the size in italics, but do not say PMG. A sure fire test is to unscrew the back end of the pencil and see what color threads you are screwing on to. If it is black, it is 1st gen.
I have a side-by-side breakdown of a 1st and later gen on the PMG page in the Pentel Book.
I’m very glad the latest posts made this thread jump up once again: Damdeok’s collection is stunningly impressive, and I can only dream to achieve his spectacular effectiveness.
The Hi-Uni 5050 FF-Matic, the Pentel QX, the FC alpha Exclusive and the FC Tekagraph 9604 are the items that most captured my attention and curiosity: if only the availability here in Europe could be a little higher, and the prices a little lower!
Congratulations to the guy, let us hope to get closer to his status one day.
As I now know, you can tell that if you look closely. Aside from the grooves being inked on a 0.3 and not on the 0.5, which could be cleaned out, there is a difference in the number of rows on the grip. The 0.5 has 14 rows and the 0.3 has 12, except for the initial run, which had 11 rows.
I have never seen a 1st gen Mechanica until this article, and Dratex’s twitter has a picture of the 1st gen grip on the left, which is very different from later Early Mechanica’s - the arrows have text in them, at least one of which says “SAFE” or “SAFETY”, not sure about the other arrow. You can also see that this only has 11 rows on the grip.
“MADE IN JAPAN” and “SAFETY” engraved in the metal grip. Never saw this before.
Incidentally, for anyone wanting to save images… you’ll note that these are all being delivered by the server as WEBP files. This is a special lossy format that’s not bad with resolution while conserving server bandwidth. But, if you want better quality, there are some tricks to be had.
You’ll see for quite a lot of these images, the width parameter is provided with rather small sizes in pixels, like 500, 800, and 1000. The highest supported on the server is 2000 (anything larger throws an error). You have to open the images in a separate tab so you can gain access to the parameters in the URL. If you strip off “width” it should default to the maximum. Next… I prefer to get JPG or PNG instead of very lossy WEBP. You can sometimes use parameters to get what you want. Notice in the first few, it’s a JPG extension. Well, “JPG” as the format won’t give you a jpeg file. You actually have to specify PNG. Like so:
“format=png&auto=png&fmt=png”
Put that on the end of the URL following the question mark.
Unfortunately for the PNG files, this doesn’t affect it. On some servers, some formats simply won’t change the file type from WEBP. However, there’s a little trick to that too. First, save the WEBP file (stripping off the width, or putting width=2000). Notice the file size. Now, use those parameters for format, but change “PNG” to “TIF” (tiff). It’ll still be delivered as a WEBP to your browser, but if you save it, you’ll see the file size is larger. It’s kind of a way to reduce the lossy quality of the WEBP file.
Across the great wild wide web, you’ll find so many interesting “back doors” regarding image saving. On some retail servers, where they’re trying to force WEBP or just JPG on you, a “PNG” or “TIF” parameter with width=4000 can nab you a juicy fat low loss image file. On some you get surprises. Bloomingdales and SaksFifthAve for example, will sometimes give you a huge TIF file if you use the PNG format parameter. It’s weird. I don’t know why they do this, but hey… whatever works!
Thank you very much. I checked more and mine lines up with the 2nd one on the twitter image (L->R) the clip is from a later generation but I’m fine with that, this is a grail pencil for me and I would never imagine I’d be able to get my hands on one.
I’m also in love with the PMG and the 770, they have such a nice weight and design. The blue used in the 770 is pure bliss and the all metal internals? Amazing. I wish to acquire a 925 77 “HEX” Limited next to compare with the 770.
Would anyone know of ways to “conserve” the lettering on the PMG and on the 770? I’ve seen more used pieces that had the lettering fading away, I’d like to try and keep mine as pristine as possible (while still using them – sounds insane I know).
I am posting a 2 page PDF of the Mechanica pencil from the Pentel Book. The first page is what is in the current posted book. The second page is what I have changed to take into account the Mechanica Notes article.
Please let me know what you think. Is it too busy? I lean that way, but trying to make it all clear takes a lot of room, as well as staying consistent with the rest of the book.
