New question first: Are there more FC DS15L variants than the plain silver and dotted shown here?
Then returning to PD:
What is this Movaro? I’ve never seen it :-o
And are the two Arc1s left & right of the Movaro of different lengths?
The hairline cylindric pencil remains mysterious to me. Altho I always mock about the various “legit” inquiries at reddit regarding P20x and the like, in high-price vintage items these topics (Frankensteining, modifications, etc) get more interesting … The labeling Porsche Design of the hairline one in the barrel middle looks engraved, the others painted. But the engraving seems to be very shallow. Maybe Heath can draw some conclusions from the clip numbers?
Are there more FC DS15L variants than the plain silver and dotted shown here?
No
What is this Movaro? I’ve never seen it :-o
Movado judges that it collaborated with Faber-Castell-Porsche Design.
adding to this, Movado is a luxury watch company and on the clip of that specific pencil it seems to be a piece from 1988. Probably a collaboration release to promote sales of a new watch or commemorate a classic (probably the latter), searching the internet, the colours used in the pencil are very similar to the design of their iconic museum classic watch - their most famous model.
That Staedtler 925-25 05VA… that’s like “hen’s teeth” rare. I have no clue why Staedtler made so few of them. It shows this collector has some major league tenacity for acquiring desirable vintage MP’s.
There are pencils, which are rare, but available at stratospheric prices. Then there are pencils, which are rare and appear really only every few years, but are not necessarily super-expensive. And of course both.
Staedtler Evangelion, (in last years) Pilot H-5005, Hi-Uni 5050 e.g. are rare, but rather easily available if you are willing to accept a high price.
FC DS15L in the shown variant is rarely seen, but not necessarily expensive (I don’t remember exactly, but I would say I got mine in the range of 50€). Here you need patience …
FC alphamatic gold is rare and expensive, so endurance and buying power is needed.
This got me thinking, is he only interested in the usual brands or does he also collect minor brands? Since he has that crazy movado pencil, I wonder if he has any Inoxcrom pencils. It’s a Spanish brand. There’s no way he has the full collection, but if he has a few pieces that would be surprising enough. The vintage Inoxcroms are quite nice, they have Parker/Cross vibes.
BTW for whoever is interested, Movado is a pretty controversial brand in the watch sphere. Their vintage pieces are super sought after, but then something happened (I don’t remember if the company closed, or was sold) and when it opened again under a new owner they only made low quality overpriced watches. Imagine Colleen making a comeback, just to sell plastic clutch pencils for 20 USD. So the watch community despises movado lol.
MOVADO was originally founded in Switzerland and was a highly respected brand for about 100 years, when it was acquired by “North American Watch Corp” (around 1983). Since then, the brand was shifted into a mainstream quartz watch production focus, leveraging the famous “Museum Watch” model originally made by Movado in 1947 as a mechanical watch. The cachet of the brand “morphed,” as its aggressive marketing campaigns increased brand awareness and lured new buyers into buying something seen as a high luxury brand. In time that illusion waned. It’s still seen as a luxury brand, but in the high end watch arena they’ve no place.
Many Pentel guys here – I guess the PXN105 will produce a lot of drooling
Interesting that FC didn’t machine a knob groof at the anniversary BP for easier identification. I think it’s a later feature, so probably they introduced it after 1991 (that is the 230 years anniversary date).
I have to say, it all seems rather crazy… a Korean mega collector of rare highly sought after vintage Japanese and German mechanical pencils decides to feed his images to eagerly awaiting eyes on a dedicated mechanical pencil forum, using a teenage student from Brazil as the liaison.
He found a listing for MARS-MICROGRAPH 770 0X on Taobao and wanted to know what versions they were (after all he cares only about first versions) and if the ones he had already were the first ones, he looked the pencil up and loads of images of my ID post came up… Then he sent me an e-mail asking about the 770 and I told him his are the first production run with old logo, from there we started chatting more.
It all feels a bit unreal!
Yep, a thin thread of serendipity and here we are. It’s pretty incredible when you think about the odds. But glad they happened. The more the merrier. We’re getting glimpses of some really great vintage mechanical pencil hardware. This guy is quite the prolific collector. I imagine if he has other collecting hobbies he’s equally tenacious about finding the good stuff.
I asked Elton if he had ever seen the hairline finish PD Classic, to which he replied, “No. That’s scratches.”
I also reached out to the other Z (u/xiaozhenyang4444) to see what he thinks.
I don’t think much can be inferred from the the 86 clip date other than that seems to be a fairly common year.
Who knows though, maybe it was something internally developed by a FC employee and never saw the light of day? Now if he had evidence of that, that would be really cool.
Actually, people at fountain pen network could maybe help? After all, all colours available for the pencil were available for the fountain pen and vice versa… If it comes to it, asking Porsche design for clarification might be the best course of action.
Actually I did reach out to Porsche Design and that’s where I got that catalog page from. Unfortunately they couldn’t tell me anything else about them.
/jk