Hi everyone. I just found this site and I look forward to sharing my passion for mechanical pencils with fellow enthusiasts.
I don’t collect a lot of advertising pencils but sometimes they are too interesting to pass up.
Can anyone help me identify this 0.5mm General Electric pencil? The pocket clip ring says Germany. It appears to have all plastic internals.
The lead guide sleeve is very long (approx. 5mm) and is somewhat loose (it slides a few mm into the nose cone). It’s very lightweight.
I’m curious who manufactured it and when it was produced. It’s a nice pencil to write with. I have three more of the same type but I don’t know much about them at all.
Thank you. That is it. It seems that the DS 05s were manufactured in the 1980s, although the fact that it is labeled Germany instead of West Germany leads me to wonder if this may have been made in the 1990s.
This model has been renamed several times by FC from the 1980s thru the 1990s. From the examples I have collected, Castell XF 976x comes with a fixed tip while XF 978x has a half-slide tip. I am not sure but I think the DS05 came out before the XF series as the latter has a lot more number of listings on eBay etc. So…
Late 80s into early 90s – DS05
Mid-90s onwards – XF 97xx
These pencils are different from the one mentioned above. The Apollo, marked DS 05, is a sliding sleeve and the Contura XL has a fixed sleeve, apart from that they are the same, both have W Germany on the clip. It seems that the designation DS 05 has been used for different models.
The body and mechanism is identical (except the color) with the 9765 (usually green) which has a simpler, shorter cone and fixed lead sleeve. The DS 05 (old version, black) and DS15 (silver) are again identical with 9765, except they both have a fully retractable sleeve.
The cones on all these should be interchangeable.
The cone on yours and on the 9785 is a follow up of the old 9705 cone, with semi-retractable sleeve from 5 to 3 mm
I’ve never heard of/seen “half-slide tip” before. Is it literally what it sounds like? If so, why acknowledge the need to safely hide the tip, while only doing so halfway?
Yes, for example the Staedtler Micrograph HS (literally, “half slide”) has a tip ranging from 3mm to 5mm. That is, it recoils to 3 and extends to 5. The idea I believe is to have a “writer” and a “drafter”
Half slide sleeves are to make them compatible with drafting tools.
In this way, when the sleeve is placed against the edge of a ruler, it will retract, allowing the user to have more lead available, but it will not retract less than the length of the ruler’s edge.
