Pentel P1085 - very nice all steel mechanical pencil. I really like the stepped rear collar just below the plunger. Well made. Tight (no rattling). Maybe just one step behind the P1005 in terms of overall quality.
KOKUYO PS-100 - my 2nd one. I have to say, probably my all time favorite executive mechanical pencil for its masterfully fluid function. Body knocks tend to be a bit clunky, but this one feels amazing
PILOT QUATRO - There’s so many variants of this line, but the one that really got me has been the white/lime-green combo. Reminds me of 1950’s two-tone Corvettes. The mechanical pencil had been elusive, having picked up two of the ballpoints and rollerballs. Not really trying hard to get the fountain pen, as it’s not exactly a class act. But maybe… I plan to add more detailed photos to my Quatro topic.
SAKURA Craft Lab 001 - these are pretty easy to find and you can usually pick up one NIB pretty often for about ¥7,000. Snagged this for half price with minor signs of use. The twist action is so very smooth and luxurious. The default Sakura refill is wet and puts down a smooth line.
PILOT Automac - Now that most collectors have gotten theirs, used examples have come back down in price. Got a silver one to match the silver/black in my collection. No tip wobble. Mechanism works perfectly.
rOtring Trio - there have been a myriad of rOtring Trio variants. I like this one in particular. The body is sheathed in a nice thick layer of hard matte rubber. Really tight mechanism. I bought one back in the late 1990’s and it still works great with no degradation of the rubber. So I picked up a backup.
Newman Steel Stripe - A massive surge in collector interest for Newman back in 2022 caused so many models to slip out of reach. Grabbed this nice black stripe engraved steel 0.5 mm pencil with pipe slide. Well built, although it’s a monocoque design. No rear rattle.
Mitsubishi uni3-1051 - This 0.3mm pencil has a 4 knurled ring grip, reminiscent of the M5-1100. Likely a predecessor to the MX-1052. But there’s a removable clip and a lead hardness indicator. It has some nice touches, like a chrome ring around the back end of the body and a thin colored ring just below the lead indicator. It’s quite light, but the mechanism is very smooth.
Excellent haul. PS-100 is the highlight for me, but scoring a GWG Quatro is a big deal, too. Honorable mention goes to the Mitsubishi, which is the rarely-seen predecessor to the MX-1051.
Thanks. I’d first seen the GWG PILOT Quatro about 4 years ago, when looking at closed auctions. Someone had nabbed a near mint one for ¥2,300. Looked really cool to me, so I kept looking. Picked up a VG+ BP for a paltry ¥1,000. But the MP kept eluding me. I realized my criteria should also include “QUATTRO” and “クアトロ”. The RB can sometimes be had fairly cheaply. That was when I noticed the peculiar “color swap” where the clip would be white instead of matching the non-white body color.
Do you have the PS100, PS101, and PS102? I expect they all have the same mechanism. I still don’t have a black one but the gold and steel feel identically smooth. Probably the ideal executive pencil. Body-knock is perhaps the easiest of lead advancement.
Interesting about the MX-1051. Is that the one with the engraved lines on the barrel in plac of the knurling?
It’s more likely they’re different pencils in my opinion. Being the 1051 would imply that a pencil is a predeccesor to the 1052 (much like the 551 and 552). The 1st photo shows a pencil without knurling, as opposed to the 2nd photo’s pencils having knurling. The 2nd photo’s pencils seem more likely to be the predecessor to the 1052.
I suspect this Hi-Uni 2mm (from the mp museum blog) got the indicator ring from a 1051 like the picture above. Looks great, but the Hi-unis must have all come out originally with a chrome ring…
Very nice. I have a Rotring trio pencil but it doesn’t have a rubber coating. It has a knurled metal grip and metal body with like a black anodized layer on it. I’m not sure what metal this pencil is made of though. Did Rotring make a design change at some point? Thanks!
This one I’ve shown isn’t actually a rubber coating, but a thick rubber sheath. It’s very resilient and cannot be scratched. Yes, rOtring made a few metal variants of the Trio. Some had smooth anodized bodies from tip to grip. Aside from the 600 Trio (the very heavy hexagonal 3-in-1), there was a version with tubular body and a knurled grip. The shell is a thin steel alloy of some kind. It can suffer dents if struck hard enough.
The black Rotring 600 Fountain Pen models were prone to develop cracks alongside the body over time, especially near the finials — I believe they were from some other material than the silver models…
Well, you have something a bit different here. This isn’t a 3-in-1 trio (two ballpoints, one pencil). You’ve got one of the rare trio-pencil models. There were 3 different models of these made. Two prominent differences were satin silver vs. chromed silver. The chromed ones were prone to body cracks. You can see the first chrome accent one in the middle of this photo has an exposed crack:
You can see here that the chromed example with “JAPAN” imprinted on it and it says “Trio-pencil” (instead of “trio-pen”), and doesn’t have a crack, while the other chromed example has a crack.
