Cassette or Cartridge pencils are interesting, but they never really took off. Quite a few brands sold them, and here’s one of Pentels, the QD5 Quick Dock, sold from about 2007 to the early 10’s. The idea with these pencils is that instead of refilling them with lead you simply take out the entire lead cassette and replace it with a new one. No messing around with fiddly lead refills, lead smudged hands, graphite dust, etc. Well that’s what the marketing department would say.
The Quick Dock has a partially transparent body, and the cartridges came in three colours so you could mix and match colour schemes.
The Quick Dock was actually a Kotobuki pencil, and as usual they made the base design highly customizable so that they could sell it to a variety of customers as seemingly different unrelated pencils. Pictured here along with the Pentel version is Kotobuki’s house brand Penac version which they called Eco Point. Goodness only knows why. Anyway, the cartridge has a screw thread near the top that allows various eraser holders and push top caps to be utilised, and of course the usual array of different grips, pocket clips and colour schemes allows a wide variety of different styles to be produced from the same base model. As far as I’m aware, Pentel was the only major brand to sell this pencil, although Kotobuki did also produce it under the house brands of several large office supplies companies.
