There were 2 versions of the PILOT Sprinter. One had an attractive tear-drop style nose piece and full body length of “coiled spring” steel. The other version had a more traditional nose cone design and a plastic grip, which could be provided in a few different colors.
In all of the versions searchable online, I’d never come across a Sprinter with a coating on the coiled spring body.
Perhaps when NIPPON STEEL commissioned PILOT to make a branded version of the Sprinter for them, they had a coating applied as well to make it look more like brass. If you look very closely at the cap, there’s some additional lettering provided that’s non-standard. All I can make out is “TANIUM.” So my suspicion is that it’s “TITANIUM” and the coating is perhaps capturing a shade of the titanium made by NIPPON STEEL… providing the pencils haven’t suffered a uniform color decay.
Here’s my lame attempt to digitally remove the NIPPON STEEL name.
Looks like Elton bought these… “NIPPON STEEL NAME” still on the body… selling individually for $450 each, claiming they’re made of titanium (when they’re simply coated in a “titanium color” stainless steel).
Speaking of PILOT Sprinter oddities… for the longest time, all I could find on the web were photos of the 2 Sprinter release versions (one with angled nose cone, the other a tear drop nose cone) and a few colors – black, red, and orange. Then came the yellow version, by way of a YAJ listing.
Totally legit. And in fact, @xiaozhenyang4444 managed to win the auction for it. Looking forward to him posting higher resolution photos of it once in hand and possibly a group shot of all Sprinter teardrop variants.
So, is it possible there are some other colors? Did PILOT ever do a press release or detailed catalog page that showed all of the color options?
