I’ve got a 0.5mm Newman drafter with a bent tip (thanks, dishonest seller!)
Shot in the dark here, but I’m putting this out to see if any of you have an extra tip you’d be willing to sell me. (Trades available, too.)
Let me know!
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How bad is it? Is it just the sleeve? Is it friction fit into the cone? Correcting bent sleeves is sometimes possible but if not correctable or easily removed it could potentially be drilled out on a lathe and a new one fitted. That’s a standard watch repair kind of task but although I have a watchmakers lathe, I don’t have experience doing that yet.
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It’s just the lead sleeve. I don’t have any tools suitable for working on pencils 
I tried every Newman I had. None of the cones have the right internal and external diameters for the woodgrain drafter.
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Same. I figured I might be able to use a tip from a different model, but no—the woodgrain drafter has its own unique tip 
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Yeah, it bugs the hell out of me how pencil makers didn’t strive to always standardize on certain tip designs. From a manufacturing standpoint it would make so much sense. But some designer wants a longer cone or more tapered one and then screw threads end up differently or repositioned and… incompatibility results.
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I know some people have fixed bent lead sleeves by either straightening them (I did this myself) or by drilling the old sleeve out and fitting a new one. Maybe you could contact IJ instruments in case they’d be willing to fix this for you.
However as long as the bend isn’t too bad you can re-bend it yourself. My process is:
- Find a way to “roll” the pen uniformly so that you can clearly see which way the tip is bent towards. If there’s a removable clip, remove it.
- Mark which way the tip is bent with a small stripe of tape. This is so that you don’t end up bending the tip to the wrong direction. Double check that the tape is correctly placed.
\
/\ ← Put tape on this side - Press against a hard surface with the tape facing upwards. Check to see if visually it looks straight. Put a lead inside and see if it breaks or not.
Repeat this process until the lead doesn’t break. Good news is that you needn’t straighten it up perfectly, the lead is slightly flexible so there’s some relatively large tolerance to work with. As long as the tip looks straight when rolling the pen, it’ll be fine.
Also another good thing about this is that the lead sleeves always bend in the same point (where it joins with the tip) so it’s easier to fix. I’ve unbent trekking poles (retractable ones, so if they’re not straight they won’t retract) and it’s much more annoying because you have to find the direction of bend and at also which point they bent.
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Ah. It really took me until your post to realize that newton should read Newman. I thought maybe a newton lava was meant 
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Thanks, I was confused as well.
For bent tips, I recommend a thin sewing needle inserted in the tip as a pry bar.
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How do you go about fitting in a new sleeve such that it stays in place? Is there some special technique in drilling out the old one such that enough metal is left behind to “press fit” in a replacement?
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My best guess is to use industrial strength epoxy, and inserting something into the new pipe to avoid getting the epoxy inside.
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I haven’t done it myself but how the watch repair guys do it is by drilling an ever so slightly larger hole and then crimping a bit the material outside to secure it in place. I’m sure that a bit of epoxy would do the trick as well.
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Happened to me once or twice, still looking for replacement tips for a 925 95 I was hoping to sell…
If I’m keeping the pencil for myself, though, I usually try to correct it by hand as RPD suggested. find where it’s bent to, then turn it 180º and use very small increments to correct it, really almost no pressure in each try.
You can attach the pencil to a rotating device like an electric screwdriver or a black&decker (use a bit of paper or tape around the pushbutton so that metal doesn’t bite metal) to check results and see if the tip is finally straight.
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Also, you can probably widen your search to other brands from the same period since many of them in Japan had the same OEMs.
This was one of my recent purchases. This 0.3mm came with two tips – a fixed a sliding sleeve. That’s pretty forward thinking for a manufacturer.
Has anyone ever seen this in a catalog? Any guess as to when these were sold?
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I want to say 1979–1983 based on info I’ve seen in the past, but we def need more solid confirmation.
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