Replacement tip for 0.5mm Newton Fauxbois ("woodgrain")?

General Mechanical Pencil Discussion Custom and Mods
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I’ve got a 0.5mm Newton 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 :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

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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 :woman_facepalming:t5:

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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
  3. 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 :smiley:

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