Ortie Design

The Spincil

After the bullet pencil Ortie Design has released a new pencil: the spincil. I first came across it on Gizmodo, but I have now received an email from Ortie Design with further details.

The spincil (image © Ortie Design)
The spincil (image © Ortie Design)

You’ll find more information on the official web site, but here’s a quick summary:
The spincil is a spinning top with a pencil as its centre. It features a 2B lead. Manufacturing is, as you might have expected, quite complex: the pencil is made from two huge pencil slats [1]If pencil slat is still the right term in this case before being turned to produce the finished spincil. The shorter the pencil gets the easier it should be to get the gyroscopic effect going, but I assume you can also get some sort of spinning action out of an unsharpened spincil. There used to be a video of the spincil in action, but unfortunately the video seems to be offline at the moment. The video is working again.

Originally only available in Le Bon Marché in 2012, the spincil is now being sold in a handful of chains and shops in France, Italy and Luxemburg, but I noticed that one of the shop even has a spincil offer going on at the moment.

I wonder what pencil Ortie Design will come up with next…

References

References
1 If pencil slat is still the right term in this case

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