I made a recent non-pencil relates sighting of cedar wood on the Finland episode of
the TV programme The Hairy Bikers’ Northern Exposure. Our two favourite bikers were preparing salmon on cedar wood planks in front of a fire …looked really tasty.
The screenshots in this blog post has been taken from Episode Four of The Hairy Bikers’ Northern Exposure. I believe that the use of the screenshot shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.
I found this by coincidence. There’s a TV show from Germany, where the winner gets at least half a million Euros. The first task (out of thirteen) in a recent episode was to sharpen a pencil. There’s a video on their website, but as far as I know you can’t watch it outside the German speaking countries …so unfortunately I wasn’t able to see it looks like when you sharpen a pencil for so much money.
As mentioned previously Sean posted some exciting reports about his recent trip to Japan (Tokyo and Osaka). I have now seen photos of a very cool pencil sharpening knife he bought there. Dare I say it? Depending on your taste you might think this is potentially even more exciting than the Faber-Castell knife. It’s called the Scutter, made by Yoshiharu, and it’s a pencil sharpening knife with a guard, similar to a Lancashire peeler – but it’s for sharpening pencils, not for peeling vegetables. As far as I can tell the price in Japan is quite cheap, between ¥300 and ¥400 (~$2.90; £1.90; €2.60). You can find a photo on the manufacturer’s web site. I hope there will be a blog post about this knife on Sean’s blog.
This mechanical pencil’s ‘specialty’ are two different mechanisms that help prevent the leads from breaking.
If there is too much axial pen force, i.e. pressure is applied to the lead towards the centre of the pen, the lead will retract, i.e. it is cushioned, somehow similar to the Faber-Castell TK_Fine Vario L.
If there is too much normal pen force, i.e. pressure is applied to the side of the lead, a protective guard will extend to protect the lead from breaking. This guard can obviously only extend a certain amount, so it is possible to break an excessively long lead, more about this later.
Axial vs Normal Pen Force (open in new Tab for details)
Not working as advertised?
The packaging states that ‘If you advance lead more than 4 times breakage is possible‘. I wonder whether they either explained it wrong or whether I got a dodgy DelGuard, because using my normal writing angle on my DelGuard the lead will also break if the lead has been advanced 4 times. More on the clicks later. Maybe the text should read ‘If you advance lead 4 or more times’? Maybe other DelGuard users can comment on this.
Comparison with another mechanical pencil
I compared the pressure that will cause the lead to break to another mechanical pencil. I chose the Kuru Toga, previously mentioned here, thinking that both are from Japan, so there is a higher probability of the leads they come with being similar in terms of softness and strength [1]Comparing the breakage point to a pencil with much harder or softer lead would be less exciting.. Both mechanical pencils were tested with the leads they came with using an angle of 45°.
What force is needed to break a lead of what length.
The axis at the bottom shows the lead length in millimetres, with the number of clicks marked as well. You will probably have to enlarge this image to see it well (right click and open in new tab/window). The axis on the left shows the force needed, in Newton, to break the lead.
Personally I don’t extend the lead more than 0.5 mm or 1 mm, so I don’t really have problems with lead breakage anyway, but that didn’t prevent me from getting a DelGuard to marvel at the engineering ingenuity that built this pencil.
As you can see, the longer the lead extended on the Kuru Toga (red line) the easier it is to break.
For the DelGuard (blue line) it is virtually impossible to break the lead if it”s extended less than 1.5 mm, because of the guard that will extend. The dotted blue line represents the situation if you count bits of the lead being chipped off as breakage, the solid blue line represents proper breakage.
One click on the DelGuard will advance the lead by ~0.52 mm, less than what you get with the Kuru Toga, where one click will advance the lead by ~ 0.57 mm and certainly less than what you got with many pencils reviewed at Dave’s Mechanical Pencils. The break safe ‘zone’ for the extended lead is therefore everything between 0 mm and 1.6 mm. I usually don’t extend the lead more than 1 mm, so the lead is quite safe, but other people might use their pencils in different ways.
Here’s a copy and paste: I have neither the training, nor experience, nor the equipment to take these measurements properly, so you better take these measurements with a pinch of salt, or even better with a whole lorryload full of salt.
The latest episode of The Pen Addict, #172, has one of those behind the scenes details I just love. It starts 40 minutes into the episode. Brad Dowdy is talking about all the steps involved to get a Nock case from idea to design to getting manufactured. I wouldn’t have thought that the material is laser-cut. How exciting.
Nock Hightower Case (outside) and Notebook. The Noris was not part of the Kickstarter.
