Today: a mechanical pencil I ordered in October. I planned to do a review for a while now and it was supposed to be released today, but the day before yesterday Jeff Abbott released a review of this pencil at the biggest stationery blog of them all, The Pen Addict.
He said all and more I could have said, so change of plans then, I only post a short review of this mechanical pencil, but talk about why I like sliding sleeves, again.
Sliding Sleeves
I don’t know why sliding sleeves are such a niche. In my imagination drafting and technical drawing is done on a computer, so there’s no point in having a rigid sleeve/pipe around the lead so that you can use your mechanical pencil more precisely with a ruler.
In my imagination most use mechanical pencils for writing, at least when we talk about today and when we talk about Earth. Of course there will be exceptions, too.
When writing with a fixed sleeve you have to ‘click’ after you used up the 0.5mm or however much you have advanced the lead.
If you have a sliding sleeve it will retract while you use the lead, so you will have 4mm or more to use up before you need to advance the lead.
If you use soft leads (I don’t) the advantage gets even better than with hard leads because you use the lead p so much faster.
The OHTO Conception
Most of my ideas about this pencil can be seen in this video:
In short: You can adjust how far you want the lead to advance and you can adjust whether you want a fixed or a sliding sleeve.
That’s a lot of value for the $15 I paid on eBay. Unfortunately the pen is not available for this price anymore. As far as I can tell OHTO doesn’t have an official presence in the UK, so I wonder whether all OHTO pens here are grey imports anyway. If they are I certainly didn’t have to feel bad for buying it for a good price from Japan instead of buying it for a higher price from a grey importer in the UK.
With 23g the pen’s weight is pretty average for a pen with a metal body and slightly heavier than your average pen with a plastic body.
You might remember my table with the force needed for different sliding sleeves. Well, the OHTO Conception, at least my 0.3mm version, is a bit difficult to place in that table. When I first checked I got a very good value, 5cN or even better, but when I checked another time, after the pencil was in fixed sleeve mode, a force of four time that was needed. It seems that changing from sliding to fixed sleeve mode and back will not always put the sleeve in the same state. Sometimes you then have a ‘better’ sliding sleeve, sometimes a ‘worse’ one.
Conclusion
A great pencil, that could do with a bit more grip. I only wish I had bought another colour.
Price: October 2016
So, what’s the force needed when in sliding sleeve mode?
Thank you for your comment.
It’s not consistent if you switch to fixed mode and back. If you’re lucky it’s under 5cN if your unlucky it’s over 2dN.
Thank you very much for helping me to save some money 🙂
Happy to hear. It is a nice pencil and maybe not all of them have this issue. If I find out more I’ll post about it.
It is available from cult pens (and worldwide) http://www.cultpens.com/i/q/OH48100/ohto-conception-mechanical-pencil
Very nice pencil, i like the look of it.
But I would not buy it, it has useless functions. Why would you like to change the lead advance. Too small and you have too click it all the time too long and risk breaking the lead.
The sleeve lock might be useful. You can use it for drafting with a ruler etc or for general purpose writing. But the sleeve should work perfectly for this or it is useless especially if the thing is inconsistent.
For me .3 lead is too thin. I like .5 and .7
I think this pencil will be a mixed bag of oppinions lime kuru toga. Some will enjoy the gimmick other wont
Thank you for your review. How is the workmanship of the Conception? I have two versions of the Promecha which also sports adjusting features but this pencil is impressive only at first sight. – By the way, the Conception can be found at CultPens.
Thank you for your comments.
In the case of sliding sleeves, there are not that many sliding sleeve pencils on the market, so I was excited when I first found out about this pencil.
Workmanship is good, but when adjusting between fixed and sliding sleeve you don’t seem to always get the same easy going sliding sleeve, sometimes you end up with a sleeve that needs more force to slide. I saw it at CultPens, but ordered from Japan as it was cheaper from Japan and because I think (but am not 100% sure) that even the CultPens version is a grey import anyway.