You might have seen my Facebook post about the recently released 0.5 mm and 0.7 mm version of the Orenz and about the Orenz Mannish Line that will be released in June.
The Mannish Line has some interesting colour combinations. Very tempting.
The UK packaging
The Orenz in 0.5 mm and 0.7 mm doesn’t seem to be available in Japan. The one I bought was the official UK version, but made in Japan, of course.
The UK Orenz on Silvine Memo Books
The sliding sleeve
The 0.3 mm version of the Orenz needed quite a bit more force to slide the sleeve than the 0.2 mm version, see the sliding sleeve table for more information. This made me think that the 0.5 mm version will need even more force to slide the sleeve, but to my surprise that was not the case. While the 0.3 mm version needs more than 0.1 Newton, the 0.5 mm version needs only about 0.1 Newton. That’s still more than the best 0.5 mm pencil, the Staedtler Microfix S, but as far as I know, this is the best value for a pencil currently in production. Using different leads might result in different values, but both the 0.3 mm and the 0.5 mm version of the Orenz were tested with the original leads they came with.
Great centre of gravity
Vitals
Weight: 10.4 grams
Length: 14.5 centimetres
Diameter of the grip section: ~8 millimetres
Force needed to slide the sleeve: ~0.1 newton
This blog post has been brought to you by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Conclusion
Overall: it’s a fantastic pencil. Pentel’s pencil designs are very polarising for me, I either love or dislike them, but the Orenz has a design I really love, unlike the P20x series liked by many, but not me.
It’s a shame that this pencil is only available in black. Pentel, please release it in other colours, too.
After my 2012 blog post about the Atoma and the M by Staples’ Arc notebooks[1]…to my surprise it is still by far(!) the most popular blog post at Bleistift, even though it is a few years old. I have been asked more than once whether the Staples ‘desktop punch’ can be used for the Atoma system.
The short answer is that it works well.
Locked for transport
Why would you want to use a hole puncher [2]I know they are not holes, but I will stick to this name for now as it is commonly used. not designed for your system? Well, it is much cheaper. The Atoma hole punch currently sells for around £140 (~$205; €185), the Staples one can be bought for around £35 (~$50; €45). [3]I got my Staples desktop punch for my birthday many years ago, so I am not sure, but I think prices were pretty similar at the time.
Unlocked
Not surprisingly holes punched with the Staples desktop punch, when used with Atoma discs, seem a bit worse than the original Atoma holes [4]I assume that Atoma punched paper, used with a Staples discs, would also be slightly worse than Staples punched paper. – but in my opinion Atoma makes the better notebooks, while Staples makes the affordable paper puncher, so I will stick with this combination.
Atoma punched paper
M by Staples Arc punched paper
The M by Staples arc desktop punch is sturdy and well made in Taiwan and can officially punch up to 8 sheets in one go.
If you want to read more about Staples’ Atoma clone have a look at the Arc It Blog (not updated anymore).
Atoma left, Staples right
Price and exchange rates: May 2016
As usual: open in a new tab/window to see the images in high resolution (except the last image).
There are two pencil purchases I’ve been thinking about for a while. One of them is a Rotring 800+, but with a price tag of more than £40 I haven’t been able to convince myself to buy it yet [1]I guess I should buy it. In a recent Pen Addict podcast they were talking about a similar situation https://www.relay.fm/penaddict/204 , it all reminds me of a Bavarian movie called ‘The sooner … Continue reading.
Every now and then I check whether I find a good offer for this pencil in online stores, on Amazon and on eBay. Earlier this week I was just checking CultPens again (so far they have been the cheapest store for the Rotring 800+ when taking postage into account) when I saw an offer I couldn’t resist: Lots, really lots, of ‘free’ items if you buy a Staedtler Initium pen.
So many ‘free’ add-ons…
The Atoma leather notebook
The most tempting of these ‘free’ add-ons was Atoma’s Leather notebook [2]Mady by Belgium’s Ruitertassen.. Most tempting for two reasons:
I am using my Atoma notebooks on a daily basis, at work and at home, and I really like it
and I really like the look and the graceful ageing of tanned leather [3]Think Yo no bi, which reminds me: I just hope my Rustico notebook doesn’t get too dark over time, but based on experience with a leather bag I think I will be fine
…so this notebook was the reason why I went ahead and ordered the Staedtler Initium pencil.
I think I was probably even more interested than I otherwise would have been because of the recent flood of blog posts about William Hannah’s similar notebook after they sent free samples and discounted samples to many bloggers [4]including Scribble, Philofaxy, Pen Paper Pencil and Gourmet Pens.
Drool, so much nice stationery
Staedtler’s premium line
I do love Staedtler products, you might have noticed that this blog has more articles about Staedtler than about any other manufacturer [5]So fat there are 50 Staetdler articles. Faber-Castell, the number two only has 39 articles at Bleistift. but so far I haven’t been very excited about their foray into the world of more expensive stationery, their Initium line. Based on the photos I have seen online I think the Initium fountain pens look like cheap ‘own brand’ pens from a high street stationery chain – I might revise my opinion when I see one in reality, though, photos can be deceptive. The pencil on the other hand looks nice to me, but maybe not >£60 nice. So I went with the mechanical pencil instead. On the photos it looks better than the fountain pen, but I couldn’t really imagine how the clip works – is there a spring like in the Lamy 2000?
Arrived!
Well, my purchase has arrived now, I just unpacked the items. First impression: The body of the Staedtler pencil looks a bit more plasticy than expected, but overall it looks good. The Atoma leather notebook looks just amazingly beautiful!
I’m very much looking forward to trying all the items out.
I guess I should buy it. In a recent Pen Addict podcast they were talking about a similar situation https://www.relay.fm/penaddict/204 , it all reminds me of a Bavarian movie called ‘The sooner you die, the longer you are dead’
Think Yo no bi, which reminds me: I just hope my Rustico notebook doesn’t get too dark over time, but based on experience with a leather bag I think I will be fine
Having used Kaweco’s AL Sport stonewashed fountain pen since 2014 I thought that a stonewashed pencil might look rather nice, too. Unfortunately, the ‘Stonewashed series’ only includes a fountain pen, a ballpen (that the official name) and a rollerball – no mechanical pencil (or push pencil, the name used by Kaweco).
No pencil
The ballpen and the push pencil look very similar, so I thought it might be possible to simply use the AL Sport pencil mechanism in the ballpen body, but that would mean having to buy the ballpen even though I wouldn’t use it – and it’s just guesswork that the parts would fit, so earlier this year, in February, I contacted Michael Gutberlet from Kaweco asking whether there is or will be a AL Sport stonewashed pencil. I had his contact details from an earlier email exchange in 2013, when Michael Marzani from Just Another Pen and I were discussing the brass body of the Kaweco Liliput he reviewed in his blog. As part of the discussion Michael Marzani contacted Michael Gurberlet, who was providing information about the brass he used for this pen.
Great balance: The centre of gravity is slightly towards the front
A prototype
To my surprise Michael Gutberlet then made a Prototype [1]A real prototype 8^) not like this year’s April Fools Day Prototype. Kaweco and Prototype, that reminds me of SBRE Brown’s blog post and video about the Kaweco Ranger, which, as far as I … Continue reading for me. I got the impression that the main issue when creating this pen was the push button, but since I don’t have an AL Sport ballpen I can’t really comment how much the ballpen and the pencil’s push button differ. I assume the top looks the same, but the button is different, probably because the pencil push button is held by the lead pipe, but the ballpen push button is on the click mechanism – but this is pure speculation. Michael Gutberlet seems to be very hands-on with the pens he creates, so as far as I know he made this prototype himself. He also finishes each Lilliput Fireblue fountain pen individually. Massdrop is currently selling them for $139.
In March 2016, when the pencil was ready, I was contacted by Sabine Götz – and she called it a prototype – how exciting! The word prototype hadn’t been mentioned before, so that was a very exciting moment. I guess this makes this pencil a one of a kind.
I also got a bill. The pencil was a bit more expensive than the AL Sport stonewashed fountain pen I bought a few years ago, but that was more down to the fact that I found a shop that sold it for a good price. I guess what I paid for the pencil is similar to what the official retail price for an AL Sport stonewashed pencil would be.
The pencil
Shape and lead
The pencil itself is quite stubby, but all Kaweco Sport push pencils are, so I knew what I was getting. Nevertheless, I think the stubbiness makes the pencil less elegant than the fountain pen version. The pencil takes 0.7 mm leads. According to the mini manual that came with the pen there seem to be versions of the Sport pencil in 0.5 mm, 0.7 mm, 0.9 mm and 2 mm, but I don’t think I ever saw the Sport in 0.5 mm.
Pencil and fountain pen
Clip
I ordered a clip for the pencil so that I can transport it easily. Pen Heaven had the best price I could find in the UK, £1.99 (~$2.90; €2.50), including postage. I do use the pen with the clip, but that does make rotating the pen (and using the lead up from all sides) more difficult.
Material
The pen itself feels solid and feels like it’s mainly made from metals (mainly aluminium) or metal alloys (the mechanism?), but the lead pipe is made of clear, slightly flexible plastic. The push button gets stuck on this pipe (friction fit). There is no eraser in this pencil.
The plastic pipe for the leads
Lead
According to the manual you can store two leads in the pipe. You might think that, as with mechanical pencils from many decades ago, you can store leads in the space between the pipe and the body, but you would only be able to store leads with a length of about 2 cm there, so this space is more or less ‘wasted’.
By the way, my wife was very impressed by the lead the pencil came with. Her comments were: ‘creamy and buttery, soft, but does not smudge’. That is high praise coming from her as she doesn’t like leads that smudge …so the Lamy Scribble’s original leads had to go. Her dislike for smudgy leads goes so far that she is using H leads in a pencil that is used for an Atoma notebook (H is actually great with Atoma’s paper).
Pencil and fountain pen
Numbers
A quick look at the dimensions of the pen:
It is hexagonal and has a diameter of 13 mm (just over half an inch) – much wider than most mechanical and wood cased pencil. For comparison: the current Noris has a diameter of 6.8 mm. The pens length is 10.8 cm and it has a weight of 29 g (just over one ounce).
This blog post has been brought to you by Kryten and the Jupiter Mining Corporation – Kryten’s wide words: If you don’t gosub a programme loop you never get a subroutine
Daily use and overall verdict
I have used this pencil for a while now, together with the AL Sport stonewashed fountain pen. Together they are such a nice pair. I have to say that I always preferred using the pencil, despite its stubiness. I find the pencil’s look much less attractive than the stonewashed fountain pen’s elegance, but because it is instantly ready it was my pen of choice – there is no cap that needs to be taken off and posted first.
Overall this is a great pencil, even though I would prefer a slimmer, longer version. I wonder whether this stonewashed pencil (not my imaginary slimmer, longer version) will be available in shops in the future. I guess the original problem was that different pen parts need ‘stonewashing’ for different lengths of time, but now that there is a prototype (and a recipe how long its parts need ‘stonewashing’) it should be easier to make more stonewashed pencils.
Regarding the stonewashing: I have to add that my fountain pen has a better stonewashed effect, but this might be caused by the different shape of the parts (or, less likely, the different paint). The question now is whether Kaweco sells enough pencils to think it’s worth offering an AL Sport stonewashed pencil.
Magnified from the previous photo: The AL Sport in action
Price: March / April 2016
Exchange rates: May 2016
I would like to thank Michael Gutberlet for making this prototype for me.
A real prototype 8^) not like this year’s April Fools Day Prototype. Kaweco and Prototype, that reminds me of SBRE Brown’s blog post and video about the Kaweco Ranger, which, as far as I know, is not a prototype, but one of the first models released after Kaweco became Gutberlet owned. Unless of course the reviewed set was a prototype for the Ranger series that was available in the 1990s.
Just a very quick post showing you my new pen roll. I’ll call it BUBM pen roll, just because there’s a BUBM [1]BUBM stands for Be Unique Be Myself, with it being an imperative I would have gone for Be Unique Be Yourself. logo on the roll. My pen roll was advertised as a “Cable Organizer Roll Up Bag Storage Case for Tool Batteries Pen Earphone”.
I bought it for £3.59 (~$5.15; €4.55) from eBay, including postage. The same item was being sold for a lower price by other sellers, but these cheaper ones would have come directly from China and would have taken a long time, this one was already in the UK.
Difficult to see, but the URL bubmcase.com is printed on the green surface
Material-wise it reminds me very much of Nock products. I compared it to the Nock pen case I have. The Nock product does look more sophisticated, but I can’t say I am surprised ..and for the price I paid the BUBM pen roll is extremely good value for money and quite well made.
If you use it for pens it will usually be big enough, but very long unsharpened pencils, like the TiTi Kyung In T-Prime in the photo above, are a bit longer than the 17cm of the case.
I noticed that some of my pens and pencil slid out of the pen case when the roll wasn’t stored horizontally in my backpack – only wider pens and those with a rougher surface (unpainted pencils) stayed where they were. The surface of painted pencils doesn’t seem to have enough friction and pencils are rather slim, so they won’t be held in place – unless you put a lot of them in one slot – so if this was a dedicated pen roll it would make sense to have narrower slots, but as this is more of an all purpose pen roll the wider slots make more sense.
Well, let’s go a bit off topic then and look at other uses for this pen roll.
Off topic: Swiss army knives
Here’s an example where I used the pen roll for Swiss knives. I’ll go even more off topic by giving a short explanation of each of the knives.
The first knife from the left is an Elinox. Elinox was Victorinox’s economy line and this is the last knife my father used at work. I don’t know what happened to the ones he had before, maybe they were too ‘used up’ and he got rid of them. This one’s blade is pretty ground down from sharpening it with the tools in his joinery. As a kid I was so used to Elinox knives that I thought the Elinox logo is the ‘normal’ logo for Swiss army knives. When I first saw a Victorinox I thought they must have recently changed the logo. I also thought only the real posh knives come with tooth picks and tweezers, because Elinox knives didn’t have those.
The second knife form the left is a Swiss Cheese Knife from Victorinox. I got it a few years ago when Switzerland Cheese Marketing AG sent them out for free if you bought Swiss Cheese and sent them the bar codes, plus postage. Luckily this promotion was open world wide, so I could send them bar codes from cheese i bought here in the UK, I just had to send them together with the postage in Swiss Franks.
The third knife from the left is a normal Vicorinox Spartan. Maybe my father’s Sunday knife, but I should date it to be sure.
The fourth knife from the left is Wenger‘s equivalent of the Spartan, I think it’s called Hunter. My wife got it many years ago, but she already had a similar one so I got it.
The last knife is a Swiza. This is the D04 version. which has a screw driver instead of a cork screw. Swiza only started selling knives similar to the well known Swiss army knives a few months ago.
A quick note on the link Victorinox – Wenger- Swiza: Victorinox and Wenger make/made Swiss army knives, but Swiza, originally a clock manufacturer, is fairly new to the world of knives. Their knives have not (yet) been used by the army, so Swiss folding knives might be a better term to describe Swiza’s knives. Like Wenger they are from the Canton of Jura.
A few years ago Victorinox bought Wenger. In the last few months two things happened: Victorinox started selling Wenger knives under their own Victorinox name (Delémont Collection) and a former Wenger CEO has started to make knives again, now under the Swiza brand.
To be honest: the Swiza knives look better on pictures than in reality. They aren’t bad knives at all, but what makes them interesting is probably the fact that they are new. For use in the UK they are not great as they have locking blades which means they are “illegal to carry in public without good reason”.
Please let me know if you liked the off topic part of this post and whether you’d like more or less off topic, i.e. not stationery related, bits like this in the future
Price and exchange rates: April 2016
You can see Lexikaliker’s small black and red and big Swiss army knives on his blog.
