Schmidt Archives - Bleistift

Titanium (again)

1 Comment / Mechanical pencils / By memm

For a while now I’ve been a fan of Nitecore torches. Over the years I bought a few of their torches and one of them is part of my EDC.

My non-stationery EDC includes a Nitecore torch

What does this have to do with pencils? Wait for it. It’s coming now.

On a recent trip I took two of their torches with me, including one with a LiIon battery. The battery, also from their brand, and charged with a charger from their brand died from one day to the next. As it was only a few months old I tried contacting Nitecore.com. As they haven’t replied yet I was just about to try contacting Nitecore.co.uk and when visiting their web site I was reminded of their range of pens.

Since this spring their pen range also includes the Titanium pencil NTP40, which is using a pencil mechanism from Schmidt. A popular choice for the mechanism. The Monami 153 has the same ‘inside’. I also have a Tom Dixon brass pencil that is based on the Schmidt and you can find it in Kickstarter projects.

More about the Monami 153 in the video above.

The Nitecore certainly looks the part, but comes with a price tag of about $120 / £100. It would be great to try this pencil out one day. The Schmidt mechanism is very good and the NTP40 has good looks, too.

If you like Titanium you might like this blog post from 2016.

The image in this blog post has been taken from the Nitecore web site. I believe that the use of the images shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

The Kuru Toga – an old hat?

2 Comments / Mechanical pencils / By memm

This isn’t really a follow up to my 2009 blog post The Kuru Toga – a disappointment, t’s more of a separate blog post – by coincidence I’ve come across a document I want to share.

As consumers we usually see Schmidt as a manufacturer of pen refills, but they actually do manufacture a lot of pens. If you look at their catalogue you can see pen parts that look as if Schmidt is manufacturing pens or parts of pens for big companies like Lamy and Montblanc.

They also seem to invent a lot and are very innovative when it comes to pens, even though very often we don’t see these inventions in mass market products. Just one example, I remember reading about a fountain pen they invented that uses microscopic pumps to transport the ink to the nib.

Well, it looks as if they have also invented something very similar to the Kuru Toga, just that they did this 25 years before Uni / Mitsubishi. You can read more about it in this patent: DE 3641432 C1 , but be warned: Google’s translation of this patent isn’t brilliant.

It even looks a bit like the Kuru Toga (Image from Schmidt’s patent document)

I assume I can show the image from the patent here (‘fair dealing’), as the patent is available to look at via Google anyway.