Pencils?

He keeps busting mechanical pencils due to playing around with them so thats no good.
Is HB darker than H2B?
I will get some of those staedler ones.
 
Angilion said:
H is the hardness and B is the blackness. The numbers are a scale. It's been in use for donkey's years. Generally they're inversely proportional, i.e. a higher hardness rating will leave a fainter mark and a higher blackness rating will wear down quicker. Around the middle of the scale is best for general school work on paper. A high hardness rating would be too narrow and too faint and a high blackness rating would be too dark and too soft (and thus wear down too quickly, not lasting long enough and making the lines too wide after a little bit of use because the point would be very quickly blunted).
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I remember my school getting a load of pencils that were shockingly ‘soft’, was almost like writing with charcoal and smudged like **** - which of course led to a slap with a ruler from the teacher. Fun times.
 
SideWinder said:
Sounds like a job for the Staedtler 2B. It destroys all other pencils in terms of performance, sharpness and durability.
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+1
2B they sharpen without fracturing, and with staedtler plastic eraser easy to correct (on a nice 90gsm+ paper notebook)
clutch pencil may require too much dexterity, but with staedtler or faber castell leads, joy to use, and you can withdraw the point.

( It's a pity none of the tablet based styluses can match the experience )
 
Angilion said:
That's what I was using ~50 years ago. Some things stand the test of time because they do the job very well. Your child might prefer a slightly higher B rating (based on you saying that the pencils they've used don't seem to be dark enough).
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My son is a bit young for pencils, being 7 months old and all :p
 
the frustration caused by snapping the lead on a pencil when attempting to sharpen it with whatever method must be the equivalent of a skipping cd or a buffering video :p
 
This has nothing now to do with brand, harking back to our childhoods or anything retro like that since even the Staedtler H2B all used to be lead, and therefore fairly durable, decent finish, good colour and now they're graphite because lead is bad mmmkay.
 
Django x2 said:
This has nothing now to do with brand, harking back to our childhoods or anything retro like that since even the Staedtler H2B all used to be lead, and therefore fairly durable, decent finish, good colour and now they're graphite because lead is bad mmmkay.
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Either I've been completely misinformed for decades or there never was any lead in pencils. It was a case of mistaken identity centuries ago, when the orginal natural graphite deposit was found and wrongly assumed to be some form of lead.
 
Django x2 said:
This has nothing now to do with brand, harking back to our childhoods or anything retro like that since even the Staedtler H2B all used to be lead, and therefore fairly durable, decent finish, good colour and now they're graphite because lead is bad mmmkay.
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Modern pencils (wood cased style) have never contained lead. It's called lead because ancient Romans used lead. I doubt the Staedtler H2B was around at that time!

The Unleaded Pencil

Here’s a myth buster: There is no lead in pencils. Rather, the core is made up of a non-toxic mineral called graphite. The common name “pencil lead” is due to an historic association with the stylus made of lead in ancient Roman times. If you’re looking for information on potential lead exposure...
pencils.com
 
This may sound really daft, but I found a good pencil sharpener makes a huge difference to how easily the lead breaks on a lot of pencils, as many sharpeners don't seem to do an even job of sharpening the lead wo you and up with one side often having the wood removed for quite a bit more than the other, thus when you press down with the pencil it breaks at that point.

I used to love a good metal sharpener, with a decent blade in it as it always seemed to do a better job than the cheap plastic jobs, these days I've actually got a relatively cheap helix desk clamped sharpener in the garage (it's holds the pencil and feeds it in parallel, and you turn a handle to spin a spiral cutter inside the case), it's basically the cheap version of what the teachers often had on their desks when I was a kid:)
 
I remember that many teachers had a mega pencil sharpener clamped to their desk, it had a hand crank and spring loaded grip to hold the pencil. I used to borrow a pencil from a classmate, often a girl that I fancied, then after 30 seconds on the mega sharpener I'd give them back a 1 inch stub of pencil!

I had it done to me so many times that I got used to making do with a mini pencil that had already gone through the mega sharpener and was too short to go through it again.
 
Pencils are such wonderful things. I use one daily at work for sketching, although I've moved up in the world and use a clutch pencil now so you only need to replace the lead in it. It also has an amazing rotary sharpener. So geek
 
:cry:
bainbridge said:
I remember that many teachers had a mega pencil sharpener clamped to their desk, it had a hand crank and spring loaded grip to hold the pencil. I used to borrow a pencil from a classmate, often a girl that I fancied, then after 30 seconds on the mega sharpener I'd give them back a 1 inch stub of pencil!

I had it done to me so many times that I got used to making do with a mini pencil that had already gone through the mega sharpener and was too short to go through it again.
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Then some dipstick thought it was funny to dump the big plastic tray of sharpenings over someone in Technical Drawing class.
 
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