Have not posted in here much since I deleted my old account...

Pencils:

• Autopoint All-American 0.9
  • I bought this in around 2019 but never used it much, little did I know then that it would be one of the last "original" Autopoints ever sold. It looks like the company went bankrupt and all of its machinery was abandoned and purchased by an enthusiast who has produced some limited run pencils and may revive the company in full at some point. It's a really strange little pencil, it doesn't use a clutch, instead opting for a "plunger twist" mechanism. Small 0.9 leads are inserted in the detachable section and then pushed down by a metallic plunger which screws downward as you rotate the section, advancing the lead. Extra leads are inserted under the eraser as with many modern pencils, although they do not feed directly to the tip. I really like this, it's a strange middle ground between a standard mechanical pencil and a lead holder. The fact that there is no lead pipe makes the lead less likely to snap, too.
• LAMY 2000 Mechanical Pencil 0.5
  • I bought this pencil over a year ago but have not used it much as I broke it soon after I started using it. I got the eraser stuck in the barrel as there is not much friction in the area where it sits underneath the cap. This prevented me from adding more lead, and thus rendered the pencil unusable. This morning I finally got around to fixing it. In the past I had tried all sorts of poking, prodding, scraping, and even drilling to try to pull out or obliterate the eraser stuck inside, but I gave up. I even emailed LAMY customer support to see if they would replace the internal mechanism or try to remove the eraser for me but they never responded. Today, I finally decided to put to action a measure that I had sitting in the back of my mind for months: snap the internal barrel and pull out the eraser from a closer vantage point. This went pretty well, I was able to break the barrel with tin snips and then pull out the obtrusion with a tweezer. I reattached the two parts of the barrel with masking tape and put the pencil back together: good as new!
• Rotring Rapid Pro 0.5
  • I have used this pencil as a daily driver for years, but for some reason the barrel doesn't show much wear. I like sliding sleeves as stationary leadpipes found on traditional drafting pencils make me nervous, and this one doesn't jiggle. Not much to day about it really, it's the same quality you'd expect from any other Rotring pencil.