uniball Kuru Toga Mechanical Pencil Starter Kit, 0.7mm HB#2, 1 Pack

I lived in Japan for many years and greatly enjoyed buying and using all of the wonderfully engineered tools, cooking implements, knives, consumer electronics, etc. Japanese people love precision and great clean design, and mechanical pencils ("sha-pen" in Japanese) are heavily used. By professionals, captains of industry, artists, and school children. My Japanese teacher turned me onto them, great for precision writing of Kanji. I think the Japanese affinity for them stems from the similarity to sumi-e (charcoal) writing implements traditionally used to write Kanji characters. I don't recall these Kuru Toga pencils from when I was there, I might have been using them all along and didn't realize what I had. Anyway, I just bought this one from Amazon and fell in love with it instantly. For a piece of consumer goods that costs less than $6.00 the engineering and design of this thing is a marvel. Might sound funny but it is beautiful to look at. Smoke translucent high gloss plastic barrel, neon green grip and eraser cap, chome-look tip, ridges molded into the end to make it easier to grip. The auto rotation/ auto advance of the lead works perfectly as expected. To test it I started writing and could not stop. The included HB leads are for me, the perfect balance of darkness and hardness. Silky smooth on the paper and they produce no dust that will smudge. I spent the day today at work, writing with a 0.5 mech pencil (not one of these, just a standard one) and the lead broke every 10 seconds literally. Snap, click to advance. Snap, click to advance. Snap, click to advance. Frustration. Got home, opened this up and just wrote a lot and have not broken the point once. Includes a starter pack of HB 0.7 leads and 3 erasers (one installed and two spares). The pencil itself had about 3 leads pre-installed so get this "starter set" and you'll be good to go for a long time. Amazon sells a 40- pack of the 0.7 leads as an "add-on" item for a couple of dollars if you spend more than $25. Love this sha-pen. Must. Concentrate. On. Not. Losing. It.

Great mechanical pencil with strong 0.7mm lead. Looks sharp too

If you like techy writing stuff. You will not be disappointed with this pencil. I love it. Works perfectly and I will never go back to normal ones again!

Great pencil

This really works and I got it when it was on sale for ~ five dollars so I consider it a great value. I like that it comes with refills and would be a nice stocking stuffer. The mechanical portion that rotates the lead makes writing so much easier. The person who invented this item is a genius. The only thing is that this is made of plastic so feels a bit flimsy in the hand.

my son really loves doing physics with this pencil. He finds it is really nice to write with and finds it to be very helpful

Worked great until body crumbled for no apparent reason. Did not drop or damage, just broke when taking it out of pen case

This pencil is so cool. It shifts the lead around itself so you always have a nice writing edge. No more endless clicking to get a good edge. This means less lead breakage. It's a good standard size and weight, feels nice in the hand. Writes well for long periods of time. The eraser is standard the for mechanical pencils. The only downside is I use it so often I lose it a lot.