Flat Lead Pencils
I’ve been attending a watercolor lettering workshop this week (which has been a blast, by the way, I will post photos by the end of the week). Towards the end of the day today, the whole mess of lettering nerds got all excited about a flat lead mechanical pencil similar to a carpenter’s pencil. The hunt was on. Where do you find one of these mysterious little creatures? How much would they cost?
I hunted around on Google for about 30 minutes trying to determine the exact combination of descriptors to find this imminently coveted graphite implement. What I did manage to track down was the Striker Mechanical Carpenter’s Pencil with Duralead, available from Hechinger (“the world’s most unusual hardware store”) for $3.69 US including three replacement leads.
This wasn’t exactly the pencil that was discovered in our lettering workshop was I continued to hunt. I knew the manufacturer was Foray, the brand most closely associated with off-brand writing instruments at the big box office supply stores so I finally went straight to the Office Depot site and just searched page-by-page through their pencils. Voila! The reason that I couldn’t find it was that Office Depot lists the pencil as “Foray™ Super Size Lead Mechanical Pencils, 0.9 mm” and at no time indicates that it has a slightly flattened lead design. So, there you have it. A set of three of these pencils costs about $7 US.
Popularity: 10% [?]
there is also a ibis mechanical drawing pencil that works really well
I LOVE the Flat Foray pencil but I CANNOT find it anywhere. I’m so sad
thanks for writing about the Foray.
Joi