Page Text: DMP - Dave's Mechanical Pencils
My mechanical pencil collection and various related things, thoughts and musings about them, reviews of mechanical pencils and other items, and more. I'm not prejudiced - all forms of pencils and graphite are welcome here, even some ink sneaks in too. You can use the sidebar links to find mechanical pencil reviews and other stuff.
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Lead In The Real World
I’m sure pretty sure all of us mechanical pencil people have our own favourite lead sizes, grades and brands, but I’ve always been interested in what lead sizes are actually used by the population at large, out there in the real world. Twelve years ago I started making some efforts to actually answer the question, by asking industry sources – retailers, distributors and manufacturers. Some didn’t want to say anything, but a few were happy to give some quite specific answers. On the one hand the information wasn’t particularly confidential, but they also generally didn’t want it shouted from the rooftops. However, over ten years have gone by, and I don’t think they will mind this post. So, here then, a little snippet of real world lead facts.
Leads - 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.7 & 0.9mm
Firstly then, the New Zealand importers of two major worldwide international brands of mechanical pencils replied to my questions.
I asked each of them what percentage of sales was each lead size of their biggest selling technical drafting model of pencil, and of their general writing pencil. The results were surprisingly similar between the brands, and so I average them as below. These are the figures for the NZ market.
Technical Pencil