Uni-ball Kuru Toga
The Kuru Toga is a self-sharpening mechanical pencil that writes as precisely and evenly as a high-quality gel pen. After just a couple of lines of writing, the lead in a normal mechanical pencil becomes a blunt irregular chisel shape, leading to clumsier, increasingly smeared writing. Experienced pencil users try to counteract this by rotating their pencil every few words, a tactic that works, but very imperfectly. The Kuru Toga, however, counteracts this automatically via an internal ratchet mechanism that rotates the lead minutely with every stroke. As you write it's constantly sharpening and rounding the lead against the paper. The resulting script is noticeably more legible and can be much finer than with a standard pencil -- ideal for tasks like coding, diagramming, annotating and general note taking. The mechanism's operation is literally unnoticeable. The packaging is in Japanese, too. So I'm not exactly sure how it operates. Based on what I've read online, it seems to rotate with every pressing and lifting of the point. The Kuro Toga is not retractable, but it is highly ergonomic, and my 0.5mm specimen (the Kuru Toga also comes in 0.3mm) seems never to suffer from broken leads (I've used both HB and 2B leads). Looking at my notebooks, I've written about 150 A4 pages which translates to about 30,000 words with diagrams. No sign of wear. It's surprisingly cheap for being the best pencil I've ever found.
-- Jonathan Coupe
Uni-ball Kuru Toga
$7
(black - 0.5mm)
Previously available from JetPens.com*
Other colors and 0.3mm also previously from JetPens.com
Manufactured by Mitsubishi Pencil Co., Ltd.
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