Sierra Lead Query

[KDM]

Chappies,

I've turned a couple of sierra pencils recently. Very pleasing reults, nice easy kit to assemble.

Now, this amy sound like a stupid or even mundane question: how do you change the lead!??!

The mechanism appears to be a little brass widget which winds up and down on a spring. When I come the end of a lead, am i expected to pull the little stub of lead out of the brass widget, insert another and wind the lead back up into the pencil?

Subsequent question: I've nocied that I must have teh pencil oriented the "right way up" in order for the elad to screw out. If I have the pencil upside down, the barrel won't twist. It sort of locks.

An irritating feature is that the lead falls out by about 1mm when I lift it off the page, then pushes back into the barrel 1mm when I apply pressure. I've noticed that this effect can be countered by "locking" as described above.

Is ths a flaw in my kits, or have I accidentally discovered the correct way to use a propelling pencil?

 

[KDM]

No ideas?

 

[azamiryou]

I don't know about the Sierra, but PSI's "Designer" pencil works that way. I couldn't believe it when I saw the instructions, they didn't make sense to me. "You really have to pretty much completely disassemble the pencil and feed a new lead in from the front?!" Doing it, it's actually not too hard, but explaining it to a customer is not easy.

Here are the instructions; replacing the lead is at the bottom of page 2. http://www.pennstateind.com/library/PKMONT-PCL_ins.pdf

I'm not familiar with the locking or loose lead thing you're describing, but it sounds strange and possibly broken to me. The Designer pencil I made does not have these "features".

 

[KDM]

The dangerous end of that "Designer" kit looks remarkably similar to my Sierra. I'm happy enoguh with the reasoning: you have to screw the widget back up anyway, so it makes sense to screw a lead back up with it!

I agree that it's not what someone new to handmade pens would expect. In an office environment, most folk might be used to "click" type pencils where the next lead just falls through. I was worried that it might look a bit backward that you have to screw the lead in!

Something I noticed in a handmade click pencil: there is a rubber grommet in the very pointy part of the nib end. It stops the lead retracting when the mechanism retracts. I have a feeling tha the inclusion of a small grommet in the nib would fix the problem. I'm worried that maybe it was supplied with such a thing, but it fell out at some stage.

Thanks for gettign back to me.