Mechanical pencil review: Paper Mate Write Bros.

Listing for the product in question: Paper Mate Write Bros.

When I was in elementary school, my dad and I bought these planning to attach origami hearts to them for Valentine’s Day and give them to my classmates. Finding that it was more difficult to attach origami hearts to these than to the other kind we bought, we kept these and I spent the better part of, I think, my first two years of college going through this pack of 30.

“Going through,” you say?

There is one main design issue with these pencils, which are purportedly “refillable”. This is that the most obvious way of refilling the lead is to take out the eraser, put in the lead, and put the eraser back. However, if you’re not paying attention, during a few weeks or months (depending on how often you make mistakes and how big the mistakes are), you’ll use up enough of the not-large eraser that it becomes flush with the plastic edge that holds it. The result of this is that it becomes very difficult to take out the eraser (I believe I attempted to do so even with a paperclip). This results in the simultaneous loss of two capabilities: (1) the main method of refilling lead and (2) the eraser, which is stymied in its erasing efforts by the fact that the plastic edge of the top of the pencil instead contacts the surface you’re trying to erase.

After this, there is plausibly one way to refill the pencil: insert more lead into the place where the lead you write with comes out. I just tested this and it does work, although I broke the piece of (advertised, seemingly correctly, as being extra-long) lead while testing the refilling, and this method certainly requires fine motor skills.

The bigger problem is that you have no more usable eraser. (At least for me, erasing with a separate eraser is noticeably more inconvenient.) If you have gotten to this point, you may take extreme measures by repossessing/requisitioning the eraser of another pencil from the pack (possibly an unused one, meaning erasers run out faster than pencils, since the body of the pencil lasts pretty long (I’ve only broken a few)) ...if you’re able to remove the existing eraser in the first place. This also means we can only use about half of each eraser provided, since once you’ve used the top half, the bottom half doesn’t extend out of its chamber.

Once you become wise to this process, you may stop it in its tracks, probably by replacing the eraser before it becomes difficult to extract. This requires a certain level of situational awareness. Besides, at least for me, the erasers don’t last that long. As noted, they go faster than any other part of the pencil, and no refills are provided (it looks like they’re not even provided separately).

In conclusion, these pencils are poorly designed. Paper Mate’s Clearpoint pencils, for instance, are much better designed: they have extremely long erasers that last ... years? ..., and the top of the pencil can be removed for lead refills in a way that is isolated from other functions of the pencil (i.e., erasing capacity), putting it further from having a single point of failure. My only gripe with the Clearpoint pencils is that a combination of the thick barrel and the matte grip means it’s harder to put the pencil behind your ear or in your hair compared to the Write Bros. pencils or a garden-variety (say Ticonderoga) traditional pencil. Also, after probably 10 years of having a set of Clearpoint pencils, the one I’ve been using (though not continuously for 10 years) has had its clip broken off (probably due to breakage from being dropped on the floor too many times), and as far as longevity goes I had one that to my understanding went out of commission within a few years due to an issue with the tip collapsing back into the pencil under pressure.

I am not a mechanical pencil connoisseur, though I do wonder how much of a productivity multiplier I could get from finding the most optimal writing utensil (I notice that sometimes I write something incorrectly and have to take time to go back and fix it). I just have strong opinions about this particular design.