The Well-Appointed Desk

My pal Brad over at Pen Addict always refers to the Uni Kuru Toga mechanical pencil as his pencil of choice so I finally decided I’d give it a try. The feature that makes this mechanical pencil unique is a automatic lead rotation so that you do not have to continually alter your grip to avoid getting a wide chisel effect.

The pencil body is plastic painted to look metallic and the grip area is clear plastic with some ridges to aid in gripping. There is a small ring of rubber just above the tip that must be designed to keep your fingers from slipping on the plastic body into the tip writing area. Overall, I love the color but this is not the most comfortable pencil for long session writing. For that, I would prefer the Pilot Opt with its large rubberized grip area.

The Kuru Toga pencil includes a small white plastic eraser under the translucent cap which works well and the cap keeps the eraser clean and free from bottom-of-the-bag debris.

There is a spring-loaded clutch in the pencil that is triggered every time you lift the pencil helping to rotate the lead to a perfect point as you write. I test drove the 0.5mm green model though there are 0.3mm lead versions of the pencil as well for an even finer line which would be good to tight technical drawings or other detailed work.

The image above is a writing sample from the Kuru Toga. There does seem to be an overall consistency in the line widths. I worked hard not to adjust my grip on the pencil while I was writing. Its a hard habit to break.

This is a sample of my writing using a standard big-box mechanical pencil with a 0.5mm lead. I wrote with this without rotating the pencil while I wrote an lo and behold, the writing does get much thicker and more indistinct as a result of the pencil lead wearing into a chisel point.

If a consistent line width with your pencil is an issue, then the Kuru Toga line is definitely the answer. Available from JetPens for $7.50 for either the 0.5mm or 0.3mm versions.