Pentel Ain Leads Refill - 0.7mm 2B

This lead is my favorite. Got my daughter hooked on them too. Only problem is she keeps trying to steel mine.

These things are amazing.

Hard to find sometimes, but extremely nice lead refill for the aficionado. I will buy more when needed.

Great quality product!

Nice and dark. Better than #2 pencil. Just what I wanted.

I am not an engineer. I like to draw and recently I considered that I haven't really tried it using a mechanical pencil, so I decided to try and experiment with various ways I could use them in drawing. Of course, from math homework or note-taking, I am familiar with and like their replaceable leads and that you can press somewhere to advance the lead without stopping to use a pencil sharpener. A mechanical pencil is sold by the thickness of lead the pencil is designed to hold, e.g., .30mm, .50mm, .70mm .90 mm. I had not tried these frequently sold thicknesses enough to be able to distinguish one from each other. I was drawn to checking out the different feel I would find while working with different pencil thickness. I sometimes enjoy fineness of a tip for the level of detail. I had recently purchased a set of .30mmfelt tip marker pens in three different tones, so I could also explore some of cross-comparison with .30 pencils. I was not very concerned about the different brands available for a given pencil thickness. For each particular lead thickness, there is the same range of categories of hardness (lighter tone) or softness of lead (darker tone). B is soft, H is hard, HB is in between, and there are increasingly softer / darker 2B, 3B, 4B ... 9B or harder / lighter 2H, 3H, 4H ... 9H. Most of the mechanical pencils packaging in the office supply stores referred to the range but often came only supplied with a pack(s) of HB leads only, or sometimes B or 2B, H or 2H. I noticed online stores provided only a few more options of the other softness/hardness options (lead types). (Unfortunately, an online search for 1 or 2 lead types invariably mixed in many non-matching results; so, it was like finding a needle in a haystack). Apparently, the average customer does not experiment much with the lead type. The rare user probably only buys, for the given thickness pencil, a couple or a few of the lead types from among the ones available (forget finding the supposed range). Possibly because of the sizeable number of leads that usually comes in a lead type pack, a user probably would not be switching between lead types for a given lead thickness pencil, but buy a pencil for each lead type. Also to efficiently replace leads when there is more than one lead type for a given lead thickness pencil, I had to label each pencil with the lead type assigned (lead thickness is usually labeled on the pencil). It seems that artists using mechanical pencils were more likely to recommend softer leads from HB to 6B. I have dabbled in drawing, water colors and acrylics, but I am currently going back through missed lessons in drawing. The mechanical pencils are not even addressed in the drawing book I'm looking at, which for pencil, covers working with larger scale graphite pencils and circular or rectangular graphite sticks. Tips are bigger and varied, and often the side of the tip may be used to cover broader areas and suggest appropriate textures or complex details. For drawing, it seems these are the more established tools, with known techniques used to make excellent drawings. Two other groups of drawing tools discussed in the book include chalk (black pastel “pencil”, circular or rectangular stick of hard pastel or Conte pencil), and charcoal (thin sticks surrounded by wood or a cylinder of paper, labeled hard medium or soft --or HB through 6B; sticks of natural charcoal). With mechanical pencils you do get some of the softness-darkness, and fine thickness may also have its own niche (I'm not sure I have discovered it yet), but the finer thicknesses of tips can limit what you might do in larger scale drawings? Surprisingly I didn't hear so much about artists recommending, when using mechanical pencils, one lead thickness over another using , but just gaining experience using any and all of the sizes mentioned above was "bonus".

Smooth writing, great pencil

Excellent product, does not break as easily as others