Dear Zebra, I'm glad you liked my idea. Do I get royalties?
Back in the fall of '05 I made a pencil barrel in the metal shop based on the design and mechanism of a Zebra M-402 mechanical pencil.
(Links to that story: 1, 2, 3, 4)
The other week at Staples, I found this pen, a Zebra F-702:
Here is that pen next to the pencil barrel I made:
The knurling is much finer; it also doesn't go as far up the barrel. Still, it's a lot better than the annoying rubber grip.
Fortunately, this barrel has the same thread diameter and pitch at both ends as the F-402's mechanism, so you can pull the guts out of an F-402 pencil and put it in the F-701's barrel, to give you this:
So, if you want a pencil like the one I made, you can have one for about $10 and or two for $15 (the pencils come only in two-packs). The only three downsides I see are these: (1) The knurling is very fine, which feels cheep to me. (2) Theirs is very light compared to mine. Theirs is an all stainless steel barrel but that means the entire length, not the entire barrel. The barrel is a thin stainless tube around a plastic core. As a result, my pencil, assembled, weighs about 40 g whereas theirs weighs about 20 g. This could probably be fixed by drilling out some of the plastic and gluing in steel tube or lead weights. (3) The knurling comes up farther on my version so my big fingers don't have to feel the transition from knurled to smooth.
It's great to see this product on the market. It looks an awful lot like they took my idea. Do they owe me royalties or should I just be happy that I can get what I want without tracking down a metal shop?
(Links to that story: 1, 2, 3, 4)
The other week at Staples, I found this pen, a Zebra F-702:
Here is that pen next to the pencil barrel I made:
The knurling is much finer; it also doesn't go as far up the barrel. Still, it's a lot better than the annoying rubber grip.
Fortunately, this barrel has the same thread diameter and pitch at both ends as the F-402's mechanism, so you can pull the guts out of an F-402 pencil and put it in the F-701's barrel, to give you this:
So, if you want a pencil like the one I made, you can have one for about $10 and or two for $15 (the pencils come only in two-packs). The only three downsides I see are these: (1) The knurling is very fine, which feels cheep to me. (2) Theirs is very light compared to mine. Theirs is an all stainless steel barrel but that means the entire length, not the entire barrel. The barrel is a thin stainless tube around a plastic core. As a result, my pencil, assembled, weighs about 40 g whereas theirs weighs about 20 g. This could probably be fixed by drilling out some of the plastic and gluing in steel tube or lead weights. (3) The knurling comes up farther on my version so my big fingers don't have to feel the transition from knurled to smooth.
It's great to see this product on the market. It looks an awful lot like they took my idea. Do they owe me royalties or should I just be happy that I can get what I want without tracking down a metal shop?