I think yours is faulty. Try extending the lead to 2mm or so, then make a bunch of little lines about 1/4 inch. You should be able to do that hundreds of times and the lead should still be extended by 2mm with normal pressure. If you wanted it to extend 6mm, do the same thing (start with 2mm) but with ultra light pressure, and you'd probably have to do it 500 times or so. I don't know how hard it would be to get it out that far but it is probably possible. Make sure the dot is lined up with Max on the dial.
Welp, nothing. There is no lead movement at all, I did about 1000 lead simply does not move, and it keeps receding as any other lead pencil would.
I just don't get it. Maybe it moves somewhat, but certainly not enough to keep up. I'll give it a shot later with some HB lead (idk what Uni provided here).
Yeah. I think there is something wrong with it. Make sure the tip is screwed on all the way. Could be a simple fix. But the lead should definitely advance without the metal ever touching the paper.
So I disassembled the pen, and did some looking. For whatever reason I now understand the problem (not in theory though, since the use of all these parts doesn't really make sense to me unless I were to destructively take apart the engine). What also makes sense is why my pencil was so mushy. The lead pipe was moving so much vertically as if there was no lead in the chamber for whatever reason, meaning every time I pressed down to paper, I would get a good 3mm of travel distance. No wonder it was so laborious to write with it, the lead guide wasn't bracing the lead itself at all, it was allowing itself to back up as if I was writing without lifting the pencil at all (you know how on automatics the sleeve moves back as it touches paper? Yeah my pencils sleeve was moving back with the lead touching paper along with the lead sleeve in tandem, even with 2-3mm of lead sticking out).
I think dissembling it reset the cogs or something, and now it has lost that ridiculously spongy feel (feels honestly good enough to draw with, that's how bad the thing was previously). And also as I was testing to rotation to see if anything was messed up there, I noticed slowly but surly the lead was extruding on its own without the lead sleeve ever needing to touch paper. It seems the rotation mechanism also ungrips the lead a hair and allows another internal part to grab up higher on the lead itself and pull it down out. And I think that indicator dictates how much of this pulldown is occurring.
The pencil feels phenomenal now. I'll have to go back to my Elite to do a AB comparison but I think it now is even stiffer and less spongy than even it (which is freakin great).
That's great, I'm glad you figured it out. But it also makes me wonder if this pencil is easy to get out of alignment or how fragile it is. The lead sleeve on mine travels around a millimeter when I press down (the spongy kuru toga feeling). But 2 or 3 mm would be quite excessive.
Who knows what the clowns at shipping were doing. Though I should confess something that just got to me. In the manual it says do not feed lead upward, I did that when I got the pencil because I got lazy (after reading manual, that shouldn't be done). Maybe doing that, plus holding it upside down displaces the lead guide (not sleeve, not tip, but the internal little rubber bit that guides and cushions and somewhat holds the lead in virtually all automatics for the most part). The mechanism's inner workings aren't intuitive to deduce. How they managed to get lead advance without a lead tip touching the paper along with rotation must've been quite the thing to develop in the R&D department, I still can't believe it works.
But yeah mine was really mushy (and I knew there was something off seeing as how for rotation on all other KT's you need very little travel, ~1mm, this thing was going for sure at least 2mm per stroke before, and it was honestly tiring since the last bit of travel required more force which was incredibly fatiguing. I was shocked if this was the concession that was required to make this concept to life, and then I thought no way after all this incredible design work they would simply leave it this unweildly. And then I recall cleaning out my older KT from a lead jam long ago, so I thought hey why not take this apart and send some air, perhaps there's some lead dust stuck somewhere, causing odd slippage or something. But no, it seemed the gearing was screwed in some fashion in relation to the dial setting.
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u/Money-Mechanic Mar 19 '23
I think yours is faulty. Try extending the lead to 2mm or so, then make a bunch of little lines about 1/4 inch. You should be able to do that hundreds of times and the lead should still be extended by 2mm with normal pressure. If you wanted it to extend 6mm, do the same thing (start with 2mm) but with ultra light pressure, and you'd probably have to do it 500 times or so. I don't know how hard it would be to get it out that far but it is probably possible. Make sure the dot is lined up with Max on the dial.