Kita-Boshi 9500
The company
The Kita-Boshi Pencil Company (*Warning, that website looks to be in Japanese only!) is a small family owned Pencil company in Japan. A funny thing happened to me here - a friend of mine sent me a link to a nice YouTube video showing a Pencil production line that I find rather mesmorising - and it turns out to be of the Kita Boshi factory. I had a search of this blog and realised I’d not done any reviews of them, but then to my surprise found I had a whole box waiting in my stash!
Thus, after a rather long break from the blog, it was time to break out a new pencil!
The pencil itself
Apparently I had a whole box of them…
These are well finished pencils. A nice very dark ‘British Racing Green’ type colour. No real ripples or blemishes, and the embossing on both sides of the pencil is fairly crisp.
The pencil bodies are cedar, and so far I’ve had no issues with sharpening them. Well, apart from the point is slightly off centre, when I sharpened my first one, but I think that is more a consequence of my sharpener than the pencil. It’s and odd thing - I have a feeling that once you have started to sharpen a pencil off centre then it is quite hard to correct in later sharpenings. At least that is the experience I have with my X-acto L. I wonder if it is something to do with the sharpening hole being fractionally bigger than the pencil. It would not take much to make the off-centre point obvious (by looking at the encircling cedar ‘shoreline’).
Looking at the end of the pencil though, the lead is nicely centred.
How does it write
This is one smooth pencil. It writes very well. Well enough to have now been my on-desk everyday user for the last 4 months. The feel is smooth, but not waxy. The line is very dark and crisp. The point lasts a reasonable time. I can happily recommend these.
Sourcing
These may not be the easiest pencils to source in the U.K. It looks like I got mine from Choosing Keeping err, nearly five years ago! They appear to have 2B at the moment, but I got a box of HB, for a very reasonable price of £12.50 - that’s only just over £1 each! A bargain.