I picked up a pack of Paper Mate Mates 1.3mm Mechanical Pencils hoping for a pencil where the leads wouldn’t break as easily.
These pencils are great:
1) Ergo dynamically perfect for little fingers
2) Thicker lead rarely breaks
BUT there are two BIG problems with the leads:
1) The leads are only about 60% usable. Once they get down to about an inch long it won’t click down and the last inch of lead is wasted. Traditional .7 or .9 pencils only waste about 1.5cm of lead and the leads are longer. These are shorter and waste more.
2) Each pencil only has 1 lead in it. The refill container has 5 so these pencils last about two weeks and then you have to buy more leads (which are ridiculously expensive!)
Bottom line: I won’t be buying more and I will probably skip buying refills too.
