A special (and useful) mechanical pencil, from the Faber-Castell exam card pencil set

In photos of tools that I took for the preceding post on this site (Crumpling cabinet feet/wheel mounts: jerry-riggin’ a solution), to give an idea of the relative sizes of the implements, as a rough scale I included the mechanical pencil that I’d used to mark up the pieces of wood and plywood that I’d cut and drilled.

A close-up photograph of the tip of the mechanical pencil from a Faber-Castell 'exam card pencil set'. — A close-up photograph of the tip of the mechanical pencil from a Faber-Castell exam card pencil set.

What makes this pencil unusual is that it takes a graphite refill (i.e. lead) with a non-circular cross section. They have a rectangular cross-section (measuring 1.8mm by 1mm), with slightly rounded corners.

Zoomed-in images of the tip of the 1.8mm-by-1mm pencil leads in use. Apologies for the poor quality of these pics.

I’ve been using it as a superior kind of carpenter’s pencil, to make easily-removable marks on materials for cutting and drilling. Mechanical carpenter’s pencils do exist but the ones I’ve seen have much girthier leads — 5mm wide instead of 1.8mm. With this Faber-Castell 1327, I can draw nice, dark, 1mm-thick lines on rough or textured surfaces without having the tip of the lead snap off all of the time. The lead being 1.8mm thick in the direction of movement makes it sturdier.

Faber-Castell EXAM PENCIL LEAD (2B) 1.8mm. Additional information printed on the label, perhaps useful in identifying this item: the number 529992 to the right of the description and, beneath the slim barcode the string of digits 6 933256 637833. Made in China. — Faber-Castell EXAM PENCIL LEAD (2B) 1.8mm Additional information printed on the label, perhaps useful in identifying this item: the number 529992 to the right of the description and, beneath the slim barcode the string of digits 6 933256 637833. Made in China.

The photo above shows a pack of leads for this Faber-Castell exam pencil, with four protruding from the uncapped container and one by itself, positioned horizontally, at the top of the image. A 1mm-thick round lead, resting diagonally, is included for purposes of comparison.

An unopened set including pencil, pack of spare leads, and an eraser, front and back of packaging shown. The eraser is of little interest to me or, I’d imagine, to you. The pencil, however, bears a numeric designation: 1327 followed by a string of Chinese characters that translate to exam-filling pencil.

I got this writing implement as part of a blister pack set that included a cartridge of 5 compatible leads (in addition to the one pre-loaded in the pencil) and a white polymer eraser for which I have little need. Aside from Faber-Castell’s brand name, nearly all of the text on the printed card is in Chinese. The background image on the front of the card shows the intended use: efficiently blackening sections of an answer sheet for some sort of standardized test with one stroke. You can use an image-to-text translation tool to decipher the text on the plain rear side of the card, but there are a couple of things I find worth noting. First, this set seems to have been manufactured or packaged or stamped ready-to-sell on May 30th, 2024. That’s relatively recent, so it doesn’t appear to be an old, discontinued product. The other thing is that the URL printed on the packaging, www.faber-castell.com.cn, doesn’t seem to work, but faber-castell.cn loads without any problems. One more thing: there are two versions of this set and they’re identical except for the color of the pencil itself (clear, the version I’ve gotten, or black).

Faber-Castell 'exam card pencil' next to a carpenter's pencil, to give an idea of the relative sizes of their pencil leads. — Faber-Castell exam card pencil next to a regular ol’ carpenter’s pencil, to give an idea of the relative sizes of the pencil leads. I’ve never used an actual carpenter’s pencil and received this one as a free gift when I purchased some tools at some point and whittled down the tip to expose the lead for this photo.

One more observation: AFAICT, neither this set nor the pencil from the set is listed in the product pages of any Faber-Castell web site (including faber-castell.cn). I got mine from a seller on Taobao that is offering the sets for purchase as well as individual 5-packs of lead refills and, once I’d tried it out and found it useful, bought a second set and additional cartridges of leads in case they vanish from Taobao in the near term.