Devoted Comrade Dave in New Zealand recently made a week-long experiment with wooden pencils, a foray away from the mechanical pencils he so excellently writes about on his new and very well-written blog:

Now whilst my main interest is mechanical pencils, I am certainly not immune to the charms of wooden pencils, so I thought that it was time to put my mechanicals away and have a “wooden week”.

Anyone visiting a selection of shops here in New Zealand would quickly get the impression that Staedtler was the market giant, with Faber-Castell a fairly distant second, and so I decided to trial three Staedtlers and two Faber-Castells.

I chose the following HB grade pencils as a reasonable selection of different price ranges, qualities and designs:

Monday - Staedtler (Australia) Pacific 830
Tuesday - Staedtler (Australia) Tradition 110
Wednesday - Staedtler Mars Lumograph 100 (Made in Germany)
Thursday - Faber-Castell Grip 2001 (Made in Germany)
Friday - Faber-Castell Goldfaber 1221 (Country of origin not identified)

Read the rest of the results here.

[Image, D.P.  Used with kind permission.]