Uni Kurutoga Advance Upgrade Model Mechanical Pencil 0.5mm, Metal Barrel (M510301P.43), Black

This is an excellent mechanical pencil. The design and attention to detail are really nice.It's very well engineered although the feature of turning the lead is very cool it only really works if your writing with it because your constantly lifting the tip off the page and back down again while writing so it rotates a lot more.When drawing with it, especially technical drawing, it does not do it quite as much but still gives you a nice point.This is a lovely pencil though and I am very happy with it. I find the best stationary comes from Japan.

Although the body isn't entirely metal (the narrower part of the main body is plastic) it all looks good. The mechanism feels stable. I wish it had contained a few leads, but that's not a problem.

This is a high-quality pencil that's probably good for technical drawings or writing. However, it's too heavy for me to use for art. Additionally, the grip is subpar. The graphite is high quality. I'm not sure what number it is, but it feels like a good quality 2B.

Writes beautifully, a great addition to my desktop.

Excellent pencil great tech

Fantastic to write and draw with, the rotation mechanism makes a big difference and prevents lead breakage.

I've probably bought a dozen Kura togas over the last fifteen years, half of them as gifts and unashamedly, the rest of them for me.I wanted to jump and get one of the upgraded pencils to test out some of the upgrades so picked up the two different varieties of the advance instead of the prohibitively expensive dive.The advance offers two benefits over the standard kuru toga: a slide, which retracts the lead into the barrel to protect it; and an increased lead rotation rate which is intended to keep your point sharper.On paper, any upgrades to my favourite pencil sound cool, but in practice, the writing experience is a *lot* less intuitive, and I'm constantly finding myself picking it up and multi-clicking just to get the lead back to where I want it to be.Overall feel of the pen, while it looks nice, doesn't feel as premium as the older plastic bodies, with a gunmetal effect. The lack of any knurling like the roulette model, or barrel indentations like the standard, make it feel comparatively a lot less comfortable in the hand.

Great pen but tip scrapes off revealing bronze underneath after a while of use. When little lead is left, the tip will go up with little pressure so replace led when that happens.