A Few Good Clips

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I talked briefly about these transitional pencils from Eversharp’s utilitarian line a while back (see “A Colorful Ending . . . Almost” at ):

The ones with the longer tops are fitted with Eversharp’s cutting edge Equipoised mechanism, and the tips are fused onto the barrels.  The earlier ones have the improved version of Charles Keeran’s original design, and the nose cones on those unscrew:

In that last article, the problem I was trying to solve was swapping out a black nose cone on one of those earlier examples, but there’s a problem unique to both of these which is the subject of today’s article: those clips, with those hexagonal bolts holding them to the barrel, are prone to coming off – and, contrary to what I originally thought, finding donor pencils with those clips is getting harder and harder.  The last example I scabbed a clip from went to making the faceted one of these black examples whole:

I just love these pencils – unlike their more colorful brethren, the barrels on these are one continuous piece of hard rubber, and both are inscribed with advertisements for Eversharp Red Top Leads:

And, with all of my pencils complete, I rested.

And then I went to DC.

The first order of business came from my friend Joe Nemecek, who gave me a clip replacement challenge:

Joe had a spare clip – it’s the missing bolt that’s a problem.  I’ve never seen one in that cool limeade kind of color before, and it would be really nice to see that one intact again.  The ordinary cream and black one was to be the donor for the bolt and, at some point, the yellow one has had its Eversharp clip replaced with an Autopoint one.

I played with them and, unfortunately, I’m coming to suspect that the Autopoint bolt has been glued into the barrel.  I’ll have to work on that some more . . .  but in the meantime, I was suspecting there might be another problem with that yellow one: I’ve never seen one of those transitional examples with anything other than a black nose.  I didn’t want to tell Joe that the nose cone might also have been a replacement.

I didn’t have to.  In a bag full of pencils someone else had to offer me were two of the Equipoised-mechanism examples, both of which unfortunately are also missing their clips:

Since on these examples the nose cones are permanently attached, we know that the yellow noses were used on the more-yellow-than-cream configurations.

In addition, see that yellow ring on the black example?

This means, between Joe and I, we have four of these that are sorely in need of donors from more common examples.  Anyone have a spare or four?