Judiciously Mixing and Matching

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Joe Nemecek and I have had some success finding bolt-on clips to finish out his yellow and limeade Eversharp pencils.  Just before I gave them back to him at the Ohio Show, I shot this picture of his examples alongside my red and cream ones:

That left me with some spare parts lying around, and since I kind of liked Joe’s yellow one and I had an equipoised-mechanism one in that color which was now without a clip, I wondered if it were possible to “make” one.  I took apart what was left of the red hard rubber pencil from which I scavenged a clip recently (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/11/junk-box-nirvana.html):

And there you have it – I’ve got one just like Joe’s awaiting a donor clip.  Well, almost like Joe’s . . . what you can’t see inside the barrel is that there’s a hexagonal fitting at the tip which engages the mechanism.  That means you can turn an Equipoised barrel into an earlier model, but you can’t go the other way (the Equipoised mechanism won’t fit in an older barrel).  I also “made” one with a black tip, since I’m certain that was included in the lineup as well:

I’m setting a dangerous precedent doing this, because there’s several colors in the Equipoised models I haven’t yet established were made in the earlier models.  As a purist, I object to making anything that Eversharp didn’t make itself, so I’m not encouraging the creation of fantasy pieces here.  That’s why I didn’t do the same thing with this one:

This jade example has a great “Use Eversharp Square Leads” imprint, so I kind of hate to see it sitting in my parts box (it came to me without a clip).  But I already have a jade Equipoised mechanism model, and the parts don’t fit together very well on this one . . .

Yet I hesitated.  That little angel on my shoulder was telling that devil on the other one that no matter how cool it would look, if I haven’t established that they were offered with the older mechanism, it wouldn’t be right.  But then this one turned up at the Ohio Show:

OK, they do exist . . . or there’s at least one other idiot out there taking these things apart and putting them back together.  No, I think they do exist.  Comparing the two more closely, I wondered if maybe my jade Equipoised one might have originally been made for the earlier line . . . since the parts fit together so poorly . . .

Just for fun, I tried swapping parts out, and guess what: they don’t fit.  Back to the parts bin the Equipoised model goes, as the angel pats me on the back.

I did make one other swap after the Ohio Show that even my shoulder angel agreed with.  Although I had an Equipoised-mechanism model in lapis, a clipless one turned up at the Ohio Show which had something extra:

A price sticker.  Yeah, I had to make the swap.

Besides, someday another clip will come along, and out of all the duplicate barrels in my parts bin, that lapis one will be first in line when the time comes.