Junk Box Nirvana

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In a small antique store on old Route 40 east of Zanesville, I noticed a little box of pencils marked a dollar apiece.  This one was in there:

When it comes to Evrsharps, the varieties seem to be almost endless – this one is special, even with the dings, but until you see it alongside known examples within this family, it doesn’t particularly look it.  Note that in addition to the enameled aluminum barrel, this one is oversized, and it has a tombstone-shaped cutout into which the clip was fitted:

I’ve only seen those features in combination on one other example:

This one takes an even sharper eye to pick out, since it so closely resembles a more common variation:

The ones you normally see have an ordinary Z-clip, rather than the tombstone-shaped clip patented by John Wahl:

Comparing the green enameled example to this one, there’s something interesting to note:

While the green example has a crown marked with the Wahl Eversharp name, the red example has the company’s name imprinted on a straight utility top:

Since the straight utility tops are frequently hidden underneath those crowns, it was worth a check to see if the same imprinted cap lurked underneath, but it isn’t – the parts on the red example are unique to this model:

This made me more determined to find a clip to complete this model.  Fortunately, oversized clips such as this aren’t as hard to find as you might think.  In that collection of pencils I purchased at the DC show was a handful of red hard rubber Eversharp pencils with a more familiar-looking top end:

When the company introduced these models in hard rubber, the easiest way to adapt John Wahl’s clip from the line of metal barreled pencils was to simply press fit a section of metal barrel over the top end:

Disassembling the new addition was a simple matter of unscrewing the tip and drawing out the inner barrel, which had a bushing at the top end to secure the clip in place:

With the new clip secured, I shined up the ends a little bit to make this one, dings and all, as nice as it can be:

And here’s the complete example alongside the other members of this family of pencils:

From the top, a short model (the short tip may not necessarily mean pre-1924, since the extra small workings might not have left enough room inside for the redesigned version); ringtops in pre-1924 (short tip) and post-1924 (long tip) configurations, side clip versions in pre-1924 (short tip and flat clip) and post-1924 (long tip and ribbed clip) configurations . . .

And now, an oversized version in post-1924 configuration I never knew existed.