It's been a while since I really used a mechanical pencil in earnest, but I'm glad I decided to pick up the Platinum Pro-Use 171 recently. The name isn't great, but don't let that turn you away from this otherwise excellent pencil.
The Platinum Pro-Use 171 mechanical pencil is a drafting pencil made with premium materials, but it also sports a couple of neat tricks that make it a little nicer to use than your standard drafting pencil. Of course, it also has that tiny emergency eraser to erase the tiniest of mistakes.
Along with the metal body, knurled grip, and matte black finish, the pencil also features a fairly standard lead-grade indicator, a pocket clip, and a retractable lead pipe. Pretty standard fare in the mechanical pencil realm.
What sets this pencil apart is a couple of features that add some additional customization and adjustments to make this pencil fit your grip, style, or the specific job at hand.
First off, the lead pipe is completely adjustable in length. By rotating the cone back and forth, you can extend or retract the lead pipe from 0 to 4.5mm. At the 0 setting, the pencil is set for storage in a bag or pocket without the risk of poking through fabric. But when you're ready to write, draw, sketch, or use the pencil alongside a straight-edge, you can extend the pipe to the appropriate length to get the job done.
I've found that I enjoy using the pencil with the lead pipe extended all the way (to 4.5mm) because of the way it alters the grip. See, this is the main downside I have with the pencil. When fully extended, the knurled grip blends smoothly into the cone and gives me the grip that I prefer. When the pipe is retracted, that extra space (up to 4.5mm) is transferred to a gap between the grip section and the cone. The pencil still works just fine in this setup, but it does alter the grip feel. My fingers can't get comfortable when this gap is present. The smooth material between the knurled grip and notched cone just confuses my fingers and I end up fidgeting with it too much.
With my personal idiosyncrasies aside, it's still a really cool feature. I have plenty of pencils with retractable lead pipes, but they're either fully extended or fully retracted — no in between. It's nice to have this level of control for certain tasks.
The other feature, which I'm even more excited about, is the pressure-absorbing spring contraption inside the pencil that allows the lead to retract back into the pipe if you exert much pressure on it. This is intended to prevent lead breakage when you apply too much pressure when using the pencil, but it has the added benefit of making the pencil feel softer on the paper when using it. This feature is easy to turn on or off — just rotate the grip one way or the other. You can't tell a big difference at first between the two modes, but after writing for a good minute or two in one mode, it's much easier to feel how it can completely change the way the pencil feels when writing or drawing. I've really enjoyed writing with this pencil with the soft mode turned on. In my mind, it's a similar difference to how a soft gold nib feels as compared to a stiff steel nib of the same size. They both write great, but the gold nib feels a little softer. Depending on what you're doing with the pencil, the ability to switch back and forth is really cool.
As far as other options go, you can grab this pencil in a variety of sizes/colors. If you want the matte black version shown here, you have an option of 0.3mm or 0.5mm lead sizes. There are also 0.3mm, 0.5mm, 0.7mm, and 0.9mm versions, and each is represented by a specific color — gray, navy, black, and white bodies with a silver knurled grip section and cone. The matte black versions both cost $34, while the other ones come in at just $20. From what I can tell, the only difference in price comes down to the materials used. The body of the matte black versions are metal, while the others are just plastic. Functionality-wise, they're the same.
The Matte Black Pro-Use 171 looks killer, and it's worth the extra 14 bucks to match that blacked-out aesthetic if that's your thing. If not, save some money and know that you're getting an equally great pencil!
(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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