Tombow has been on quite the run with their mechanical pencil lineup for the last several years, and that run continues with the Tombow Mono Graph Fine Mechanical Pencil.
This pencil has everything I am looking for in a drafting-style pencil: a lightweight barrel with the weight balanced toward the front, good visual clearance of the tip, and a comfortable grip section. The Mono Graph Fine checks all of those boxes, and adds in Tombow’s amazing eraser - a twist eraser, at that - a solid clip, and a clean aesthetic.
What’s not to love? For me, I can’t think of a single thing.
The only question I had after unboxing this pencil was how the grip was going to feel. Would it be too smooth and slick? Is that weird depression really needed? It’s definitely not too slick. According to the product description, it is coated with a “grippy soft-touch finish,” and while I’m not sure that is the proper technical term, it is an accurate description of how it feels. I’ve had no slipping so far.
The low profile notch is nice in the fact that it doesn’t get in the way if your fingers are not seated in it perfectly at all times. Mine aren’t, and I never noticed it. I tended to start right in the middle of it, but my fingers move up and down the grip and the notch edges are so minimal it never bothered me. In fact, I never noticed it while writing at all.
One design decision companies make at this price point is to use a metal grip section in combination with a plastic upper barrel, and that’s what Tombow has done here. This gives the pencil that front-weighted feel that technical pencils need for good line control. You know, for all of the engineering I do. Still, this is expectation for this design, and it feels great in hand.
As someone who is eraser agnostic when it comes to any type of pencil, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how fantastic Tombow’s erasers are. I used this one more than I hoped, and it performed brilliantly. Most, if not all, of the graphite was removed from the page, and no eraser dust was left behind to brush off - it sticks to the eraser.
Top to bottom: Rotring 600, Tombow Mono Graph Fine, Pentel Sharp P205, Spoke Model 6.
Like with many of their other pencils, the eraser is part of a twist mechanism to extend and retract as needed. A feature of the Mono Graph Fine is that when the eraser is extended, the pencil knock locks in place so you don’t accidentally extend the lead when erasing. Does anyone press down that hard with their eraser to have this problem? Chalk this feature up to marketing, not necessity.
The final piece of the puzzle is price, an area that Tombow is extremely competitive in. The Mono Graph Fine is $13.75, which positions it perfectly against the competition. While I’d go as far as saying their other pencils such as the Mono Graph Grip Shaker and Mono Graph Lite are underpriced, this model is bang on price-wise. And, like those other two pencils, it would make a great addition to your mechanical pencil collection.
(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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