The Tombow Olno Body Knock Mechanical Pencil

The Tombow Olno Body Knock is a very unique mechanical pencil that I spotted on the Jetpens website, and as usual Brad and the folks at Jetpens were gracious enough to have sent one over for me to take a look at for this review.

Tombow Olno Body Knock Head On

So the Tombow Olno looks like a standard mechanical pencil with some pretty nice design elements like the elongated grip and nice color choices, but it is hiding something that is pretty cool.  The elongated grip isn’t just for show, it actually facilitates the mechanism for advancing the lead in this pencil.  The way that you advance the lead is by simply pressing your thumb against the top half of the grip section, in a way that makes it feel like you are actually trying to bend the pencil in half.  The top plastic part extends into the top of the grip creating somewhat of a hinge where the pencil actually flexes a bit, and when you apply the necessary pressure to “bend” the pencil at that point, you can hear it click and see it advance a small amount of lead.  The motion is similar to other mechanical pencils that just have a button on the grip that you press to advance the lead.  The benefit over that method though is that if you rotate the body as you write, it doesn’t matter because you can press anywhere to trigger the advancing action.

Writing with the pencil was pretty easy, and the lead advancement seems like a very natural and unobtrusive method.  The only minor issue I noticed was that after each time I advanced the lead and started writing again, there was a tiny movement of the lead sinking back into the pencil as if it had to catch something in order to permanently adjust to the new length that you have pushed out.  One other note, if you prefer the traditional method of lead advancement, you can definitely just click the top of the pencil where he eraser is hidden.

The Tombow Olno Eraser and Clip

There really isn’t much of a clip on this pencil as you may have noticed in the first picture, but here is a closer look, and in fact you cant really use that little hook as a clip.  I found the eraser a bit hard to use because of how small it is and how you have to completely remove it from the body in order to use it, but I know that many people use full size hand held erasers instead of the ones on the ends of their pencils.  If you are looking for a unique mechanical pencil that minimizes your need to break the flow of your writing to advance the lead, then the Tombow Olno Body Knock is probably one of your best options.

©2017, Brian Greene. All rights reserved.