Tuesday Toolset, Fixpencil Edition

If I set the Over/Under at 1.5 Tuesday Toolset posts before I included my beloved Caran d’Ache Fixpencil, how many of you would have taken the under? Yeah, me too. And we would all be poorer for it. I made it all the way to the second post!

This setup is one I keep handy at the house for grab and go situations. It will always contain two things: Note cards and the Fixpencil. The rest rotates, but what I have here is a normal setup.

1. Nock Co. Lined + Blank Note Cards. I like to carry loose or perforated paper on the go for situations when you need to hand something off. These are also some of my favorite sketch/idea cards.
2. Superior Labor Pen & Wallet Case. I wasn’t sure this layout would work for me, but it does. When full, it is a little too big and heavy for a jeans back pocket or shorts front pocket, but goes great in a bag.
3. Caran d’Ache Fixpencil. A personal favorite. If I don’t have this pencil with me when I travel I get anxious. I should give it a proper blog review one day.
4. CW&T Pen Type-B. This pen and my Fixpencil usually run in tandem. I keep mine loaded with the Pilot Hi-Tec-C 0.3 mm black gel ink refill, and it is glorious.
5. Sailor Pro Gear Imperial Black Fountain Pen, F nib, inked with Sailor Sei-boku blue black ink cartridge. A carry-over from last week, which is something you will see frequently in my Tuesday Toolset posts. I didn’t get to use it enough last week.

Feedback on last week’s Tuesday Toolset post was fantastic, and if you have more, please let me know. I’ll be working on a submission form for readers to submit their own Tuesday Toolsets so there is a wider variety of posts. Look for that soon!

Tuesday Toolset, First Edition Edition?

I want to add a regularly scheduled post to the blog around my personal daily and weekly carry items, and Tuesday Toolset is my answer to that. It is absolutely a work in progress, and your feedback is appreciated. Here is the general idea:

— Each week, I pick a small group of items I plan on carrying and using as my primary stationery tools for the week.

— There are no fixed rules, but in general, it will be a smaller carry. Something I can grab in one hand and take with me on the go.

— I’m not limiting myself to only these goods for the week - I have other pens and pencils in use at my desk and around the house at all times (especially review goods) - but these will be my primary tools.

The reasoning behind this is that readers want to know what I am using on a regular basis. I use A LOT of stationery, and this will be a way to rotate through it and share my thoughts. This will be a short-ish post, with pictures, links, and a few words about each product. Something like this:

— Rotring 600 0.5 mm Mechanical Pencil loaded with Rotring Tikky Hi-Polymer HB Lead.

The 600 lives on my desk and will be in even more frequent use now as I go through my graphite testing. This week, it is the Tikky Hi-Poly HB, a more mainstream lead than I reviewed earlier this week.

— Sailor Pro Gear Imperial Black Fountain Pen, F nib, inked with Sailor Sei-boku blue black ink cartridge.

This is a great pen that doesn’t get enough love from me, so I am correcting that right now. I chose the Sailor pigmented blue black ink cartridge because it performs well with nearly every paper I’ve tried it on. Since this is a portable carry, I wanted an ink to fit.

— James Brand Benton Limited Edition loaded with the Jetstream SXR-600-07 refill.

I’m enjoying this pen, but I don’t think it is worth the price tag. I bought the $85 model because of the color scheme and notebooks that came with it. The $60 standard model may be more in line. That said, this refill absolutely lives up to the hype so far.

— Nock Co. DotDash Pocket Notebook.

My favorite every day carry pocket notebook. Works with almost anything I throw at it.

— Nock Co. Tallulah Pen Case.

It’s slim, it’s pocketable, and it holds everything I need. The notebook doesn’t fit, of course, but I can fit all of the pens in it and grab the notebook all in one hand. It slides into a pocket or backpack easily.

So that’s an example of what I think this post can be. Here are the questions/problems I have in my head that hopefully you can help me solve:

— Is this worthwhile? If nothing else, it is a pocket dump, what’s in my bag type of post, and I always enjoy those. Maybe I get readers to submit theirs too to keep it fresh? That seems like a no-brainer to me. I do think that would require rules, ie. maximum of five items.

— Minimal notebook variance. That’s kind of a self-imposed thing, as I am trying to keep one pocket notebook active per month. That doesn’t mean I don’t try and test out other things, so maybe it is a non-issue. We will see how it plays out.

— Nock Co. over promotion. If you know me, you know how I like to conduct business, and that is not by slamming my business down your throat at all times. But guess what? I started Nock to make the things I want to carry, and I carry Nock goods all the time because I love them. If I have a case in my carry there is a 75% chance it is a Nock Co. product. Is this a problem? This goes for paper, current and future pen and pencil products, all of the things I sell.

— Naming convention. This is small potatoes, but I like to have fun with my titles. I think something relative to the products within is fun, similar to how I do my weekend Misfill post. It beats “Tuesday Toolset, 1/8/2019” I think.

— Do I need number pointer overlays on each picture to correspond with each item? Probably so. I’m open to simple OS X or iOS recommendations for this.

That’s where I’m at right now. I think the easiest solution is taking submissions for Tuesday Toolset, which honestly didn’t occur to me before I typed it above. I get a lot of feedback that requests more of me on the blog, but maybe the real answer is the collective we. What do all of us stationery geeks like to carry on a daily basis? Something to think about.

Let me know your thoughts!