Mechanical Pencil: An illustrated celebration of the engineering around us

What a timely coincidence to this episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfY2JACiDGU

Bryan has been working on this forever! Truly a labor of love. Neat to see it pop up here. He also does illustrations of homes around San Francisco (amongst other things), which I highly recommend checking out: https://www.instagram.com/bmacomber_art/

Nice, embodies the quote;

"What one man can invent, another can discover" -- Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Dancing Men.

"Illustrated tear-downs and break-downs of everyday products, like mechanical pencils, lighters and pez dispensers, that you may have taken for granted. Drawn by Bryan Macomber, a mechanical engineer and artist."

The description above comes from the following post on mastodon: https://merveilles.town/@rek/116658587354593919

Such a beautifully done site. I might be in love already . Many kudos.

I dropped in a suggestion to do one on an umbrella. There's a lot going on in these. One can study the differential geometry of surfaces. The mechanism design of opening and closing.

I find both the spring ones (push button) and the ones without spring quite fascinating. In fact the ones without a spring has implicit ones imposed by the bending of the spokes.

I've always enjoyed that the cam surface for that particular push-push mechanism design (click pen) is not that dissimilar from a Leibniz wheel. It's so tempting to add more steps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz_wheel

I can't help myself and have to link some of my favorite youtube channels.

Engineerguy: https://youtube.com/@engineerguyvideo

Chris Staecker: https://youtube.com/@ChrisStaecker

Meta: confusing typo in title. Mods , please fix penciN -> penciL. Thanks.

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