I'm an engineer designing a premium pencil carry case - brutally honest feedback wanted
I have a Rotring 600 that is now just a showpiece because I bent the tip. I'm a mechanical design engineer, and I always want to carry around my premium mechanical pencils, but can't because I worry about losing, damaging, or scratching them. Not sure if I am alone in wanting to take my pencils with me in my bag, but I want to build something to solve this problem.
The concept is a rectangular anodised aluminium tube (shown as green in image) with a spring-ejected insert (shown as white in image) that holds two pencils in individual channels. The lead sleeve floats in a recessed zone and never contacts anything. Push the base to eject the insert, lift your pencil out.
I'm trying to design it to fit all the common premium pencils Rotring 600, 800, GraphGear 1000, Staedtler 925, Kaweco Special, etc, which I haven't seen done before. I'm starting to compile a spreadsheet and taking measurements of all the pencils I have to get a good data set of what sizes the case needs to accomodate.
With the quality of materials I want to use here, I think it would cost around $50USD.
A few things I want to know before I go further:
Do you actually carry your premium pencils day to day, or have they become desk-only because of the transport problem?
If you do carry daily, how do you go about it currently?
Is two pencil slots right number, or would you need more? Would you want a spot for lead and erasers?
What would make you not buy something like this?
What's the most you'd realistically pay?
What are any really common pencils that have a funky size and shape? I only know what I own currently.
Not selling anything. Just trying to build something people actually want rather than what I think they want. Harsh feedback is extremely useful to me at this stage.
Attached are some rough concept pictures.
