The Large Pencil Tool

Hi again,
I' m back from holiday and wrote some new tutorials for my blog. So soon I will start a quite longer tutorial about making those sculptiong tool tips.

But before, just a little addition to the pencil tool tutorial.
In the last turorial, I explained how to use an mechanical pencil to make a handle for sculpting tool tips made from 1mm steel wire.

But there are also larger versions of mechanical pencil around that could also be used to make a nice tool tip holder. On the picture below (pic. 1), you can see one that is made for holding 2mm leads, so this would be fine for tool tips made of 2mm steel wire.
Nothing much to explain here, because you can use this kind of mechanical pencil just as it is without any modification.

There's another thing, I want to talk about regarding the pencil tools. Maybe you will come to a point, where you discover, that the grip of the metal clamps inside the pencils didn`t hold the sculpting tip tight enough, so it start to rotate some times (see pic. 2). This might not happen with straight tool tips, but more often with curved or angled ones.

if this happens, you can modify the back ends of your tool tips a little bit.
Most of the pencil clamps are made of three parts (jaws) like you see in pic. 3.

So just file or grind down the back end of your tool tip, until it get a slightly triangular shape (pic. 4). In most cases, that should solve the "rotating-problem", but I have to admit, that this rotating thing is a weak point of the pencil tools.