bought a mechanical pencil today. They also had a bargain bin with unpopular lead, so I bought a bunch with different hardnesses, to see if I could figure out what this hardness stuff is about. I couldn't really, though I did clearly feel a difference between the bargain bin stuff and the packet of caran dache leads I also bought.
Made my usual chicken broth using only chicken carcasses, rather than the usual 50% vegetable scraps today. And damn, I didn't realize there was This much collagen/gelatin in chicken bones.
Randomly remembered an impossible wood joint I saw in Japan. So I looked it up, and attempted to draw it.
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Yep, it's about hardness, and how dark it is. I read somewhere, that for technical drawing harder lead is supposedly better. So I tested it. But even the 6H is not that different from the HB (and the photo makes it look a bit more pronounced than it is to my eye), so I'm not sure that it really matters for where I'm at.
But the F, 4H and 6H are all from a no-name brand in the bargain bin at the store, and using them feels almost like scratching the paper with a needle, whereas the HB and ? (which was the lead already in the pencil when I bought it) felt a lot nicer to use. If the scratching was due to lead hardness, then F should feel a lot closer to HB then to 6H, as far as I understand. And it doesn't...
So I learned at least something from this.
I wonder how many times I'll break that thin lead in the long term, though I do feel like I've gotten quite a bit better with my pen handling by using the fine liners.
I have a heavy left hand, and couldn't use thinner lead back in the day. Ah, but looking at your stuff, it looks like hardness and how dark it'll get?