I’ve got enough money that I shouldn’t have to ever worry about how much I spend on pens and pencils, but every now and then I ponder what the biggest bang for the buck is when it comes to writing instruments. Realistically, I can’t burn through pencils faster than I find them (I live next to a school and for some reason kids seem to drop pencils on the ground and leave them), so I have an effectively infinite source of free low quality pencils, but the thought of how I might attempt to determine a words per dollar (or similar) metric still enters my head every now and then.

Here’s what I’ve come up with:
Get some cheap college ruled notebooks and a copy Star Wars: A New Hope by Alan Dean Foster. Select a writing instrument and start copying the book into the notebook until some suitably measurable amount of the writing instruments capacity has been used up.

For instance, I could put a new stick of 0.3mm lead in one of my drafting pencils and write until the stick is used up (the last half centimeter can’t be used…that would be figured into my calculations I suppose). 0.3mm is consumed pretty quick, so that would probably be my first test.

My next test might be a commonly available wooden pencil (name brand so that I can have some faith in the consistency of the pencil). Sharpen a new pencil, and write until I’ve used up a full inch of the pencil. Then extrapolate based on how many inches of usable pencil I think there is (and there’s a lot, especially if you have a pencil extender…which I do).

Pens would be trickier. With a gel pen, I might just write until it dries up (with casual use, I typically run a gel pen out of ink in about a month…my wife does it in 2 weeks). Space pens, however, last much longer and there’s no way to see the ink inside the refill.

Has anyone done something like this before?

Maybe some day when I’m bedridden with the flu or something, I’ll actually attempt this…I’ve done more tedious things out of boredom…