An old and unremarkable Eberhard Faber pencil box I recently came across had two remarkable items in it, and both were extenders/caps. First was this extender with clamp eraser, similar to the one in this post:
(With a Blaisdell Calculator 600.)
This style of extender first appeared in 1921, coinciding with the introduction of the clamp eraser.
The barrel in the above illustration has a black painted band and says: “E. Faber U.S.A. Pat. Appl. For”, whereas the silver one below has no black band, says: “E. Faber U.S.A.”, and has “CLAMP” with the patent date stamped at the top (though they both have the same version of the clip which holds the eraser):
You can see the wear-lines, revealing a brass-like color underneath; perhaps the silver ones were nickel-plated? This extender is in such good condition that I don’t think the painted band was originally there and then wore off, as seems to have happened with this brass-colored extender:
Also, the form of the silver-colored extender is a little less pronounced. All this leads me to think that this silver-colored extender might be one of the earliest versions: the very first clamp-style ferrules, which came on the Van Dyke, were also silver-colored and without a black band. This would also place the ferrules and extenders with the cutout arrow a little later.
In at least two cases, the product number was determined by which pencil the extender was paired with: No. 1582 came with a pocket Mongol pencil, and No. 1580 came with a pocket Liberty pencil:
I don’t know if the cutout arrow appeared specifically with one or the other—my guess is that the arrow eventually just became a feature of the extended ferrule itself, given that it ended up on the Van Dyke and the Blackwing as well. It’s safe to assume then that there were likely a minimum of four iterations of this extender, differentiated by color, banding, patent date, and the cutout arrow (and who knows, there could have been even more).
The other extender in the box has a regular eraser (which I replaced), and has “E. Faber” stamped near the top. I get the feeling that there were many versions of this basic extender style, the design for which can be traced back to A.W. Faber’s offerings at least as early as the mid-1800s. Many other companies had similarly-designed caps as well.
What’s interesting about this one though is that the barrel isn’t round, rather it’s hex-shaped, which allows it to fit tightly on the pencil:
Contrapuntalism 
The middle ‘ring’ of the CLAMP stamped extender looks to me as if it is finer and might therefore be more complicated to manufacture/needs more sophisticated machines to make.
These are great items. Thanks for showing us.
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Thanks, Memm.
That ring was an early design motif that was eventually replaced by a painted/colored band. The early Van Dyke I mentioned has that same ring, though much smaller.
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The “L” in the “Liberty” imprint on the pencil looks unusual (and more like an “S” to me). – The hex-shaped barrel of the second extender is great! May I ask which pencil in that extender it is?
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Yes, at first glance it does look an “S”.
The pencil in the extender is an A.W. Faber No. 3 (it has no other writing on the barrel). Here is a photo on Bob Truby’s site:
http://brandnamepencils.com/brands/awfaber/awfaber3ger.shtml
I’m going to do some digging and see what I can find out about the hex extender.
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