Nothing about the Tradition has changed in decades and that is the entire review. The cedar takes a point cleanly on six or seven sharpenings before the grain starts to tear, the lacquer is matte enough not to slip in a warm hand, and the 2B lays a line dark enough for correction marks without smudging under a right hand dragged across the page. Loses half a star only because the imprint wears off the barrel faster than the pencil itself wears down.
The three-tone lacquer gradient is unnecessary and I resent slightly liking it. Core is centred with a consistency few HBs manage — twenty test sharpenings, zero off-centre breaks. Darkness sits a touch lighter than the Staedtler at the same grade, closer to what most brands sell as an F.
Genuine incense cedar, and it shows in the sharpening — long unbroken curls, none of the splintering cheaper basswood gives. Core is softer than advertised, closer to a 3B in practice, which is either a feature or a problem depending what desk you're at.
Every pencil is sharpened on the same hand-crank mill, never a electric sharpener, because electric sharpeners flatter a soft core and hide how it holds a point under hand pressure. Darkness is judged against the scale below on the same 90gsm stock, same room, same overcast north light, because direct sun washes out the difference between a B and a 2B on paper in a way that makes the whole exercise pointless.
Each pencil gets a minimum of four sharpenings and forty minutes of actual writing, not scribbling, before a verdict. A pencil that only looks good for the first six strokes is not a good pencil.
9H is the hardest, faintest line commonly sold; 9B the softest and darkest. HB and F sit in the middle and are, despite popular belief, not the same grade — F holds a point slightly longer than HB at a near-identical darkness, which is the entire reason F exists and the entire reason nobody remembers it exists. This column tests almost exclusively in the B range, 2B to 4B, because that is where most of the interesting differences between manufacturers actually show up; every maker's HB looks more or less like every other maker's HB.
Nearly every wood pencil sold with an attached eraser uses a crimped metal ferrule, and nearly every one of those ferrules starts to mark the barrel lacquer within the first week of pocket carry, simply from the crimp edge rubbing paint with every step. Nobody has fixed this. A rolled, un-crimped ferrule exists and appears on perhaps one pencil in twenty tested here. It is not a hard problem. It has simply never been worth a manufacturer's time to solve for a component that costs less than the lead inside it.