Pencil Review: General’s Cedar Pointe 333-2HB

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I’m one of those people who like to shed all of their clothing and walk around the house bare-ass naked as soon as the kids go to bed. TMI? Whatever. This is my blog, I can say what I want. Anyway, I have an appreciation for minimal dress. Living in Alaska, and in America’s worst-dressed city, that’s a rare state of affairs since the layer system is key to comfort in our climate (and, apparently, the local fashion).

The same can be said for pencils. We’ve got schoolhouse yellow ones, red and black striped ones, even ones with weird bamboo leaf printing all over them. Layers of lacquer seems to be the norm. The inner nudist in me feels the urge to rebel against this stifling multi-layered construct! That’s why I bought the first pack of “nude” pencils I’ve ever owned — the General Pencil Co. Cedar Pointe #2HB — and decided to review them. So, without further ado…let’s get naked!

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Pencil Review: Nataraj Bold (bonus: sharpener and eraser!)

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In case you hadn’t noticed, I love soft pencils. The smoothness. The darkness. Oh yes. Another thing you may have noticed (or probably will in the near future, if you continue reading this blog) is that I enjoy sampling pencils from every corner of the earth. So when I found out that India’s largest pencil-maker, Hindustan Pencils, is producing a product called the “Bold”, which it markets as being “super black”, you know I was all over that.

India is a country that straddles the line between “developing” and “industrialized”. Their economy is more developed than most of their neighbors, and yet their median quality of life is not on par with most Western countries. All of that is to say, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this product of their pencil industry. Would it be a hidden gem, or a flop? Well, my box of Nataraj Bold pencils finally arrived, so let’s find out.

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Journal what you read

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I have a love/hate relationship with books. I want to be a reader. I enjoy reading. It just falls to the wayside, and takes me forever to finish a book. Sometimes it takes me so long to finish a book that I have forgotten the beginning by the time I get to the end. Sometimes I put one down for ages, pick it back up, and really want to read it but have forgotten the whole story thus far, or possibly even lost my place. I am the type of person that needs a deliberate system. So, I started writing a journal about each book that I read.

I’ll admit, it could be that I was just looking for an excuse to write more. But hey, whatever motivation I can grasp onto to make my brain actually want to do a thing, I’ll run with.

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Pencil Review: Staedtler Rally #2 HB

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I feel a little bit of shame admitting this, but I routinely scroll through the “wooden pencil” category on Amazon, AliExpress, etc. and save everything that happens to catch my eye. In fact, on Amazon I have a huge wish list that covers the spectrum of price points, core grades, and countries of origin. Every once in a while I flip through the list and treat myself to something new; and one of my latest self-treats is the Steadtler Rally.

The Staedtler Rally comes in a dozen-pack that can be had at a competitive price. Some Googling reveals that these pencils are/were made in different factories in various locations, but the box that arrived in my mail was made in Indonesia. The packaging indicates that Staedtler intends for these pre-sharpened pencils to serve a utility role, with an “A+” homework assignment and a marked-up Scantron form prominently displayed on the graphics (another hint is that they feel compelled to specify both #2 and HB). Of course, that category of pencil covers a wide spectrum. Are they workhorses? Are they hidden gems? Are they complete garbage? Well, read on my friend, and you shall find out…

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Sharpener Review: X-ACTO Mighty Mite

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It may be somewhat of a faux pas for a pro-analog pencil snob to use an electric sharpener, but I’m not trying to hear all of that negativity. For one thing, I push pencils for a living. Sometimes I’m working with a pencil and I just need the damn thing to get sharp. It doesn’t have to be an “experience”. Yeah, yeah, stopping to smell the flowers and all. Try telling that to the people I’m billing by the hour. Better yet, tell that to my brain that will wander off into the weeds if I break my focus for more than a nanosecond.

The X-ACTO Mighty Mite, AC-powered version

It also occurred to me that a reviewer of pencils should strive for consistency in methods. I put a lot of thought on ways that I can remove variables from my reviews and make my testing more objective. Although I do a hand-sharpening test for every pencil I review, I conduct the rest of the process using an electric sharpener. Electric sharpeners simply make a more consistent point than I can by hand, and that way I’m making apples-to-apples comparisons.

OK, now that I’ve hopefully talked my way out of being ostracized by the pencil community, let’s get down to meat and potatoes. My go-to electric sharpener is the X-ACTO Mighty Mite, which I own in two versions: one that plugs in to AC power (model 19520), and one that is battery-operated (model 19510). I’ve been using these on the daily for a few months, and think I have a pretty good handle on the pros and cons of each. And, because it’s the thing that I do, I’m going to share my thoughts on the Mighty Mite with you, dear reader.

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Pencil Review: Chung Hwa 101 2B

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Some pencil snobs might bristle at the notion of ordering pencils off of AliExpress. But what can I say, I like to live on the freshly-sharpened edge. I’m also always in search of a good deal. And, finally, I began to think about how remarkable it is that the People’s Republic of China has so many pencil factories that are making products specifically for export to other countries, but even in the world of pencil snobs we seldom hear about their domestic products. Surely people in China write with pencils. What kind of pencils do they use? How do they compare to the ones they’re exporting, and the ones the rest of the world makes?

Those are the things that motivated me to order ten Chung Hwa 101 grade 2B pencils. I had never heard of Chung Hwa pencils before — in fact I just ordered them on a whim from AliExpress without having any clue what to expect — but a little research indicated that they are made by the Shanghai-based China First Pencil Co. The 101 is positioned as Chung Hwa’s “drawing” pencil, and as such as available in a full spectrum of grades; its sibling, the 6151, is better known for writing purposes. Nonetheless, it seems that the 101 gets regular use as a writer in China, where both product lines are fairly prolific — in fact, in 2008 a Chung Hwa pencil was launched into space with the crew of China’s Shenzhou 7.

And on that note, let’s launch into our review…

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Pencil Review: Faber-Castell 9000 (HB and 2B)

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If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I don’t know if the German nobility has an analogous turn of phrase, but if so, it would certainly apply to the Castell 9000 pencil. Since 1905, Faber-Castell has been producing this iconic writing implement in more or less the same form.

Much like other high end pencils in the post-internet age, the Castell 9000 is marketed as an artist’s pencil, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t charmed many a writer over the past 100 years. Today I’d like to have a look at these fine instruments, and see if they can work some magic for us!

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Pencil Review: Dixon Ticonderoga #2 (Chinese)

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Every blog has to start somewhere. As an aspiring office-supply blogger with a particular fetish for pencils, what better place to start than a review of a benchmark pencil — nay, THE benchmark pencil — against which I can evaluate future test subjects? So let’s set that bar right now with the first Polar Pencil Pusher pencil review, a review of the most prolific pencil in North America: the Dixon Ticonderoga.

Now, I need to be specific, here: Today’s review is going to focus solely on pencils of Chinese origin. Ticonderoga pencils were previously made in the USA, but are now manufactured in Mexico and China. Spoiler alert: the Mexican variants are not identical to the Chinese ones. So we will leave those out from this review and perhaps come back to them at a later date.

Also, because Dixon makes Ticonderoga pencils in all sorts of variants, even within the same Chinese factory, simply specifying “Chinese Ticonderoga” could include any number of product lines with different lacquers, woods, barrel shapes, etc. With that in mind, I expanded the original scope of this review to cover not only the “classic” yellow cedar-bodied pencils I obtained for review purposes, but also a handful of the basswood Ticonderoga Black pencils I happened to have on hand.

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“Why on earth would you use a pencil and paper?”

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Where do you start writing a blog about pencils and such? I guess the best place to start is with the question I get most often: why?

Supposedly, wood-cased pencils and notebooks are obsolete. We don’t need a planner anymore, because it can go in our phone. We don’t need a notepad anymore, because our notes can go in our phone. We don’t need a diary anymore, because we can journal or tweet or Facebook on our phone.

We don’t need to live in the real world anymore. We can just live on our phones.

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