The bane of my existence during my school days was the common No.2 graphite pencil. Not the mechanical pencil…no, the cheap, yellow pencils that were given out like free candy at the beginning of the school year. I hated them, for one reason: unless the tip of the pencil was razor-sharp, I didn’t want to write with it, and when it was sharp enough for my liking, the freaking tip would always break off. That left me with only one choice: getting out of my desk, walking up to the wall-mounted hand-crank pencil sharpener, and proceeding to make enough noise to piss off the entire classroom, teacher included. Hey, at least it wasn’t as bad as the kid with the hand-held sharpener who would sweep his pencil shavings into his desk for the next kid to deal with.
Certainly, there has to be a better (read: faster) way to take care of good old Mr. No.2 Pencil, and that’s where the entertainment value of YouTube comes in. Mike of the channel Mike and Lauren was given the remains of a nitro-powered remote control car and asked by his friend if he could find a use for it. Next thing you know, we have a hot-rodded pencil sharpener. Sure, it probably makes four times the noise that wall grinder model made when yours truly was in sixth grade, but unlike that old bastion of math class, something tells me I won’t be standing there for a minute and a half, grinding away to turn a pencil into a perfect point, either!
