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Brilliant Pencil Sharpener Design Helps You Endlessly Extend Pencils

Uses miniature wood joinery to turn your No. 2 into a No. 2222

By Rain Noe - February 12, 2016

in Sustainable Design | Product Design

One of the more fascinating challenges for a product designer is creating the UI for something tiny. Aspirin is a good example: The active ingredient is so miniscule that we cannot physically manipulate it, thus its creators wrap it in a pill comprised of 99% powder, or an airy capsule, just so we can pick the damn thing up.

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A pencil is another example of this. The "active ingredient" here is just the graphite in the middle, but with no way to hold something so small, we need to wrap it in a cylinder of wood. This is wasteful, particularly when you get down to the end of a pencil. I toss mine once they shrink to three inches or so, as it becomes too short to effectively wield. Then that otherwise-still-good three inches of graphite and wood go into the wastestream.

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Now a Japanese company (of course) called Nakajima Jukyudo has solved this problem with their Tsunago sharpener. The company has been making pencil sharpeners for three generations, but this one is different: Amusingly, it does not function as a regular pencil sharpener, but instead has three "operations" that prepare two pencils for joinery.

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Hole #1 bores a mortise into the butt end of a pencil; hole #2 turns the tip of another pencil into a sort of pointy mortise; hole #3 then cleans up the shavings on the mortise. With the joinery thus created, the pencils can then be attached. Here's how it looks in operation:

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I love inventions like this that skirt that fine line between silly and brilliant, and I got a kick out of watching the "glue-up." Speaking of which: How long until this company invents tiny little bar clamps to hold everything together until the glue sets?

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Another relevant factoid that I found amusing, courtesy of the Spoon & Tamago entry featuring the Tsunago: In Japanese "a hole and a protrusion [are] often written as dekoboko." While the literal translation of that term is "bumpy" or "uneven," check out the characters used to write it:

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Pictographic script FTW.

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Lignarium Lignarium

8 years ago

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Great for joining two different colours like blue-red or green-yellow and sharpen both ends.

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Ross Dusenbury

8 years ago

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You could make a glue up jig with a 3d printed end cap with 'J' Hooks for the pointy and blunt pencil ends. Then connect rubber bands to the J Hooks.

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Rodrigo Canedo

8 years ago

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What impresses me the most is how they managed to come-up with this idea. Would love to know more about the thinking process behind it.

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Juan Cano

8 years ago

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Ohh, that's cool. I don't like the glueing part. Can they do it so it creates grooves like in a screw and then you can screw them together? Less messy.

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Patricio Ortiz

8 years ago

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Great! , but please, do a crank and helicoidal cutter version to make it sublime.

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