Review on 🖊️ AS2 Automatic Long Point Pencil Sharpener by Kum, Two Hole - 1053021 (Extra Lids Excluded) by Dawn Fischer

To keep my crayons sharp I've tried dozens of sharpeners, from the expensive electric and cordless to the cheapest and most basic manual ones, each ranging from 7 cents to 50 cents. This is the best I've found so far. I won't go into the mechanics like other reviews do, except to reiterate that sharpening with KUM is a two-step process that cannot be reduced to one. In the first stage, the wood is cut off, and in the second stage, graphite, wax or some other material that makes up the pencil is sharpened. and will be too large to fit in a hole of the same size. Despite a cartoon that seemed to suggest that only hexagonal pencils were suitable for use in a sharpener, I tried my Prismacolor Premier, Prismacolor Verithin, Caran D'ache Pablo round pencils, Derwent Studio thin pencils and my Faber Castell round pencils. Polychromos. What a delight to see that every pencil in a KUM sharpener is perfectly sharpened once I've followed the two step process. The tips are very long and razor sharp, but of course this makes them fragile and must be handled with care. Care. You can't expect to squeeze them hard without breaking them. However, I will say that in my testing not a single pencil broke in the sharpener. Also, when I tried to fix a pencil with a knowingly broken shaft by "toasting" it in the microwave for 20 seconds and then using a KUM sharpener, the process actually worked the first time I did it. It was nice to know that I was able to salvage a pencil I thought I had lost. Two key suggestions: 1) I chose not to cover the top of the sharpener, instead using it over the trash can every time. This allowed me to watch the pencil as I sharpened it and see when to stop at step 1. The chip bin is tiny anyway and makes it hard to see what's going on with your pencil, so I recommend you don't use it. This way you don't run the risk of cutting off too much of the pencil tree at once. 2) When using an AFB to sharpen colored pencils, make sure to sharpen a graphite pencil in it at least every 5 or 6 pencils. Otherwise the exquisite sharpness of the blades dulls too quickly. (It was a stroke of genius or kindness that the KUM folks included two extra blades with the sharpener that could be attached with a simple screwdriver. So if the original blades become dull, you don't have to wait for another KUM to arrive in the mail. ) I never thought I would give one of the simplest pencil sharpeners a thumbs up as the best I've found, but here it is: TWO THUMBS UP! Congratulations to KUM for developing a really decent pencil sharpener that works well with almost ALL pencils.