September 5, 2007

C.H. Hanson SuperPencil - Review

C.H. Hanson continues their Signature Series with the new Superpencil, a pencil so blatantly powerful that other pencils warp when it comes near. What it is is a regular looking carpenter's pencil that is made entirely of a graphite composite. The result is a pencil that has a ridiculously long life and always has a variety of edges to choose from.

C.H. Hanson says that the SuperPencil lasts seven times as long as a normal pencil. From our experience with it, this might be a low number. As they advertise, you really don't have to sharpen it because, somewhere, there is always an edge. Sure, we had to get a bit creative from time to time and hold the pencil at an odd angle, but still, it's impressive. With rough framing, we opted to just use one of the thick edges, but as things got to finish work, we went ahead and sharpened it to a point and used that.

We did have some trouble getting a really fine point on it. Even after we sharpened it with a utility knife, we couldn't get a line we were satisfied with. This probably has more to do with the fact that the SuperPencil is in the shape of a carpenter's pencil and we have the same trouble with those. We prefer the traditional round pencils, particularly for finish work, and we'd be interested to see the SuperPencil technology transferred to that shape as well.

As far as the actual mark goes, the Superpencil reminds us of those soft Choice pencils that we had in high school. In fact it may even be the same material. It doesn't come off on the skin and it didn't make a mess in our pocket, but it's pretty soft and a really sharp point doesn't last all that long.

It's a pretty cool item and while it doesn't measure up to their Pivot Square (what does?), it's still an interesting idea and we give C.H. Hanson a ton of credit for trying to bring innovation to the pencil of all things. And If you don't lose it, you'll at least have it for quite some time.