Pencil sharpener of 6 cuts and takes practice to master without breaking the lead. Specialized sharpeners are available that operate on non-standard sizes of pencil, such as crayons used in primary schools. Sharpeners that have two openings, one for normal pencils and one for larger crayons, are fairly common. An artist's or draftsman's pencil sharpener leaves the graphite untouched and sharpens only the wood (some models can switch from standard to wood-only by an adjustment). The graphite lead is then honed to a sharp point with a lead pointer, which sharpens only the lead without wood. Lead pointers are also used with
Mechanical pencil barrel of the pencil. This was the most common type in the earlier part of the twentieth century. Many of these have a locking mechanism one way to allow the lead to be pushed back into the pencil. A clutch pencil (or leadholder) tends to use thicker leads (2–5.6 mm) and generally holds only one piece of lead at a time. A typical clutch pencil is activated by pressing the eraser cap on the top, to open the jaws inside the tip and allow the lead to freely drop through from the barrel (or back into it when retracting). Because