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 selling in huge numbers after a company from Tokyo and Osaka made large orders. Later, Tokuji Hayakawa's company got its name from that pencil: Sharp. At nearly the same time in the US, Charles R. Keeran was developing a similar pencil that would be the precursor of most of today's pencils. Keeran's design was ratchet-based, whereas Hayakawa's was screw-based. These two development histories – Hayakawa and Keeran – are often mistakenly combined into one. Keeran patented his lead pencil in 1915 and soon afterwards arranged production. After some improvements, his design was marketed as the "Eversharp" pencil by the Wahl