Manually sharpening a pencil sucks. Plain and simple. Sure, you can buy one of those electric sharpeners, but it seems like the modern ones just don’t have the weight and torque that the ones of the past had. Mike, from Mike and Lauren had an idea to remedy this sad pencil situation.
His friend found a broken Nitro powered radio controlled car in someone’s trash. Mike didn’t have much use for the car itself, but the engine caught his eye. The toy was probably trashed because it wouldn’t start at all. The engine was completely seized. Mike took it completely apart and cleaned everything thoroughly. After that, it started right up!
He decided that this would be the perfect power plant for the ultimate pencil sharpener. After a bit of industrious hacking, he managed to mate this diminutive engine to the back of a hand cranked pencil sharpener!
The process required a bit of strategic mounting, and he did encounter some problems along the way. Most notably, the pencil sharpener locked up due to the high speeds. A little WD40 remedied that pretty quickly though. The addition of a simple clutch (he calls it a brake) to engage the sharpener when in use should stop the mechanism from wearing out too quickly.
If you wanted to reproduce this, there is plenty of info in the video above, but even more of a breakdown in the Instructable he published.
Here are a few select images just to show off this beautiful piece of overkill.
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Cool! I made one a while back with a vacuum cleaner motor, too bad I didn’t document it. It can go through a whole pencil in under four seconds! I call it the Sharpinator.