re: Who here remembers pencil fighting in grade school?

Don't let somebody come up to you holding their pencil all loose either. We had societal pencil fighting tiers. Never let a good gummy fighter get first hit. Too much torque before you can weaken the integrity of their pencil.

Now it's true, a good China pencil was hard to beat, but I had a round orange pencil from like 6 Star or whatever it was called, and I was 81 fights in on it when someone finally karate chopped it. Through my quick reflexes I had saved it from two such assassination attempts earlier, but never seen anything like it since.

Reading this thread reminded me of the Big Chief tablets. Anybody remember those? I can remember admiring the artwork on the covers. Good old days!

Back in the day, The best pencils I found were the dark purple K&B pencils.

The trick was to get one of those “soft lead” waxy pencils. My mom would hold pencils so I could practice while she was on the phone at night.

I couldn’t spell or add but I was the pencil break champ.

I found an old Redwood pencil at the house and dominated pencil fighting with it.

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I was thinking back in the day we use to take the shorter pencils and put a needle backward into the eraser. Then break off the writing end and split it about half an inch and insert a piece of paper for a tail fin. throw at each other and enjoy.

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We called it “Pencil Popping” and it united everyone at my middle school irrespective of socio-economic background/race, and actually functioned as a great segue springboard into great friendships.

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The trick was to get one of those “soft lead” waxy pencils.

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Yep. Then soak your gaming pencils in 40 weight motor oil for a week. Impossible to break at that point. Too rubbery.

I kid, but I wish I’d thought of that because there might be something to it. Next time I guess.