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Erasing is tedious work which is why I do GGC in non-photo blue pencil to avoid all that tedious erasing after inking. Well that's all fine and well with a CG coloured strip but Polly's Gone Home is going to be coloured with water colours meaning the panels will have to be drawn with pencil, inked and erased.

There's a device called an architect's eraser which is essentially an electric eraser. It's like a dremel with a vinyl eraser on the tip. I went to look at some today and I noticed two things about them.

1) They're ungoddly huge! They're big and cumbersome. I want something small and portable.

2) They horribly expensive. $112 expensive.

Seems rather pricey for a motor with a vinyl eraser at the end of it. So I decided to look for some alternative and I found one, for $2.

Step one. Buy battery operated engraving pencil at the dollar store for, what else, a dollar.

Step two. Buy mechanical pencil at dollar store (also for a dollar, or in my case a package of five for a dollar).

Step three. remove the doo-dad at the end of the mechanical pencil that holds the little white vinyl eraser.

Step four. Heat up glue gun. Attach doo-dad to the end of the engraving pencil.

Step five. Let the glue dry and harden. When you're done you have a battery operated architect's eraser that only cost you $2. You can buy refils for the vinyl eraser when it wears out. It's smaller and more portable. The batteries last a long time.

Step six. Erase pencils with smug confidence knowing that you "stuck it to the man" and his overpriced drafting supplies. That'll show him.

I should have done a step by step photo documentary of how I built the thing to post on my website, but seriously, it was super easy. Maybe I'll buy another and do just that.

does it work?

perhaps some kind of dremel thing, 800000 rpm, to really tear the wood out of the paper

Yeah it works fine, but the truth is, it's not really that much faster than erasing by hand. It's just a lot less work is all.

Conservation of energy is always favored

teh cheap andteh lazy = teh good. Go ghastly

Hang on, $112? that's like what, seventy quid? for a motor and an eraser? Futz to that! Good for you G, that you found an alternative.

Wilco:

It takes how much energy to fill the battery?

You get how much useful work out of it?

(I suggest as further reading the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics if you have any questions.... I'm not even going to cover energy to package and distribute said batteries)


Ghastly,

Sticking it to the man is awesome. Just don't use the glue gun on your genitalia in an attempt to "stick it to the over priced sex change surgeons." Some things are best left to profesionals.

I go a big scar on the back of my left hand from an accident with a hot glue gun. It goes nowhere near my genitals that is for sure. The glue from those heavy duty glue guns is wicked hot. Most of the glue from that incident landed in the palm of my hand and took off a huge chunk of skin but left no scar which is kind of neat since it was so much more damaged than the back of my hand.

I've been almost phobic of hot glue guns since school, mainly due to the fact that I can be a clumsy chump when handling tools...

Hah, I almost dropped a soldering iron in my lap once... thank god for tangled wires is all I'll say.

Kudos on the spinny eraser thingy, I can't rub out anything without ripping paper, so a high speed moter would just get me confetti...

And knowing me, a drilled desk... ><