Review: Blackwing Point Guard

I received my Blackwing Point Guard in the mail last week. As a subscriber to the Blackwing Editions, I only had to pay shipping to receive it so I was willing to try it out, even though I had already heard through the blog phone tree that it wasn’t worth it. Curiosity killed the cat and cost me $3 in shipping and a trip to the PO Box.

The first thing I noticed is that its heavier than any other pencil cap I own. Not like brass-heavy just more substantial, and larger than any of the other pencil caps. Since Blackwing pencils are already exponentially larger than pens and other pencils, sticking a Point Guard on one makes it almost impossible to get it to fit into any pencil or pen case. Euphamistically, its friggin’ huge.

It also does not fit onto the pencil very far. In the photo above, I aligned the cap with the marks on the pencil to show exactly how far the cap fit onto the pencil. I know some people can get a pretty long point on their pencil but that still leaves an awful lot of clearance at the end.

Shown above, the Point Guard appears with a Sun-Star plastic pencil cap, a generic aluminum pencil cap and a Kutsuwa Stad Aluminum Pencil Cap. I also chose a selection of pencils to test all the pencil caps to see which worked with the most pencils.

I chose common favorites beyond the Palomino Blackwings like the Prospector, Tombow, Mitsubishi, CDT, General’s Cedar Pointe, Natajar, Faber-Castell Grip 2001 (for its triangular shape), and the Mitsubishi Colour Pencil (its a round barrel and slightly wider) to get a range.

My experience with the Point Guard mirrored many other’s. I found it very difficult to actually get it on to a Blackwing Pearl. I practically had to wrench it on. It sort of broke my heart a little to do it knowing I was marring the paint to do it. I really like Pearls.  But for you, I did it. And here’s the proof. Yep. It marked it up. And I had to wrench the Point Guard off again. I mean I looked ridiculous trying to pull the cap off. I can’t imagine trying to pull that cap off in a  meeting. I looked like I was wrestling a candy cane out of the mouth a rigor moritised-earthworm. It was not pretty. In a public place, I would have inevitably lost purchase on one or the other and let them fly across the room.  Hence, the need to bring in the other pencil caps for comparison. Were they all this difficult to use? Or did they all fall off?

So I started testing the other pencil caps like the transparent plastic Sun-Star and the aluminum caps.Between the plastic Sun-Star caps and the aluminum caps, I was able to cap and shake test all of the pencils shown above and easily remove the caps without endangering those around me. They fit snugly but not TOO snugly. Mostly, these caps keep the points of your pencils from poking you or your carrying case or from the lead breaking in transit. Some of the caps fit better than others with some pencils but clearly the price points are drastically better so its easier to have an assortment of Sun-Star and Kutsuwa Pencil Caps on hand than it is to have more than one Point Guard.

The aluminum caps have slits up the side to make it possible for them to fit wider hex and round barrel pencils more easily. Of course, this means its also possible to stretch the aluminum out so that they no longer fit snugly around a standard hex pencil and wouldn’t pass Blackwing’s rigorous “3-shake test”.  But you can find two 8-packs of aluminum Kutsuwa Stad Pencil Caps on Amazon for under $9 so you can outfit an entire dozen of pencils and then some for the cost of ONE Point Guard.

The bottomline: Don’t waste your hard earned pencil funds on the Point Guard. Buy an assortment of these other pencil caps instead or do a search on JetPens for Pencil Caps or ask at your favorite shop or web site for other pencil cap recommendations. I appreciate that Blackwing tried to innovate the pencil cap but in this instance, it just didn’t work.