David Weaver
I did get a chance after traveling a little bit last week to make one pencil in 6 facets. It's definitely better suited to a fingertip grip. It's also harder to make by hand, because at some point, your bearing surface will be one small facet on the pencil, the pencil is flexible, and you need to cut even facets both relative to each other and end to end (pulling the pencil across the bottom of a plane is the easiest way to cut the facets).

The other choice is to make a special plane that cuts two facets at once top and bottom, but it'll be potential trouble if there is grain misdirection between the two glued halves.

The edges left by 6 facets are much sharper, and now it's apparent why all commercial pencils have the edges broken pretty significantly.

So, after all of the screwing around, we're almost where we would've been if we just copied a commercial pencil from the start!!