The Inside Story of How Our Custom Pencils Are Made

What’s in a Pencil?

First thing to clear up: For anyone still worrying, pencils do not contain lead. We’ll get to why we still call it that.

Before the invention of the thing we call a pencil, people wrote with ink or by scratching sharp implements into softer surfaces. Sometimes they used lumps of lead. The first step towards the evolution of the modern pencil was the discovery of graphite in Borrowdale, England, in 1564. Graphite proved to be easier to write with than lead, because it sheds layers more easily. As an added bonus, it can be erased. (You can find out how effectively our erasers work by reading about our eraser experiment.) People initially thought graphite was a type of lead, which is possibly how we ended up calling the core of a pencil its lead.

A whole industry sprung up around this graphite mine, with people figuring out how to take raw graphite, turn it into a usable core, and add a case of string or wood. But it took the French Revolution to give us the modern pencil. In 1795, France was at war with most of Europe, including Britain, over the revolution. This meant that the French couldn’t access that sweet sweet pure Borrowdale graphite to make their pencils.

Luckily, the French did have a lot of leftover low-quality graphite and a resident genius called Nicolas-Jacques Conte. He put on his thinking chapeau and came up with the idea of mixing the low-quality graphite with clay and firing it to make the whole thing hard. Not only did this make a great pencil lead (one that still contained no lead), the clay made it easier to adjust the hardness or softness of the pencil core to produce lighter or darker lines. It was such a good idea that we still use this combo of graphite and clay today.

How Pencils Are Made

Step 1

The graphite and clay are added in the correct ratio, mixed with water, and the resulting paste is pushed through an extruder, creating lots of long thin rods (future pencil cores.)

Step 2

To make them hard enough to write, the rods are dried in an oven for a few hours at around 250F, then fired in a kiln at around 1800F for 45 minutes.

Step 3

Meanwhile, small planks of wood (usually basswood, poplar, or white fir) are scored with long, thin, lengthwise channels – about 7 per slat. These are where the pencil cores will lie. Glue is added to the channels.

Step 4

The hard rods are placed on a giant wheel, which rolls over half the planks, perfectly lining up one rod with one channel. The remaining, empty planks are placed on top, creating a pencil core sandwich. This is compressed under high pressure to glue it together.

Step 5

The newly secured pencil core sandwich is shaped and trimmed to create individual pencils.

Step 6

Each pencil receives multiple coats of paint.

Step 7

For pencils with erasers, the metal eraser holder is squeezed tight onto the pencil end, then the eraser is pushed into the holder, which is squeezed tight around it.

Step 8

The pencils are rolled across a giant grinder to sharpen them.

Step 9

We add your custom design to each pencil!

Video

What the Letters and Numbers on Pencils Mean

There are two systems used to rate a pencil’s color. Most places use the HB scale, while America uses the numeric system.

First, it helps to know that the more clay a pencil contains, the harder it is. Harder pencils produce a lighter colored line because they aren’t sloughing off as much of their core when you press them onto paper. The benefit of a harder pencil is that they stay sharper than soft pencils. Pencils with less clay (i.e. a higher proportion of graphite) are softer and produce darker lines.

The HB scale is all about recognizing this hard/soft spectrum, although in a slightly confusing way. H stands for hard and B stands for black, but think of it as soft because that’s what makes the lead darker.

HB is in the middle: it’s the standard pencil, the perfect balance between the hardness you need to get a sharp point, and the softness you need for a clear black line. Every other grade of pencil is either labeled H or B, depending on whether it contains a higher proportion of clay (H) or graphite (B). Each one also has a number to indicate where on the scale it falls. So a 3H pencil is harder than a 2H, but they’re both softer than a 3B, which is softer than a 2B. Just for fun, there’s also F, which falls between H and HB and can be sharpened to a fine point.

America, as usual, does things differently, using a numeric scale: The higher the number, the harder the pencil, and the lighter the mark. Whereas the HB scale typically goes up to 9H or 9B, the numeric scale usually only has five options: #1, #2 (the most common, as you probably know), #2.5, #3, and #4.

The Bottom Line

You’ll never see pencils as just useful sticks of wood again! We hope this has given you new appreciation for the humble pencil and why people can’t resist them at events. The lines a pencil leaves are erasable, but the gift of a custom pencil makes a permanent impression.