Make Something Simple that Everyone Has. A Pencil.
Let’s make that your business.
These sell for 16 – 40 cents.
If you are really clever, you could make this! 72 needed –
but this is just “art” – someone must make the pencils.
But: Nobody Can
Make a Pencil !
 No one knows how to make a pencil.
 Here is a description of contents of “Mirado” brand pencils:
 Material: California Incense Cedar.
Finish: Glossy black with gold lettering.
Ferrule: Red-banded brass.
Eraser: Genuine Pink Pearl.
Core: Waxed-ceramic/graphite composite. Available in #1/B,
#2/HB, #2.5/F, #3/H.
Markings: “USA/Mirado Black Warrior/HB/[two hearts].”
Packaging: Varies from open-stock, to packs of eight or ten, to
boxes of a dozen.
Origin: Made in Lewisburg, Tennessee, United States by the
Sanford Corporation.
Availability: Widely available in office supply stores, art supply
stores, university bookstores, department stores and online.
Step One: “California Incense Cedar”
 Here one is. You paid the owner
for the right to cut it down to get
the wood you will need.
You will need:
Big chain saw, big truck, a saw mill, and other
equipment.
But wait—who makes all those things? They
require steel, machinery, buildings, trained
workers. And the workers need food,
clothing, housing, transportation, etc.
We need the wood for the pencil …
 Your tree is one of these!
 Now get it milled
down a bit.
And start sawing.
Of course—
precision is required if you
don’t want to waste valuable
wood and want to keep
costs under control.
Keep cutting the wood smaller and
smaller—but remember to kiln dry it.
 If the wood is not dried,
quality of the pencil will be
bad & you lose customers.
So the wood get put in
a kiln drying machine.
This one claims to be good.
So you get little pieces of wood.
Also consider: poplar - Turkey, pine –
Russia & basswood – China.
Next: Glossy black (or classic yellow) finish.
 The color is a lacquer applied to the pencil.
 Lacquer came from China and India originally—
made from resin from the Rhus tree or squeezed
from a bug (insect lac).
 Now, of course, we have factories to make this
complex chemical. Previously it was quite toxic,
now it has been made fast drying and safe.
 Colors come from many sources of dyes or
pigments added to the lacquer (another industry).
Side Note: Why yellow?
 In late 1800s—a Frenchman exploring
Siberia near the China border found the
highest quality deposits of graphite ever.
 Hence, the pencils made with that graphite
were the best.
 Yellow in China is associated with royalty, so
the pencils were colored yellow as a signal of
the highest quality in the market.
Put your name on the pencil.
 Then the company name
or your logo must be
embossed on the side.
Here is one machine that
will do that.
But anyone can make this
machine, so lets get to the more technical stuff
about pencil making.
Lead pencils…
There is no lead in pencils.
The inner stuff is a mix of clay that comes from
many places and graphite. Sri Lanka and
China are the leaders.
The number on the pencil (hardness)
depends on the clay/graphite mix.
First good quality pencil factory in the
U.S. was the Thoreau factory—founded by
brother-in-law of Henry David Thoreau.
Side Note: Colored Pencils
 You can get pencils that draw in red, green or
whatever.
 That stuff in the pencil is a mix of clay (called
china clay because it dries hard), pigments,
and wax.
 There are other specialty pencils—charcoal
pencils for drawing; eye-liner pencils for
makeup, etc.
 But back to the main product……
Erasers
Get your vocabulary right—plugs, not erasers.
First patented in 1858.
Standard in the U.S., but not Europe (go figure).
Today—synthetic rubber or vinyl is used—get the
right consistency and an extruder machine
squirts out long ribbons of plugs. When cool,
cut to size. And then, because we like soft
edges, hundreds of pounds of them are
tumbled in a tumbler to get softer edges.
New word for the day: Ferrule
 That is the little band, made of zinc and
copper (and mixes of other metals) that hold
the plug to the end of the pencil (too
complicated for Europeans). Traditionally—
the ferrule put on first, then plug shoved in
after some glue put inside the ferrule.
 Thermoplastics now commonly used. Put on
by “ultrasonic welding.” So you need to figure
out how to get all those machines and parts.
Ready to go!
 Now we have the simple pencil made—so
put them in boxes you get from somewhere
and then get the boxes into cartons and on to
trucks to get them to distributors and stores.