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About Paper Mate \| Making of Wood Pencils
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Paper Mate pencils carry the Pencil Manufacturer’s seal of approval. Sustained Yield Forests are used in the production of Paper Mate pencils. Have you ever wondered how the lead got into a pencil? Did you ever think they drilled a hole in the pencil and put the lead in it? Check out the wood pencil making process below to get the facts:
	Premium wooden pencils are mass-produced from large blocks of incense-cedar wood. The grain of incensed cedar wood is long and straight. This grain reduces friction during sharpening making the sharpening task quick and easy.
	The incense-cedar wood is prepared by being cut into wide slats. Each slat is about seven inches long and ten pencils wide. The slats are processed to create ten evenly spaced grooves. The grooves will eventually be filled in with graphite cores.
	The cores of pencils are actually made of graphite, not lead. Modern pencils do not contain any lead! The “lead” name stuck from when ancient Greeks used metallic lead slivers to draw faint lines. Pencil cores are actually made of graphite and clay.
	Chunks of graphite and clay are placed inside a huge rotating drum that mixes the materials into a doughy mass. The lead is then pushed through a metal tube. The outputs of this process are thin rods that look like black spaghetti noodles.
	These “noodles” are fired in a kiln at 1700 degrees Fahrenheit for 6 hours. The firing process fuses the ingredients together giving the core strength.
	Pencil cores are placed in the grooves made earlier in the slats. Two slats of wood are glued together, encasing the lead rods making a “pencil sandwich”!
	The “pencil sandwiches” are joined under heavy pressure (100 psi) and pressed for an hour.
	When the glue dries, the slats are fed through a cutting machine. Fast revolving steel blades trim the wood into round or hexagonal shapes, one side at a time.
	The pencils are sanded and each one receives from two to four coats of paint.
	Although most people think of erasers as being made of rubber, that is not the primary ingredient of an eraser. The rubber acts to bind together the factice which is what actually does the dirty work in taking marks off paper. Factice is a generic name for vulcanized vegetable oil. There are several other ingredients such as fillers like clay, vulcanizing compounds, processing lubricants and colorants.
	Pencil erasers are made by extruding the ingredients to make a solid pink rod that looks like toothpaste. These rods are vulcanized and cut up into eraser-sized nuggets. A metal band called a ferrule is wrapped tightly around one end of the pencil. It holds the eraser that is pressed on the end of the pencil.
	The pencils are then ready to be packaged, sharpened and used.
	Paper Mate is the largest pencil manufacturer in the United States. We produce millions of pencils everyday!