How it’s Made? By Tanner Van Maanen Pr.5 Mr. T

Pencil

What its made of? Graphite Incense-cedarEraser (New England) (California)(Dutch East India)

Process

1. At the Slat factory Pencil Stock is cut into Pencil Blocks a bit longer than the normal length of a pencil. 2. Pencil Blocks are cut into Pencil Slats using specially designed circular saws. These saws are very thin in order to reduce the amount of waste in the form of sawdust. Due to the natural grain and defect characteristics of the wood the slats are sorted by width and grade for further processing.

Process 3. At the Pencil Factory a Groover machine cuts grooves into the slats to accept the writing core. Writing cores -- made from a mixture of graphite and clay -- are placed into the grooves. 4. The sandwiches are transfered to equipment called a Shaper and are first trimmed to assure that the sandwhich is square and that all the pencils will be the proper length, then the sandwich is machined into pencil shapes such as hexagonal, round or triangular.

Process 5. Next each pencil is painted in a machine receiving from 4 to 10 coats of lacquer depending on the desired quality of the finish and the color of lacquer. 6. On a tipping machine an eraser and a ferrule (the metal ring that holds the eraser to the pencil)are crimped into place on each pencil.

21 st Century Skills Life and Career Skills – We used our group to find the different stages of production and how we it is made. Each person had to find something out about a pencil and present it to class. ICT – We used the internet to find our information and pictures about how the pencil was made.

Conclusion As a group we learn where the pencil came from and what the process of making a simple object we have in class.