NYT Mag - Inside One of America's Last Pencil Factories (Lots of Great Pictures)

[JDC]

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/magazine/inside-one-of-americas-last-pencil-factories.html?referer=


Very cool pictures of the pencil making process.

[ProudLib72]

1. Those pics are wonderful!

I'm embarrassed to admit how many of those caps (with our without erasers) I chewed up as a child.

[PSPS]

2. Wow, those photographs are really something. Thanks.

For those wanting to see pencil-making machines in action, there's this:

[murielm99]

8. That was a great video.

Thank you!

[Silver1]

12. What would we do without our engineers to figure this stuff out.

[shanti]

3. Very surprised

that this industry hasn't been outsourced yet.

[Lochloosa]

4. These are great pencils for the artist in you.

Here's their website.


http://www.generalpencil.com/

[Bob Loblaw]

5. I love a good factory tour

[njcpa1978]

10. Factory Tour

I remember visiting the International Nickel Company factory in Sudbury Canada, over 50 years ago. I doubt we could go on that tour today. You could feel the heat from the furnaces, from behind a yellow line on the factory floor. On different floors, different metals were extracted from the ore as large fingers raked through the almost molten rock. Then on the bottom floor the slag was removed and dumped on a mountain of stone behind the factory. Probably a toxic waste site now.

[dalton99a]

6. Amazing photo essay.

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. Very cool indeed.

thank you for this.

[blitzen]

9. Henry David Thoreau was a genius at pencil-making...

among other things. His family owned a pencil factory and he himself engineered a revolutionary technique that made for America's finest pencils...just an interesting bit of trivia to go along with this story

[iluvtennis]

11. Wow, very nice article...thanks for sharing it.

[Javaman]

13. I use their pencils in my art work!

https://javaman8263.deviantart.com/art/Gandalf-Sm-703399193

[George II]

14. Back in the 1950s my father was an engineer at a pencil factory (Eberhard-Faber) in Brooklyn.

He brought home some "demonstrator kits" with each of the dozen or so steps for making pencils, from the rough wood, then in each step the pencil took more shape until the last one was the finished pencil. Those are now long gone, but my brother and I were fascinated by them.

They closed the plant and moved to Pennsylvania.

This made me look up their history. Their first factory was on the current site of the United Nations.

If interested, here's a New Yorker article about them:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/09/pencils-up

This brings back memories of back then, especially the grooved "slats" in which the lead was placed before the top "slat" was bonded to it.

[KT2000]

15. and to think

how we take this and so many other things for granted.

[MLAA]

16. Super cool and coincidently I just added a yellow pencil to an oil painting I was working on today 😬

[tblue37]

17. An interesting point about pencils: Pencils were originally colored yellow because the

finest graphite was from China, so pencil manufacturers wanted to imply that tgey were using only the best graphite in their product.

[Scurrilous]

18. K&R

[TeamPooka]

19. K&R

[meadowlander]

20. So cool. Thanks for posting!