How a Pencil is Made

This is where it all begins — our factory in Shelbyville, Tennessee. We’ve been making custom pencils here in the USA for more than 100 years.

We start with wooden slats. These arrive in our factory in stacks upon stacks.  

Each individual slat goes through a machine called the Groover Machine (not to be confused with someone who can’t stop dancing) that cuts — you guessed it — grooves into the surface of the wood. This preps the wood for graphite.

Next we lay the graphite cores of the pencils into the snug grooves on the slat. Each gets a thin layer of glue, and one by one, graphite cores are laid into the grooves that were earlier cut into our pencil slats. Most of our cores are made up of a blend of raw graphite and clay, although some pencils like our Test Scoring Pencil have other materials inside the core.

Curious how graphite is made? First, the raw graphite is ground very finely. Next, it’s blended with clay and other ingredients to make a sort of paste. The paste is pushed through a thin tube, which makes the long spaghetti-strand shape of the pencil’s core. It’s fired in an oven, dried, and ready to be put in a pencil. This close-up clip shows the pencil cores moving quickly through our machines.

Next, the graphite is sandwiched together with another slat. While it’d be impossible to write with it at this point, you are seeing the very first step of an officially “wood cased” pencil.

The freshly glued slats are clamped together and left overnight to dry, ensuring everything is stuck tightly together.

Since they’re still slat sandwiches, our next stop is shaping the slats into pencils. Slats are laid into a cutting machine that divides each one evenly. Now they’re looking like a #2!

The body of a pencil is called a “barrel.” Here at Musgrave, we make a variety of pencil styles: Round, Hex, Jumbo, Carpenter, Bridge, and Golf, all of which are available as custom pencils. These standard pencils are moving down our conveyor belt, ready for a coat of paint.

After cutting, it’s time to give them a coat of paint. Everyone loves a classic yellow pencil, but we have virtually endless options for pencil colors in our factory for custom pencil orders because we can mix our paint to an exact Pantone® match! Depending on the style of pencil, they’ll get between 4 and 10 coats of paint.

Now that they’re painted, it’s time to give our pencils some flair. From here they will head to one of our many printing methods: Some will get hot foil lettering imprinted on the side, others will get digital printing, a full foil wrap around the barrel, or screen printed. As a pencil factory, we can accommodate the production of nearly any kind of custom pencil order.

Once the pencils are painted, printed, or wrapped in the customer’s style, they are tipped, which means they get a ferrule and eraser (unless, of course, customers order them without). In a quick, four-step process, the pencils' ends are primed, set with a ferrule, then eraser, then clamped together.

During the tipping process, our Golf pencils have an especially funky step — they get an eraser and ferrule on BOTH ends, prior to being cut in half to make them pocket-sized.

Some of our pencils get a further step — sharpening! We use a belt sander to grind down the tip of the pencil into a nice fine point.

The pencils are checked in our Quality Control department, making sure there are no misprints, missing ferrules, or other problems.

Have we talked about boxes yet? Custom orders can be packaged nicely in custom-printed boxes at our box factory next door, giving the newly minted pencils a tidy package to travel in.

When our pencils arrive in our customer’s hands, they continue to transform. These pencils are fresh off the press, but the little shavings remind us the next stage of their journey is now with you. From big bold ideas sketched out in a notebook, to a child learning how to write their ABC’s, it’s almost too easy to romanticize how cool pencils are!