A Complete Personal Pencil Making Factory

Imagine making a pencil for your child’s SAT test? Your grandchild’s first pencil? The opportunities for memorable gestures are endless. All of the steps are easy to achieve, the process is fun and the results are very rewarding.

This “pencil factory in a box” can be enjoyed by your entire family on the kitchen counter!

It is easy to use and allows young and old alike to make professional-grade pencils without woodworking experience or ability.

Most of the parts of Pencil Precision are CNC machined from solid aluminum and anodized creating a beautiful finish that is almost as hard as a diamond. The plane iron and dies are made from hardened tool steel.

By using the Pencil Precision Block Plane with the Plane Sled Unit, the default pencil shape is hexagonal. To make round, beaded or Reuleaux pencils, a hexagonal pencil is fed into the extrusion unit. A series of progressive dies remove material to create the desired pencil shape. Your pencils can also be painted in different colors if you like. All of the steps are easy to achieve, the process is fun and the results are very rewarding.

--John Economaki

THE PLANE SLED UNIT

This unit is designed to allow kids to make hexagonal pencils without using the extrusion unit. Put the blank in the unit, tighten the clamp and in 4-6 strokes, you have cut a 1mm radius groove AND thickness planed the blank to the correct thickness. This is the beauty of depth skids on a hand plane. In practice, the unit sits on a provided anti-skid pad so it stays put and your table or counter is protected.

Once you have finished the above steps on two blanks, you insert them into the grooves in the fixture.

Without changing a thing on the plane, you plane until the skids hit the fixture and the plane no longer cuts. Flip the blanks and repeat to create the opposite edge. When these are glued together you have a perfect six sided hexagon, the standard pencil cross section.

Clamping needs to be kid friendly and this is about as easy as it gets. Place the lead in one half, brush on some glue on the opposite blank and put the two halves together一the lead will align the two halves perfectly. Stand the pencil on end and slide on the tapered aluminum clamp below.

Next, place a clamp on the other end. The major diameter of these clamps allows you to put the entire assembly back in the sled unit for clamping the middle section of the pencil.

If you desire your pencil to be painted, lightly sand all of the corners with 400 grit. The sled unit converts to a paint rack as pictured below. Since the pencil will eventually need to be sharpened, and most likely will receive an eraser ferrule, you can rotate the ends of the blank with your fingers to paint all six faces without fear of screwing up the paint job. You can paint up to two pencils at a time.

FERRULE UNIT

The next step is to score the shoulder that the ferrule will butt against. This is done with the "Ferrule Unit". You insert the pencil until it stops, lower the cutter and spin the pencil until the cutter is parallel with the fixture. It is actually really easy.

Then we have to create the tenon for the ferrule. This involves putting the pencil in the hole, peel off some wood back to the shoulder cut. The goal here is not to create a perfect cylindrical tenon, in fact, the irregularity of this helps create a firm ft with the ferrule.

Putting the ferrule on dead straight is almost impossible without some help and we have it. The Ferrule Station can be rotated on end, drop a ferrule into the pocket and hold the blank in the alignment channel and tap the pencil home. Super easy and accurate.

From here, you can put in one of the supplied erasers and sharpen with the included sharpener. And here is the shocker, not counting gluing time, or painting, you can make a pencil in 5 minutes. That is crazy fun!

That is how you make hexagonal pencils. For other profiles, we need to use an additional unit.

EXTRUSION UNIT

This is the extrusion unit, and it uses progressive dies to make three other pencil profiles.

This unit works by feeding a hexagonal pencil into the orange aluminum guide die. Forward motion is provided by rotating the crank until the pencil clears all three dies. We cannot tell you how much fun this is. This thing poops pencils!

Enjoy the Fun of the Pencil Factory!

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