Watch the Mesmerizing Way Pencils Are Made
If you’re a fan of calming ASMR, you’re in for a real treat. In this episode of MADE HERE—filmed at the Voskresenskaya Pencil Factory, about 50 miles southwest of Moscow—we’re taking you through the pencil-making production process from colored pencils, to sketching pencils, and the everyday classic pencil.
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The beloved writing tool begins as a humble slab of wood from which the familiar pencil shape emerges. The slabs for the colored pencils get sorted, shaved, then sorted again before being stacked, smoothed down, and shaped. Next, the color stick is sandwiched between two slabs of cut wood before it's placed in a machine that prepares to cut the columns that will become sharpened pencils later on in the production process.
Colored pencils receive a layer of paint to indicate what the color is and move down a conveyor belt where they get stacked and prepped for packaging. Before anything can move forward, though, it has to make it through a quality control check; then, the pencils are on their way to being labeled with the company name and logo.
Elsewhere in the factory, ferrules (the little metal bands that affix the eraser to the pencil body) and erasers are being sorted and prepped for attachment. The ferrules go on first and then the erasers get plugged in to the proper pencils. The near-finished products—both regular pencils and colored pencils—then get sharpened and packaged in their boxes for delivery, where they eventually make their way to us.
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