Pencil Manufacturing: From Borrowdale to ABB Robots

Pencil manufacturing from Borrowdale graphite and Conte's 1795 lead to slat lines, Blackwing's process and the ABB FlexPicker that packs pencils at Staedtler.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/13/20265 min read

Pencil manufacturing still follows a recipe that is more than 200 years old. Graphite is mixed with clay and fired into thin leads, which are laid in grooved wooden slats, glued in, then cut, shaped and painted. More than 14 billion pencils are made worldwide each year, so the trade depends on machines, and at some plants robots now do the packing at the end of the line. This post traces the pencil from the graphite of Borrowdale and Nicolas-Jacques Conté's 1795 lead recipe to today's factories in Japan, Germany and the US, and shows where ABB robots such as the IRB 360 FlexPicker already pack pencils and erasers.

A row of pencils held in a machine with their tips pressed against a spinning grinding wheel
A row of pencils held in a machine with their tips pressed against a spinning grinding wheel

Pencils being sharpened on a machine at the Voskresensk pencil factory in Russia, 2018. Photo: Fedsmir87 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How pencils were made before the machines took over

Sometime between 1500 and 1565, people in Cumbria, England, found a large deposit of unusually pure graphite near Grey Knotts in Borrowdale. They took it for a kind of lead and called it plumbago, which is why we still talk about pencil "lead". By the late 1500s makers had started to wrap the graphite in wood. The method that won out was to glue two carved wooden halves around a graphite strip, and pencils are still put together that way.

A dark rough tunnel mouth cut into green and grey rock with stones on the floor
A dark rough tunnel mouth cut into green and grey rock with stones on the floor

Gilberts Level, an old entrance to the Borrowdale graphite mine in Cumbria, 2017. Photo: Matthew Hatton / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Pure Borrowdale graphite was scarce, so makers looked for ways to stretch it. In Nuremberg, a first attempt to make sticks from powdered graphite is recorded in 1662. Joseph Hardtmuth, who founded Koh-I-Noor in Vienna in 1790, developed a graphite and clay method, and in 1795 Nicolas-Jacques Conté in France mixed powdered graphite with clay and fired the rods in a kiln. Changing the ratio changed the hardness, and today's grades come from that. Conté was working at a time when the Napoleonic blockade cut France off from English graphite.

White and cream factory buildings with a tall chimney beside a river and a bridge railing
White and cream factory buildings with a tall chimney beside a river and a bridge railing

A. W. Faber-Castell's pencil works on the Rednitz river in Stein near Nuremberg, 2011. Photo: Vitold Muratov / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Through the 19th century pencil making turned into a factory trade. In 1812 William Munroe, a cabinetmaker in Concord, Massachusetts, made the first American wood pencils, slowly and by hand, and Henry David Thoreau's family later ran a pencil factory in the same town. Ebenezer Wood of Acton brought the circular saw into pencil production and made the first hexagonal and octagonal casings. Staedtler, founded in Nuremberg in 1835, says it automated its first production steps shortly after it started. By the late 1800s Americans were using about 240,000 pencils a day, and in 1890 Koh-I-Noor's yellow pencil started the US habit of painting pencils yellow.

Sepia photo of a long brick factory with a tall chimney and a sign reading Cane's pencils
Sepia photo of a long brick factory with a tall chimney and a sign reading Cane's pencils

The Cane and Sons pencil manufacturing plant in Newmarket, Ontario, January 1927. Photo: Toronto Star via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Pencil lines today and the ABB robots packing them

A modern line runs through the same steps. Graphite and clay are ground, pressed into strings, dried, fired and soaked in oil or wax. Incense cedar is cut into grooved slats, the leads are laid in, a second slat is glued on top, and the sandwich is cut into pencils that are painted and fitted with a ferrule and eraser. A Blackwing video, covered by Colossal on 4 September 2026, shows this for its pencils: cores and a wood shop in Japan, up to 10 coats of lacquer at a painting plant, then a proprietary machine in Stockton, California, that attaches each eraser before the pencils are inspected by hand and boxed by the dozen.

Rows of dark red pencils lying crosswise on two long conveyor tracks in a factory
Rows of dark red pencils lying crosswise on two long conveyor tracks in a factory

Painted pencils moving along a conveyor at the Voskresensk pencil factory, 2018. Photo: Fedsmir87 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Packing is where ABB robots have a published record in this trade. At Staedtler's main plant in Nuremberg, an IRB 360 FlexPicker went into service about a year after a Staedtler manager first saw the robot at Automatica 2004. A second cell followed in September 2015, with a FlexPicker rated for 1 kg and a reach of 1,130 mm. A camera finds the position and orientation of each pencil or eraser on the conveyor, and the robot picks it with a suction gripper and places it in a blister pack, up to 120 times a minute. According to ABB's case study, 98 percent of Staedtler's production now runs partly or fully automatically.

A delta robot with blue arms placing white and blue erasers into a row of clear plastic trays
A delta robot with blue arms placing white and blue erasers into a row of clear plastic trays

An ABB FlexPicker uses a suction gripper to place Staedtler erasers into blister packs at the Nuremberg plant. Photo: ABB

Staedtler chose the cell for its quick changeovers. It packs 145 different products, all stored in the robot controller, so an operator sets up a new job in about five minutes by picking it on a panel. The grippers can be swapped too, which lets the robot handle single items or pre-sorted sets, and the plant needs that flexibility in the back-to-school peak. Crayon makers use robots at an earlier step. At Crayola's plant in Easton, Pennsylvania, which makes 13 million crayons a day, a robotic arm lifts freshly moulded crayons onto a conveyor that carries them to the labelling machine.

Several delta robots above a conveyor placing red packs into rows of open cardboard boxes
Several delta robots above a conveyor placing red packs into rows of open cardboard boxes

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items into cases at high speed. Photo: ABB

Where pencil and crayon factories go next

The next robot jobs will probably sit further up the line. Between the machines that lay leads, glue slats, shape and paint pencils, parts still have to be fed, turned and moved. Vision-guided robots like the ones packing Staedtler's blisters could take on more of that handling. Cells of this kind are usually set up first in RobotStudio, and our conveyor tracking module covers how a robot follows parts on a moving belt. We know of no such project yet, so treat this as a possibility.

Close view of a machine bed with pale wooden slats holding rows of thin orange leads
Close view of a machine bed with pale wooden slats holding rows of thin orange leads

Leads laid in the grooves of wooden slats on a machine at the Voskresensk pencil factory, 2018. Photo: Fedsmir87 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Crayons and coloured pencils come in many colours and set sizes, which makes boxing them fiddly. A Crayola engineer told TIME for Kids that boxing was the step the company was working to improve that year, and workers were still loading crayons into the collator by hand. Small cobots such as GoFa or the single-arm YuMi could plausibly fill sets next to people, and palletizers such as the IRB 460 already stack cases at the end of many consumer goods lines.

A white cobot arm with a gripper standing on a wooden table with small boxes in an office space
A white cobot arm with a gripper standing on a wooden table with small boxes in an office space

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

Pencils are cheap, so a robot cell has to pay for itself through high volumes or quick changeovers, as Staedtler's did. Graphite and wood dust can foul grippers and camera lenses. Brands like Blackwing also sell craft, and they may keep hand inspection or short special-edition runs manual by choice. Factories will still need technicians who can program the cells and keep them clean, and our page on no-code robot programming shows one way to make that easier.

Black and white photo of a worker beside stacks of clamped wooden slats on a factory floor
Black and white photo of a worker beside stacks of clamped wooden slats on a factory floor

Glued pencil slat sandwiches held under pressure in clamps at a pencil factory in India. Photo: Photo Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com

Instagram