6 ms·

Making a pencil from scratch (2013)

93 points by cba9 11y ago

wpblogheader 11y ago
OMG!
signa11 11y ago
but what about inventing the universe first ? (http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/32952-if-you-wish-to-make-an-apple-pie-from-scratch http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/32952-if-you-wish-to-make-an...)
- Avshalom 11y ago
  Universes are trivial to invent you just need literally nothing and an unternity of nontime; they make themselves.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Hard to generalize from a sample size of one (about which we don't even know that much).
    - Mchl 11y ago
      In fact, it's really easy to generalize like that.
whoopdedo 11y ago
Related: "The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance". My favorite passage mentions Henry David Thoreau, who was a pencil maker by trade. Thoreau seemed to think of everything when he made a list of essential supplies for a twelve-day excursion into the Maine woods... But there is one object that Thoreau neglected to mention, one that he most certainly carried himself... without it he could not make his list. Without a pencil Thoreau would have been lost in the Maine woods. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0679734155/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0679734155/
winstonewert 11y ago
Did he ever publish the complete description of his method?
dstyrb 11y ago
This would be nicely accompanied by a photo-journal...
- djaychela 11y ago
  ... but it'd take him another lifetime to make the camera.
rmason 11y ago
I actually think that it could be a business building American made high quality pencils selling 10-20X the normal selling price. When I was a kid our family had a friend whom you couldn't know for ten minutes and he would show you his NASA pen that could write upside down. Apparently they're still selling them: https://jet.com/product/detail/94fb28fc091a45ccbd2aee90942ce9a0?jcmp=pla:ggl:office_supplies_a3:office_instruments_writing_drawing_instruments_pens_pencils_a3_other:na:na:na:na:na:2&code=PLA15&k_clickid=56a5acca-0ef1-4b58-b4a1-b17d800f2365&gclid=CL7tgpWtrckCFUSPHwodkzUOJw https://jet.com/product/detail/94fb28fc091a45ccbd2aee90942ce... The key would be superior marketing, having celebs or astronauts using your pencils. Look at what Shinola has done with watches, in fact Detroit would probably be the best place to start your pencil factory.
- sdrothrock 11y ago
  > having celebs or astronauts using your pencils I don't doubt that having astronauts using your pencil would be cool, but I thought I'd mention why astronauts needed a pen and not a pencil: graphite shavings/powder or eraser bits floating around and causing problems was a real worry.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  I'd be pretty surprised if you could make that sell. At least a pen can theoretically be an expensive construction that you're proud to own. A pencil is inherently disposable; they are destroyed as you use them. A pen just needs to be refilled.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > At least a pen can theoretically be an expensive construction that you're proud to own. A pencil is inherently disposable; they are destroyed as you use them. A pen just needs to be refilled. I was inclined to agree with you but then I reminded myself that pretty much everything around me, cheap or expensive, is designed on purpose to be disposable - to wear down quickly and be replaced with a new purchase. XXI century is an era of throwaway wealth. I can totally imagine someone selling very expensive pencils.
christinecha 11y ago
This process he is describing seems incredibly different from our everyday work, but it's really the same core of learning anything. Usually, you start with a top-level entrance (records for musicians, games for programmers, translations for language learners). Then, step by step, you go backwards in time. That album was composed of songs. These songs are composed of harmonies and melodies. Harmonies are composed of chords and voicings. ... on and on until you're dissecting the very sound waves themselves. This beautiful curiosity that exists in every deep learning experience is what sets apart the hobbyists from the geniuses.
afsina 11y ago
The novel "The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity"[1] from Russell Roberts contains the tale of surprising difficulty of production of the pencil and how it is the result of division of labor and free market's natural orchestration. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Everything-Possibility-Prosperity/dp/0691143358 http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Everything-Possibility-Prosp...
afsina 11y ago
Also reminded me `how to make a chicken sandwich in 6 months` https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE
anon0518 11y ago
Here is a later post from him on producing the graphite: http://gse-compliance.blogspot.se/2013/05/finding-graphite.html http://gse-compliance.blogspot.se/2013/05/finding-graphite.h... Also quite fascinating.
Animats 11y ago
Making a small-diameter pencil is hard, although you could probably make a big one, like a lumber pencil, by hand if you had a potter's tools.[1] The first step is mixing and grinding graphite and clay into a water-based paste. You could do that with a mortar and pestle if you had to. Then you have to dry out the paste, grind again, and add more water to make a soft paste. Then the hard step - extruding the paste into a rod. For a big-diameter "lead", you might be able to get away with rolling the paste into a rod by hand on a board, like working with dough. The rod then has to be dried and fired, like pottery. All this is a lot of work, but you'd make a batch of them at a time. The wood casing could be made by whittling, in two halves. Cut a notch for the "lead". Then glue, which probably has to be made by boiling down hide scraps or pine tar. Some early pencils were wrapped with leather thongs.[2] If you've made it to pottery, which most civilizations got early, you can get to a pencil. [1] http://www.generalpencil.com/how-a-pencil-is-made.html http://www.generalpencil.com/how-a-pencil-is-made.html [2] http://museumofeverydaylife.org/exhibitions-collections/current-exhibitions/visual-history-of-the-pencil http://museumofeverydaylife.org/exhibitions-collections/curr...
- pron 11y ago
  > if you had a potter's tools I think the article assumes that "from scratch" means that you have to make those, too (including the kiln), and including all the tools you need to mine the graphite.
  - davidiach 11y ago
    Well that's the whole point of the exercise. To show how even creating a simple thing like a pencil requires vast amounts of knowledge and expertise that cannot be acquired by a single individual. The way I like to frame this is by telling people to imagine they are strapped on an island with no clothes or tools. Let's assume there is fresh water and access to food (some fruits here and there and a decent amount of animals to hunt). Even if you have good knowledge about how our current world and economy works it would still be really challenging to create/build anything that has even a small degree of complexity. Let's say you believe using some metal would help you build some useful tools and you want to start mining for metal. How would you to it with your bare hands? You need tools for that, but what tools can you build with your bare hands? Even cutting down a tree to make something out of it would be really challenging. What would you use, a rock? Imagine cutting a tree using a rock. With no tools it's almost impossible to do anything. But this is the story of humanity, we started naked and without tools, and also with no knowledge about the world, we didn't know that we can make fire, nor how we could use it, we didn't know what to eat and what not to eat. We didn't know why we get sick or what a diseases is. We didn't know where we come from nor where we are heading and yet somehow, afters many years we now build rockets that go to space, algorithms that know what we want before we do, surgeries that make the blind see, devices that make the deaf hear and so much more. These humans are truly amazing.
huxley 11y ago
While Leonard Read's essay was reasonably well known among Chicago School economists, the concepts it described were made more famous by Milton Friedman's Pencil Allegory from the 1980s PBS series "Free to Choose": http://youtu.be/R5Gppi-O3a8 http://youtu.be/R5Gppi-O3a8 You can read a critical article on the back story to Friedman and Read's writings on pencils here: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/milton-friedmans-pencil/ http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/milton-friedmans-pencil/
alex95 11y ago
I feel this title is mis-leading. It's not really how to make a pencil from scratch, but more so the difficult of actually making a pencil entirely from scratch.
adam-a 11y ago
This is reminiscent of The Toaster Project[0] a really interesting book written by an art student as he attempts to build a toaster from scratch. Including visiting disused mines and making a plastic mould out of a tree trunk. [0] - http://www.thetoasterproject.org/page2.htm http://www.thetoasterproject.org/page2.htm
kragen 11y ago
So it seems like he didn't actually succeed in making the pencil from scratch, or if he did, he didn't blog about it. He did successfully make it to mining the graphite, which is more widely distributed than I would have thought: http://gse-compliance.blogspot.com.ar/2013/05/finding-graphite.html http://gse-compliance.blogspot.com.ar/2013/05/finding-graphi... Other related projects include: Thomas Thwaites making a toaster from scratch: http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/ http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/ That guy who made a ceramic-tile-roofed house with underfloor heating from scratch just posted about adding a kiln and firing more pots: https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/55/ https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/55/ This one is really "from scratch"; he starts the project (in a previous video) by making stone tools from rocks he found onsite. kd5bjo points out, "Don't forget the Gingery book series on how to build a machine shop!" They build a machine shop starting from scrap metal, starting with a charcoal foundry for casting aluminum and pot metal; there's now a US$75 hardbound edition of what was originally a seven-book series. http://gingerybooks.com/index.html http://gingerybooks.com/index.html Jeri Ellsworth demonstrating how to make integrated circuits at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM The Global Village Construction Set is working on a set of 50 machine designs capable of reproducing themselves: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio... Of course we all know about the RepRap project that spawned the current proliferation of 3-D printer companies. Project Oberon is one of a few different projects that has a whole self-hosting toolchain including CPU architecture, compiler, networking, GUI, filesystem, and applications in a form comprehensible by a single person; it's free software: https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.html https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.h...
- kd5bjo 11y ago
  Don't forget the Gingery book series on how to build a machine shop: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery
triangleman 11y ago
I thought this was going to be about the MIT educational programming language.

93 points by cba9 11y ago

OMG!

but what about inventing the universe first ? (http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/32952-if-you-wish-to-make-an-apple-pie-from-scratch http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/32952-if-you-wish-to-make-an...)

Avshalom 11y ago
Universes are trivial to invent you just need literally nothing and an unternity of nontime; they make themselves.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Hard to generalize from a sample size of one (about which we don't even know that much).
  - Mchl 11y ago
    In fact, it's really easy to generalize like that.

whoopdedo 11y ago

Related: "The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance". My favorite passage mentions Henry David Thoreau, who was a pencil maker by trade. Thoreau seemed to think of everything when he made a list of essential supplies for a twelve-day excursion into the Maine woods... But there is one object that Thoreau neglected to mention, one that he most certainly carried himself... without it he could not make his list. Without a pencil Thoreau would have been lost in the Maine woods. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0679734155/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0679734155/

winstonewert 11y ago

Did he ever publish the complete description of his method?

dstyrb 11y ago

This would be nicely accompanied by a photo-journal...

djaychela 11y ago
... but it'd take him another lifetime to make the camera.

rmason 11y ago

I actually think that it could be a business building American made high quality pencils selling 10-20X the normal selling price. When I was a kid our family had a friend whom you couldn't know for ten minutes and he would show you his NASA pen that could write upside down. Apparently they're still selling them: https://jet.com/product/detail/94fb28fc091a45ccbd2aee90942ce9a0?jcmp=pla:ggl:office_supplies_a3:office_instruments_writing_drawing_instruments_pens_pencils_a3_other:na:na:na:na:na:2&code=PLA15&k_clickid=56a5acca-0ef1-4b58-b4a1-b17d800f2365&gclid=CL7tgpWtrckCFUSPHwodkzUOJw https://jet.com/product/detail/94fb28fc091a45ccbd2aee90942ce... The key would be superior marketing, having celebs or astronauts using your pencils. Look at what Shinola has done with watches, in fact Detroit would probably be the best place to start your pencil factory.

sdrothrock 11y ago
> having celebs or astronauts using your pencils I don't doubt that having astronauts using your pencil would be cool, but I thought I'd mention why astronauts needed a pen and not a pencil: graphite shavings/powder or eraser bits floating around and causing problems was a real worry.
thaumasiotes 11y ago
I'd be pretty surprised if you could make that sell. At least a pen can theoretically be an expensive construction that you're proud to own. A pencil is inherently disposable; they are destroyed as you use them. A pen just needs to be refilled.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > At least a pen can theoretically be an expensive construction that you're proud to own. A pencil is inherently disposable; they are destroyed as you use them. A pen just needs to be refilled. I was inclined to agree with you but then I reminded myself that pretty much everything around me, cheap or expensive, is designed on purpose to be disposable - to wear down quickly and be replaced with a new purchase. XXI century is an era of throwaway wealth. I can totally imagine someone selling very expensive pencils.

christinecha 11y ago

This process he is describing seems incredibly different from our everyday work, but it's really the same core of learning anything. Usually, you start with a top-level entrance (records for musicians, games for programmers, translations for language learners). Then, step by step, you go backwards in time. That album was composed of songs. These songs are composed of harmonies and melodies. Harmonies are composed of chords and voicings. ... on and on until you're dissecting the very sound waves themselves. This beautiful curiosity that exists in every deep learning experience is what sets apart the hobbyists from the geniuses.

afsina 11y ago

The novel "The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity"[1] from Russell Roberts contains the tale of surprising difficulty of production of the pencil and how it is the result of division of labor and free market's natural orchestration. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Everything-Possibility-Prosperity/dp/0691143358 http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Everything-Possibility-Prosp...

afsina 11y ago

Also reminded me `how to make a chicken sandwich in 6 months` https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE

anon0518 11y ago

Here is a later post from him on producing the graphite: http://gse-compliance.blogspot.se/2013/05/finding-graphite.html http://gse-compliance.blogspot.se/2013/05/finding-graphite.h... Also quite fascinating.

Animats 11y ago

Making a small-diameter pencil is hard, although you could probably make a big one, like a lumber pencil, by hand if you had a potter's tools.[1] The first step is mixing and grinding graphite and clay into a water-based paste. You could do that with a mortar and pestle if you had to. Then you have to dry out the paste, grind again, and add more water to make a soft paste. Then the hard step - extruding the paste into a rod. For a big-diameter "lead", you might be able to get away with rolling the paste into a rod by hand on a board, like working with dough. The rod then has to be dried and fired, like pottery. All this is a lot of work, but you'd make a batch of them at a time. The wood casing could be made by whittling, in two halves. Cut a notch for the "lead". Then glue, which probably has to be made by boiling down hide scraps or pine tar. Some early pencils were wrapped with leather thongs.[2] If you've made it to pottery, which most civilizations got early, you can get to a pencil. [1] http://www.generalpencil.com/how-a-pencil-is-made.html http://www.generalpencil.com/how-a-pencil-is-made.html [2] http://museumofeverydaylife.org/exhibitions-collections/current-exhibitions/visual-history-of-the-pencil http://museumofeverydaylife.org/exhibitions-collections/curr...

pron 11y ago
> if you had a potter's tools I think the article assumes that "from scratch" means that you have to make those, too (including the kiln), and including all the tools you need to mine the graphite.
- davidiach 11y ago
  Well that's the whole point of the exercise. To show how even creating a simple thing like a pencil requires vast amounts of knowledge and expertise that cannot be acquired by a single individual. The way I like to frame this is by telling people to imagine they are strapped on an island with no clothes or tools. Let's assume there is fresh water and access to food (some fruits here and there and a decent amount of animals to hunt). Even if you have good knowledge about how our current world and economy works it would still be really challenging to create/build anything that has even a small degree of complexity. Let's say you believe using some metal would help you build some useful tools and you want to start mining for metal. How would you to it with your bare hands? You need tools for that, but what tools can you build with your bare hands? Even cutting down a tree to make something out of it would be really challenging. What would you use, a rock? Imagine cutting a tree using a rock. With no tools it's almost impossible to do anything. But this is the story of humanity, we started naked and without tools, and also with no knowledge about the world, we didn't know that we can make fire, nor how we could use it, we didn't know what to eat and what not to eat. We didn't know why we get sick or what a diseases is. We didn't know where we come from nor where we are heading and yet somehow, afters many years we now build rockets that go to space, algorithms that know what we want before we do, surgeries that make the blind see, devices that make the deaf hear and so much more. These humans are truly amazing.

huxley 11y ago

While Leonard Read's essay was reasonably well known among Chicago School economists, the concepts it described were made more famous by Milton Friedman's Pencil Allegory from the 1980s PBS series "Free to Choose": http://youtu.be/R5Gppi-O3a8 http://youtu.be/R5Gppi-O3a8 You can read a critical article on the back story to Friedman and Read's writings on pencils here: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/milton-friedmans-pencil/ http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/milton-friedmans-pencil/

alex95 11y ago

I feel this title is mis-leading. It's not really how to make a pencil from scratch, but more so the difficult of actually making a pencil entirely from scratch.

adam-a 11y ago

This is reminiscent of The Toaster Project[0] a really interesting book written by an art student as he attempts to build a toaster from scratch. Including visiting disused mines and making a plastic mould out of a tree trunk. [0] - http://www.thetoasterproject.org/page2.htm http://www.thetoasterproject.org/page2.htm

kragen 11y ago

So it seems like he didn't actually succeed in making the pencil from scratch, or if he did, he didn't blog about it. He did successfully make it to mining the graphite, which is more widely distributed than I would have thought: http://gse-compliance.blogspot.com.ar/2013/05/finding-graphite.html http://gse-compliance.blogspot.com.ar/2013/05/finding-graphi... Other related projects include: Thomas Thwaites making a toaster from scratch: http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/ http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/ That guy who made a ceramic-tile-roofed house with underfloor heating from scratch just posted about adding a kiln and firing more pots: https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/55/ https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/55/ This one is really "from scratch"; he starts the project (in a previous video) by making stone tools from rocks he found onsite. kd5bjo points out, "Don't forget the Gingery book series on how to build a machine shop!" They build a machine shop starting from scrap metal, starting with a charcoal foundry for casting aluminum and pot metal; there's now a US$75 hardbound edition of what was originally a seven-book series. http://gingerybooks.com/index.html http://gingerybooks.com/index.html Jeri Ellsworth demonstrating how to make integrated circuits at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM The Global Village Construction Set is working on a set of 50 machine designs capable of reproducing themselves: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio... Of course we all know about the RepRap project that spawned the current proliferation of 3-D printer companies. Project Oberon is one of a few different projects that has a whole self-hosting toolchain including CPU architecture, compiler, networking, GUI, filesystem, and applications in a form comprehensible by a single person; it's free software: https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.html https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.h...

kd5bjo 11y ago
Don't forget the Gingery book series on how to build a machine shop: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery

triangleman 11y ago

I thought this was going to be about the MIT educational programming language.