Drawing Pencil Set

Details

Graphite drawing pencils in cedar, hexagonal, with the core glued to both wood halves along its full length. Three things about this category deserve saying rather than glossing. The first is the one worth correcting outright: there is no lead in a pencil and there never was. The core is graphite and clay, roughly 68 percent graphite, 26 percent clay and 6 percent wax at HB, with the clay falling and the graphite rising as the grade softens. The word lead survives from a Roman misidentification of a graphite seam, and the actual lead in pencils was in the yellow lacquer, which is why pencils have been tested for it for a century. The second is that the HB scale is not a standard. There is no specification anywhere that makes one maker's 2B the same darkness as another's, so a set bought to match an old one will not match. What can be held is our own scale, measured. The third is that soft grades break, and any set claiming otherwise is either not soft or not honest.

• Grades are held to a measured reflectance step between adjacent grades, checked on a drawn swatch per lot. Across makers there is no such standard and we are not going to imply one exists
• Core is graphite, clay and wax, glued to both halves along the whole length, so a dropped pencil does not shatter inside the wood and then step back in the sharpener
• Core centred within 0.15 mm, checked on a cut section, which is what stops a pencil sharpening to a wedge
• Soft grades are fragile by their nature. A 8B or 9B core is mostly graphite and it will break if the pencil is dropped point down on a stone floor. That is physics, not a defect
• Heavy metals on both lacquer and core to the migration limits in IS 9873 (Part 3), because drawing pencils are chewed as readily as school ones
• Lacquer is water-based, matt, with no lead chromate and no added lead
• Wood is cedar from a plantation source with the mill's chain-of-custody paper travelling with each lot. No FSC claim is made, because our lots are not FSC chain-of-custody certified end to end and printing that logo without it defeats the point of the scheme
• The grade is printed twice: at the ferrule end and again 40 mm from the tip. A grade printed only at the end disappears the moment the pencil is short, which is exactly when you most need to know which one you are holding
• Set of 6 is 2H, HB, 2B, 4B, 6B, 8B. Set of 12 is 4H, 3H, 2H, H, HB, B, 2B, 3B, 4B, 5B, 6B, 8B. Set of 18 adds 6H, 5H, F, 7B, 9B, 10B
• Rs 53.30 a pencil at six, Rs 43.30 at twelve, Rs 40 at eighteen. The larger sets are cheaper per pencil because the tooling cost is spread, not because the pencils differ