Plumbago Atelier · Instrument No. 001
The pencil.
Incense cedar, kiln-fired graphite, six facets, one grade — the exact centre of the scale.
3D is unavailable in this browser, so the instrument appears as a line drawing. Everything below still reads.
Fig. 01 — The point
Cut to twenty-two degrees.
A cone of incense cedar and graphite, renewable with a twist for the life of the instrument.
Grade HB — H for hard, B for black. The centre of the scale.
Fig. 02 — Assembly
What it is.
Two slats of cedar, grooved and glued around a fired core, milled to six facets, capped in brass and rubber. That is the entire architecture.
Handcrafted by machines.
- Erasernatural rubber compound
- Ferrulenickel-plated brass, double-crimped
- Barreltwo incense-cedar slats, grooved
- Coregraphite + kaolin clay · Ø 2.0 mm · HB
Materials
Everything in it, disclosed.
Two working materials, one wood, and one famous absence.
01
Graphite
A crystalline allotrope of carbon — the same element as diamond, arranged instead in sheets that shear at a touch. A pencil writes by leaving a trail of itself behind. Graphite measures 1 to 2 on the Mohs scale; diamond measures 10. Hardness was never the point.
02
Clay
Kaolin, blended with the graphite and kiln-fired. More clay makes a harder, lighter line; more graphite, a softer, darker one. Nicolas-Jacques Conté worked out the method in 1795, when war cut France off from English graphite. The grading scale still runs on his ratio.
03
Incense cedar
Calocedrus decurrens. Straight-grained, soft enough to sharpen cleanly, and the reason a freshly cut pencil smells the way it does.
04
Lead
None. Graphite surfaced at Borrowdale, England, in the fifteen-hundreds and was taken for lead ore; the name stuck, but the metal was never there. The deposit was pure enough to saw into sticks, and an industry grew around casing them in wood.
Specification
Instrument No. 001
| Grade | HB |
|---|---|
| Core | Graphite and kaolin clay, kiln-fired, Ø 2.0 mm |
| Barrel | Incense cedar, two slats, six facets |
| Finish | Satin lacquer, black, three coats |
| Imprint | Foil, silver |
| Ferrule | Brass, nickel-plated, double-crimped |
| Eraser | Natural rubber compound |
| Length | 175 mm, new |
| Width | 7.4 mm across flats |
| Mass | 6 g, new |
| Words per instrument | Disputed.* |
* A figure near 45,000 words is widely repeated. To our knowledge no one has verified it, and we did not volunteer.
No. 001 · Edition of many
$4
The price includes the pencil.