Wood for 18 billion pencils
- Since I was a kid, I liked pencils. To draw, and because it couldn't be otherwise, we only had a pencil and a row pen. The pen was loaded with ink for each stroke to be performed… Loosening the screw of the extreme pen, the thick line, tight thin. By the time you took us, the rhotrine and all the lines of the same thickness appeared. But the pencil was a world.
It was from home the carpenter pencil used by my father in the sawmill; I especially don't know how to say it: dictionaries say oval, oval and vulgar. School pencils were hexagons or round. Copy or indelible round and normal hexagons. The latter also paint on the bust and are made not to lose the writing.
For me, the pencil wood was curious. The bite of the child's back tip was not surprising, and by sharpening it on the tap, it freed creative dependency. Cedar was a family of smell that I've been living all my life on a pituitary membrane, now I live surrounded by cedar wood.
Soon this addiction started working: I started collecting pencils. At first I would gather all those around me and then I looked and continued searching. More dependent. I met a lot, I have boxes and a plea of half full fanega... I have it very far, but Aaron Bartholmey, with his 69,255 pencils of the Guinnes record.
Pencils also have a rich and beautiful geology. Her soul is graphite but mixed with caolina. This mixture heats up to more than 800 degrees, even for brushing, to write gently. According to the mixture, pencils have a hardness scale: the hardest is 9H and the softest 9B, in center F and HB, with 20 levels. If you have eraser gum on your head, the backing foil is made of aluminum from bauxite and the eraser rubber mixture of stone foam and sulfur.
I, however, am interested in wood. The cedars we know, the true cedars, those of Atlas (Cedrus atlantica), those of Lebanon (Cedrus lebanese) and those of Himalaya (Cedrus deodora), are not used for pencils. Other conifers with similar odor are the most commonly used. Three are the main characteristics required of wood for pencils: soft, resistant and sharpened easy and clean. The giant tuya (Thuja plicata), the Brazilian pine (Araucaria angustifolia), the Caribbean pine (Pinus caribaea “Hondurensis”) and especially the insect cedar (Calocedrus decurrens), as well as the school tree (Alstonia scholaris), the gijicaricamiche (Delicarichia). The latter are used to make cheap wooden pencils outside the coniferous people’s crew. Because it won’t be easy to get enough wood to make 18 billion pencils a year…
These include those carried out by Sprout. At the back end they carry a capsule where there are plant seeds. When the sharpened pencil is a tiki that cannot be held between the fingers, it gets upside down and plants form: basil, parsley, cilantro, thyme, poppy, carnation, etc. Among them, the fir, with the sand of a pencil, will form a fir that will then give wood to make 180,000 pencils.
