Thanks everyone for a wonderful Pencil Month! Wrapping it up today with some of my rusty chemistry knowledge and attempt to enlighten you as to how pencils work on a chemical level.
Here are the links to information I used to put this video together:
Basic info about graphite
SEM image of the surface of paper
Basic info about pencils
Basic info about erasers
Patent for method of preparing pencil cores
And here is the step-by-step process that is used to put pencil cores into the wooden slats