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How pencils are made in a Japanese factory [video]

youtube.com

by DemiGuru·3y ago·59 comments·view on hn ↗

59 comments

Found some of their pencils on Amazon. A pack of 14 standard HB pencils is ¥565 ($3.94) [1]. I'm kind of tempted to get this set of colored pencils after watching the video [2]. Looks like their best selling product is a mechanical pencil that comes with a 2mm thick graphite core that can be sharpened into a point [3]... never seen that before and actually kind of a cool idea.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B00CB700UK/

[2] https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B00AHA3BGS/

[3] https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B005N3NQHS/

Lead holders are quite common if you venture into an art supply store. I prefer them to normal pencils because you have the full length pencil even when the lead is tiny.

These ones look very nice though.

They also were once common for manual drafting.

I have several and in my engineering and drafting education were referred to as drafting pencils. They have that cool whirly sharpener too.

One of fmy favorite holdovers from the old world is that you can still buy them, along with a few other basic hand drafting tools from office supply stores like office depot. Stadler is one of the big brands.

Fun tidbit, the Japenese word for a mechanical pencil is two english loan words, Sharp Pencil ( シャープペンシル )

And apparently the creator of the "Ever-Ready Sharp Pencil" in Japan went on to found the electonics company "Sharp", whose name is derived from the pencil:

> The mechanical pencil became successful in Japan with some improvements in 1915 by Tokuji Hayakawa, a metalworker who had just finished his apprenticeship. It was introduced as the "Ever-Ready Sharp Pencil". Success was not immediate since the metal shaft—essential for the pencil's long life—was unfamiliar to users. The Ever-Ready Sharp began selling in huge numbers after a company from Tokyo and Osaka made large orders. Later, Tokuji Hayakawa's company got its name from that pencil: Sharp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_pencil

Surprisingly not available on jetpens !

Kitaboshi Pencil Factory is within cycling distance from my home in Katsushika ward. This news item makes me so happy! You don't see things from your neighborhood make to the trending HN section everyday :)

It's been ~40 years, but this brings back a delightful memory of being bored in middle school, and drawing out a design for a pencil factory.

I don't remember all the details, but their design is probably a little better.

Our story starts with Hakomiru, a man who has studied diligently all his life in the art of pencil-making. He first apprenticed with his grandfather 58 years ago, and inherited the the family tradition several decades later. Hakomiru will walk 11,000 kilometers in the coming year, exploring forests and woods looking for the perfect lumber for his pencils. Not just any wood will do. Once a tree is selected and a price negotiated with the owner, the process of felling this tree will begin. Delicate wood saws are employed, no axes as these impact on the tree stump may subtly alter the grain. These saws cost upwards of $40,000 and must not be mistreated! Our artisan Hakomiru will spend no fewer than 16 days sawing it at exactly 67cm above the point at which the tree meets the soil. As the saw approaches the point at which the timber may start to fall on its own, Hakomiru hurries to retrieve it so that it isn't twisted in the felling. The saw will not be ready to fell another tree until it has been polished by a master sawblade polisher, a job that can take up to 18 months! Next, Hakomiru loads the log onto a traditional pencilmaster's log-hauling cart, which he and his assistants will pull by hand into town. From there, it will be loaded onto one of Japan's 296 maglev high-speed trains, where it will take another 17 minutes before it arrives in his workshop on the other side of Japan. Hakomiru is very excited, this may be the best log he has ever harvested and well worth the $190,000 price tag. But that is still unknown, and will be until he can peel the bark in a grueling 30 month ordeal. Should things turn out well, the log can then begin air drying. A translator speaks: "We never let the lumber air dry less than 22 years, and with luck I will live to see this one ready for the next phase, since I will only be 94 years of age at that point!"

I always wonder, when I see videos like this: who creates the system of little machines that nudge, shove and knock items from one step to the next?

What's their job called? And when that is your job, can you just go into any factory and come up with the answer – or do you specialise in a certain field? And all the parts you use commodity, or are they specific to pencil making, for example?

If anyone has any light to shed on this field of work I'd be interested to learn more.

> who creates the system of little machines that nudge, shove and knock items from one step to the next?

Industry automation companies. A big part of the German Mittelstand - a ton of companies of all sizes, from small ventures like HEITEC over mid-sized like KUKA (the robotics guys that the German government in all its ignorance tolerated to be bought up by China) to giant megacorps like Siemens.

Particularly the small shops aren't really known, not even here in Germany... but worldwide, out of ~3.400 businesses classified as "hidden champions" aka market leaders in their niche worldwide, Germany has 1.573 such companies, surpassing everyone including the US worldwide by far [1].

Think of it like YKK from Japan, the undisputed champion in high quality zippers, just even less known to the general public... such machines that nudge, shove and knock items, each of them is made by a dedicated German company specializing in a specific type of machine, made with parts made by another dedicated German company. Yes, conglomerates could gobble all of that up and use advantages of vertical scaling, but they're all owned by the founder families and their descendants, in many cases across many generations. They won't ever sell out or share their knowledge, and so they remain in business because they have ironed out all kinks and wrinkles in their specialty machines over decades if not centuries - and upstart competitors have to start from scratch. On top of that, their staff is extremely loyal, you can't just go and poach them and their knowledge.

[1] https://www.iwd.de/artikel/hidden-champions-die-starken-aus-...

Those are production engineers.

Curiously if you dig into the whole Toyota Production System/Kanban/JIT literature you encounter a lot of this, especially the work of Shigeo Shingo who came up with the mistake proofing/zero defects/single minute exchange of die ideas. Most of the actual tactics in use are shockingly simple, but it is the ability to move the needle to total reliability that makes the difference.

I reckon that is called material flow and logistics and is an area inside mechanical engineering schools. I worked in the past for companies doing just that in every size from a pencil to parts as big as a car.

In a similar vein, but for different products, but also with much more focus on the "back end" of the process:

https://youtu.be/GDzBE6vz5r0?si=UfbbEIveujVciaTs

I visited the Caran d'Ache [1] factory in Geneva a few years back, it's very similar [2]. Except they have a system to be sure all the pencils are in the same position in the box, with the name on top. It's a system with a camera and shape recognition, used for high end sets.

[1] https://www.carandache.com/ch/en/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rki-EDU3cUg

It is not immediately obvious, but the video has subtitles explaining the whole process.

I wouldn't say it's exactly the "whole" process.

The same video without ads: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Lk_57TP6RFk

a few observations:

- I didn't see any ads (uBlock origin)

- this video looks lower quality

The yewtu.be link is to one of several servers running Invidious, an open source alternative front-end to YouTube.

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

> this video looks lower quality

Pretty odd given it's still YouTube backend

Looks like cedar - it must smell amazing in there.

The caption mentions it is indeed cedar.

You can tell it’s cedar because of the way it is!

Shallow depth of field looks really cool when the subject is actually in focus, but just looks like crap when nothing is in focus. Lots of close ups of random parts of machinery that is not obvious what so ever is the intent of what's supposed to be shown. It was almost a cool video.

I’m guessing they did that deliberately to hide some of their trade secrets.

My guess too, really common in factory tours. Years of development can go into tooling, it's a huge asset.

Surprisingly manual intervention seems to be required

I've done some factory automation. Something I learned is that automating the last 20% of the process takes 80% of the work. Removing the last remaining manual processes gets exponentially harder and more costly.

And often in doing this last 20% we come across the fact that the human portion of the assy process does so much more than it seems on the surface. Things like predicting and correcting for errors, keeping things going that aren't immediately obvious.

My guess is it is probably cheaper than fully automating the process with machines.

It is, or rather they may not have enough production volume to justify full automation. Buying the machinery and setting it up to automate a production line only makes sense when your volumes are massive.

I didn’t watch the video but $DAYJOB is a consumer goods company that manufactures, some fully automated some with human operators.

wood quality is quite variable so it's to be expected.

https://goo.gl/maps/hRm71TwRbSBEdop76 … east Tokyo city, within the 23 wards.