Silly question about pencil materials

[Dragonmaster Lou]

This has been something that has been bugging me since I was a kid.

Now, I always had whatever wooden pencils were on sale at any given time as a kid, so I was never picky. However, I noticed that there were often two kinds of "wood" (yes, the quotes are important) that the pencils were made of. One was definitely like real wood in the way it sharpened, smelled, etc. The other, for lack of a better term, seemed plasticky -- the shavings were always smoother than real wood, the leads somehow seemed to write worse, etc. Anyway, I hated these relative to the more wooden ones. Any ideas on what this plasticky material was?

[timbre70]

Simulated wood. Real wood is very expensive now.😊
Where I am living, train sleepers have been replaced by concrete sleepers, garden benches are either wrought iron or fitted with simulated woods.

[dam]

All the pencils I buy are made of real wood. They are mostly made of incense-cedar and the cheaper ones are made of basswood. Cheap economy pencils like the crappy Dixon no. 2 are made of wood, if we are to believe the packaging, but I think it's made of a variety of throwaway wood products, shaving, chips, which are mixed in with plastic as a sort of bonding agent. There are probably more knowledgeable people here who can give you the exact recipe!

[Wile E Coyote]

pencils.com grasshopper

[Dragonmaster Lou]

Thanks for the info, all of you. I suspect it probably was some sort of wood scraps combined with a bonding agent, and they probably were Dixon #2s.