how to make charcoal pencils

Don't want to pay for expensive charcoal pencils?
Learn how to make your own with a cheap, easy way.
These pencils in my opinion are as good as the ones you buy.

Step 1 Build a fire

Now you need to build a fire.
1. Take some tinder and light it,
2. Put small pieces of wood on the lit tinder.
3.Gradually add bigger pieces of wood.
4.Wait for the fire to build up.

Your fire is made =).

Comments

[jilllindseyw]

 do you have any suggestion on how to get darker or lighter charcoal.

[hruodger]

As far as I know, the "color" of the charcoal depends on two factors: the first, is the type of wood (cedar, mahogany, oak, pine, etc), because of the inherent grade of natural compression the wood has, and the inherent chemical compounds content in the wood (alcohol, proteins, metals, etc), hence the hardness of the wood (just like graphite leads); the second factor is the "cooking time", proportional to the amount of material that has been subject to pyrolysis process.

I suppose you should do some previous tests to determine which one is darker or lighter.

Hope my answer helps you.

[mousewrites]

This type of charcoalis what is referred to as "vine" charcoal. Darker charcoalis generally Compressed charcoal. Here's a Wikipedia article on both.

Basically, to get darker charcoal, you take the vine, grind it up, and compress it with a binder. Not sure what binder you would use for home use, but i'm interested in trying it.

Great instructable, btw!

[nightninja87]

could you use a little clay to bind it?

[GlueyMcGee]

yes you could

[GlueyMcGee]

 if by lighter or darker in color when you stroke then give a different pressure to the pencil but if you mean in general, i think experimenting with different kinds of woods would be best. I have only tried maple and that works great but i haven't tried any other kinds of wood.

[jilllindseyw]

 lol I understand how to get a different tone from pressure but im talking about the actual color of the charcoal I'll try different types of wood as well. Thanks for the thorough answer its much appreciated keep up with the awesome Instructables good sir. 

[GlueyMcGee]

 And if you rreally wanted to change the color, then you could maybe grind up the charcoal and mix it up with some pigment and add wax as a binder...That would make conté crayons though :P

[GeekyGirl1103]

GAAAAASP.

I LOVE to draw with charcoal, but I'm always too broke to buy some. Thank you SO much.

[The Jamalam]

take knex out of the keywords, it is irrelavent

[GlueyMcGee]

so..

[The Jamalam]

well, put it this way, why is it under knex in the first place?and also, how is it relevant in any way??

[GlueyMcGee]

i caan put any keywords i want, why would it have to be relevant

[lawizeg]

You're obviously doing it to get more attention. Instead of messing up the search engine, you should make an Instructable that will get attention for what it's worth.

_{also, this is very bad for the environment. the smoke, the fire, ugh.}

[nutsandbolts_64]

lol, use pyrolisis

[GlueyMcGee]

 lol.

and lawizeg, don't you think that the millions of cars on the road and the millions of cows and the smoke created by factories is worst than what im doing? Thats what i thought.

[nutsandbolts_64]

Besides, the fuel is renewable!

[The Jamalam]

because they are the laws of this site. And you still haven't answered my questions

[The Jamalam]

that is the point of keywords! They are relavent to the instructable so that when you search for any of them, it comes up!

[GlueyMcGee]

i know, but even iif its not relevant, it comes up while youre searching for it

[The Jamalam]

i know, but this would clutter up the k'nex search menu, and we would not want that. Someone might think this is knex, only to find it's not, and have to go back, wasting maybe valuable time. Could you do that to someone?

[GlueyMcGee]

(removed by author or community request)

[lawizeg]

You one of those people that doesn't care, and that noone likes because of that. that guy that takes the nacho with the most cheese because he "felt like it".

[GlueyMcGee]

umm i don't care and why? because who cares about knex?! i dont usuallly go on instructables and i only posted this to help others and people who find this in their knex search just have to ignore this unless they are interested and obviously people like you only came to see this because they have nothing to do and like wasting their time by posting USeLESS posts.

[The Jamalam]

i care about knex

[The Jamalam]

but, you're breaking site rules. I could always tell ewilhelm to ban you...

[GlueyMcGee]

umm ok? but im still not removing it. now youre just wasting your time and mine.

[The Jamalam]

you could have just removed it and saved me he bother

[GlueyMcGee]

you could save yourself the bother buy stopping posting

[The Jamalam]

or maybe you could have

[GlueyMcGee]

im just goonna stop responding to these useless posts

[The Jamalam]

okay, fine with me

[zascecs]

Hey, this is actually a pretty good idea; I don't see why people are rating this instructable so badly...

[LiaVivas]

Hey! great to know about this, thanks! It reminded me of an article I read a litlle while ago about this pencils made out of old newspapers. So I was thinking that if you are into recycling that can be an alternative to the cloth under the resin. Although in those pencils they didn´t use resin just a adhesive solution resistant to water (of the sweat from the hands I suppousse). The thing would be to know if this homemade charcoals are strong enough to resist the process, they seem to be fragile. I´ll see if I can try this but if you do, let me know!

[GlueyMcGee]

they are pretty brittle so if you do that you'll really have to be careful not to break it

[googbar]

i was told that the best pencils come from grape vines... i guess if you wrap the charcoal with a pice of cloth and epoxy / polyester resin (fiberglass stuff) you can make a fairly hard and decent pencil, sharpenable too, with those big mouthed sharpeners.

[GlueyMcGee]

hmm...i didn't know that...it would probably works (i didnt know that the best pencils came frome grape vines)

[googbar]

I'm not very sure of this too, but my guess is that any decent hardwood will make good pencils, like the stuff you guys have in America, like oak, osage, redwood, mulberry, apple, cherry etc etc etc... :D Hey, try the epoxy/resin thing and tell us if that works!

[GlueyMcGee]

hardwood does make the best pencils (maybe apart from grape vines)...i probably wont try the epoxy/resin thing cus...well, 1: i don't know where to fand these and 2: thats pretty much it. 3: its winter (wel...officially its winter on december 21st but theres already a foot of snow here so i say its winter :)) now so i can't go biking long distances to get some.

[googbar]

Keep it as homework, once the snow melts ;-) However, the epoxy resin you can get even at wal mart (look at tool/paint department) you'll need araldite stuff, like those mix and apply. The polyester resin is sold at paint stores, specially car body work ones and also at marinas, cause many boats are actually made and repaired with it. Looks like you're a handy young man, so I strongly suggest you learn how to work these materials, even with no relation to your pencils, cause you can make lots of things out of epoxy and resin, ok? Take care however, and I don't know about the resin, where you live, but they won't sell it for minors here, cause sadly many smell the stuff as a drug... :-(