The next stage was to glue the graphite pieces into the pencil grooves. Sometimes the pieces had to be rubbed down to fit and up to four might be needed to create a single pencil. Any surplus graphite was simply scraped away. (This was a messy process and the workers looked like chimney sweeps by the end of the day!)

A further piece of wood was then glued on top and several of these pencil ‘blocks’ were clamped together and left to dry. Each was then passed through a machine with a revolving cutter to create the familiar round pencil barrel.