I guess I’d say that PRC Ticonderoga pencils are usually very straight - except on the rare occasion that they’re not. Taken all together, I’m not sure what to make of it. Not perfectly arrow-straight, mind you most rolled with a tiny bit of a wobble, but it’s extremely rare to find a pencil that rolls straighter than these ones. Now, on the other hand, the yellow dozen I picked up for this review were surprisingly straight. Chinese Ticonderoga pencils are almost always very straight, but every once in a while… I guess it’s also worth noting that there were only a couple of pencils in that 12-pack that were unusably bent I kept the other ten and have used them on the daily since. I almost threw it away but I decided to hang on to it since it was a little bit hilarious. The pencil shown below was taken from a different batch of cedar-cased, made-in-China Ticonderogas (the wood slats and cutting process are ostensibly the same, but with a different color lacquer applied). I mean severely - no, comically - warped. The roll test was encouraging for these specific examples, but it seems fair and necessary to mention that some of the Ticonderoga pencils I’ve picked up for personal use previously have been very warped. This is a calling card of the Ticonderoga pencil.
The ferrule, which retains a pink nub eraser, is part of the Ticonderoga’s trademark look: shiny green aluminum with a pair of yellow stripes. It looks slightly more mature in a more muted tone. The yellow of these pencils is sort of a “mustard” yellow, compared to the brighter “safety” yellow of some of it’s competitors (or even some of it’s predecessors), which I appreciate. The soft-hex barrel is coated in a classic yellow lacquer and imprinted with green foil text. If you’re reading a blog about office supplies, you probably know what the standard-issue Dixon Ticonderoga pencil looks like, but I’ll do my due diligence and describe it just in case. With that in mind, I expanded the original scope of this review to cover not only the “classic” yellow cedar-bodied pencils I obtained for review purposes, but also a handful of the basswood Ticonderoga Black pencils I happened to have on hand. So we will leave those out from this review and perhaps come back to them at a later date.Īlso, because Dixon makes Ticonderoga pencils in all sorts of variants, even within the same Chinese factory, simply specifying “Chinese Ticonderoga” could include any number of product lines with different lacquers, woods, barrel shapes, etc.
Spoiler alert: the Mexican variants are not identical to the Chinese ones. Ticonderoga pencils were previously made in the USA, but are now manufactured in Mexico and China. Now, I need to be specific, here: Today’s review is going to focus solely on pencils of Chinese origin. As an aspiring office-supply blogger with a particular fetish for pencils, what better place to start than a review of a benchmark pencil - nay, THE benchmark pencil - against which I can evaluate future test subjects? So let’s set that bar right now with the first Polar Pencil Pusher pencil review, a review of the most prolific pencil in North America: the Dixon Ticonderoga.
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