That's false, I know exactly how to make a pencil. I know because I look it up in case I'm mysteriously transported back to the Roman Empire times.

The hard part is finding graphite (somewhere in Wales? looks like lead, but softer and leaves traces on sheep's wool). Then suitable clay to make the lead. Then some kind of glue to glue the two parts of the pencil (boil some bones and cartilages?).

What about the eraser? What about the machine that mills the pumice that goes in the eraser? What about the yellow paint? Are you gonna go with cadmium pigment or something that won’t kill children, and if so, what? How to you plan to refine the bauxite ore to make the aluminum ferrule that attaches the eraser to the pencil? Were you aware that they are aluminum, or called ferrules? What about the machine that makes the pierced holes through the ferrule that retains the eraser?

I know a shitload of trivia about both manufacturing and pencils. But I could not possibly recreate all the processes needed to manufacture a pencil.

I learned a lot about pencils from this article. It is also applicable to jet engines.

http://www.rstengineering.com/rst/articles/tsodpencil.pdf

The task isn't "make something that you could plausibly call a pencil". It's "understand every step of how a modern pencil is produced".