Powering the Production of Classroom Essentials

It's that time of year again. The end of Summer is right around the corner and it's time to get ready to go back to school! Millions of parents, students, and teachers head down the school supply aisles where we see stacks of fresh notebooks, sharp graphite pencils, and the classic pink erasers.

While these items are the typical classroom essentials, they represent the efforts of various types of machinery in industrial operations across the world. Manufacturers in the forestry and paper industries have a lot to get ready for this season. But where can you find Sumitomo gearboxes in these processes?

One of the first supplies people think of when it comes to school supplies is probably paper. From notebooks to folders and even sticky notes, the production of paper is essential for the upcoming school year! From raw timber to a ruled composition book, paper converting relies on massive continuous roll processing. That's where you'll likely find our Hansen P4 Multistage to be the strength for those types of applications.

Wood chips are digested into a pulp slurry to separate cellulose fibers from lignin, then sprayed onto a high-speed moving wire mesh to drain water and form a wet web. Heavy press rollers squeeze out remaining moisture before steam-heated cylinders dry the sheet completely. Finally, steel rollers compress and smooth the paper surface to a precise thickness before it is wound onto master rolls. Click here to learn more about our offerings for the Pulp and Paper industry.

If paper isn't the top of your back-to-school supply list, then pencils definitely are. The#2 pencil looks like a simple stick of wood, but it’s actually the result of a multi-part assembly process. With applications like industrial milling saws and high-speed shaping machines to create the pencils, operations need products like our Cyclo® 6000 and Paramax® 9000 to support their operations in the long run.

The lead is made from finely ground graphite and clay mixed into a slurry, extruded into rods, and kiln fired. Meanwhile, soft wood slats are grooved, glued, and sandwiched around the leads under high pressure. High-speed machinery then cuts the bonded block into individual pencils, which are sanded, lacquered, stamped, and fitted with an aluminum ferrule and eraser. Click here to learn more about our offerings for Forestry and Wood Product production.