light colored pencils

[James Meloan]

what pencils do you all use for marking your darker woods? Straining my eyes looking for the grey/black line on darker woods gets less fun as the years go on. I've tried a few varieties of colored pencils but none seem to mark that well on wood. Grease pencils are ok for labeling but not for marking a cut line (for me anyhow).

[Waddy Thomson]

Quilters pencils from sewing stores or big hobby stores like Hobby Lobby or Michaels. The lead is soft, but it's silver, and easy to see on dark woods. They sharpen best with hand sharpeners vs crank ones.

[Mark Swanson]

I have a pack of welding pencils from a welding equipment supplier. They are silver as well and sound like the same thing Waddy mentions.

[Craig Bumgarner]

I use little bits of soapstone that welders use on steel.

[Alan Carruth]

Gel pens can work well, making a narrow line that shows up. Silver ones are pretty good, and seem fairly reliable. The main issue with them is that they rend to reflect the light mostly in one direction, which means it might not show up when you're sawing to a line on and band saw. White ones are even better, since they reflect in all directions, but they sometimes stop working for no apparent reason. All gel pens seem to work best on a 'high energy' surface; one that has been sanded or scraped recently.

I keep thinking that it would make sense to borrow a technique from machinists. They will color a surface with dye (a felt tip pen works, too), and then scratch lines in it to mark a cut line or center a hole. I suspect you could do the same by making a wide mark with a China marker and then scribing the real line on that. I haven't tried it yet, though.

[Brian Evans]

I have a marking knife that I use if I want any decent accuracy. I also use a plain pencil and manipulate a light to get it to shine for me.

[David King]

White watercolor pencils from your art store, the more you spend the better the pigment. I like the silver paint pens but had a bad experience with open grain woods like wenge soaking up pigment that couldn't get cleaned out later.

[Kerry Werry]

I use welders pencils as well they are as said soft but work.. i also found some yellow 0.5mm mechanical pencil leads on Amazon..

Kerry

I have a pack of welding pencils from a welding equipment supplier. They are silver as well and sound like the same thing Waddy mentions.

[Joel Nowland]

James

I found these Sewline brand white ceramic leads for a mechanical pencil for fabric marking that work very well. They are a bit more brittle than standard leads.