r/PenProject

Hi everyone,

Some projects take us an awfully long time to finish - much longer than we would like!

One of them is the Ebonite Pen (Namur) that we showed you a year ago (!!) at the October Pen Show. We also had it shortlisted for the Spotlight Awards a few weeks ago. I have received quite a few messages asking about it since.

What started as a prototype eventually turned into a production Ebonite pen. The quantities are very small, as we are limited by the supply of ebonite itself, as well as the manufacturing process. Each bar of ebonite needs to be accurately ground down before we can machine it on our sliding-head CNC lathe. So, for now, this is a very limited numbers pen. Hence this will be our top-line now.

We have decided to try pre-orders for this pen (in the US webshop - starting today) while we update and prepare our UK webshop as well (our IT issue). This is a test run at the moment (as we only have components for a dozen of pens ready) so pre-orders may also help us manage production. Kind of made-to-order thing. I hope it makes sense. Thank you for your patience and support!

Hi everyone,

I stopped by Japan House today, which turned out to be a disaster for my wallet (as usual). I love that place.

I just wanted to let you know about an interesting event taking place there on 10–11 October called “Meet the Maker: Sailor Pen”, which is happening at the same time as the London Pen Show.

this is from their website (please check it here)

Join us in the Shop for a Meet the Maker event. The team from Sailor Pen will be on hand to introduce their range of expertly crafted fountain pens. Alongside their signature 1911 model, discover the Naginata Togi with multiple nib sizes designed to render kanji characters, and the Nawate Series – layered with urushi (Japanese lacquer) to form a raised line on the cap for stable grip.

Visitors can also try the winner of Best Fountain Pen in the 2025 Japanese Stationery Awards, the TUZU, and choose from 20 different inks in the Shikiori Ink Bar to find the shade that matches their writing style.

Having the chance to try all these pens and chat with the Sailor team sounds pretty good to me!

So that may be another reason to come to London and stop by Japan House while you are at the London Pen Show. Japan House is near Kensington High Street tube station, which is just 19 minutes away from the Pen Show at Hammersmith.

Hi everyone,

I wanted to give you a couple of updates about our Kickstarter pocket pen and some of the things we learned along the way. Today, I want to talk about titanium. Firstly, the shipping will resume shortly (with updated caps)

We offered a titanium cap as a stretch goal, and it was a popular choice among many backers.
And boy, did we have fun machining it!

We eventually managed to make the caps successfully, so there was a happy ending. We just needed to adjust the cutting speeds, use different coolant/cooling method and take time and patience.

I wanted to share some of the journey because (as always in production) there were some surprises on the way.

We had worked with titanium in the past and had stamped some titanium components (which was a tough job especially for the stamping tools). So we were cautious when considering it as a material option for the pen. So we ran some initial tests on a few pieces using our CNC lathe and everything seemed doable. Production became a bit more difficult.

I want to say - titanium is an amazing metal.

Titanium has three properties that make it incredibly useful: High strength, low thermal conductivity and chemical stability (corrosion resistance)

Those same advantages are also three things that machinists tend to hate about titanium.

Hardness itself isn't necessarily the main problem. The heat resistance is. Titanium is surprisingly good at insulating heat. As a result, heat generated during machining stays very localised around the tool tip instead of being transferred/spread away efficiently through the bar material. Tool wear happens much faster at very high temperatures.

And these properties interact with each other: the heat can't escape, the alloy remains strong, and the material start reacting and can stick to the cutting tool. Once the cutting edge gets hot and is under heavy load, each of these becomes part of the problem.

So, what did we learn?

The Kickstarter turned out to be a great platform for testing. The support from our backers allowed us to take on something we probably wouldn't otherwise have attempted.

Titanium is a fantastic material, but machining these caps was definitely harder than we expected.

For the foreseeable future, we won't be making any more titanium caps. So if you got one, consider it a special one - and enjoy it!