Hi Pen Fans!
Without a doubt, the best aspect of manufacturing custom pens is that my customers are always coming to me with new ideas for custom creations. If I only did pens in a production setting, I think that it would be easy to get stuck in creative ruts.
Usually when I create a completely custom pen, I don’t bother with making any big announcement, but I think that this one deserves a little recognition for my customers who might appreciate the design.
A client of mine approached me with an idea for a custom double ended pen. The idea was to have two separate ink reservoirs with two different nibs all in the same pen. I really liked the idea, but I was worried about whether or not having two decent sized ink reservoirs would make the pen really big and awkward. After about 3-4 prototypes, we came up with what I think really nailed the design. See below….
As you can see, the pen will be an Eyedropper filler only. With the first couple of prototypes, we tried to make it long enough for cartridges, but this extra length definitely made the pen too long. As is, this pen comes in at a touch over 6" capped. I didn’t want to get much longer than this, so Eyedropper only was the best route.
But with a smaller design like this, how much will ink capacity suffer? This was my real concern with this design. It turns out to be no issue at all. Each reservoir will hold 1.25mL, In comparison, a converter holds a bit less than .5mL. So even with these smaller reservoirs, the pen still holds nearly triple the capacity of a converter. Almost 6 times the capacity if you count both reservoirs. Not only that, but I could probably customize the interior of the reservoirs to hold even a little bit more.
One might ask about the inherent issue of an Eyedropper burping. This should be eliminated on this pen. The phenomenon of ED burping is where an Eyedropper pen will burp a small amount of ink at the very end of a fill, due to a very large ink reservoir. When the fill gets to the very end of a very large ink reservoir like most eyedroppers, the pen can lose a little vacuum due to the air being compressible and "elastic". Since these reservoirs are smaller, this should never happen with this pen.
The obvious benefits of this pen (besides the "cool" factor) is that you can have two pens in one. Two nibs of two different tip sizes, and two different inks if you like. Also visible ink reservoirs.
Here are photos of the pen next to a standard Pearl for comparison purposes.
As you can see, the pen will be a little longer that the standard Pearl when one cap is removed, but not to the point where it would be unwieldy.
If anyone is interested in a pen of the same design, obviously the transparent ink reservoir can be any color, and the caps/sections can be any material. And no reason that this needs to be based on the Pearl. I don’t see why this idea couldn’t be adapted to any of our designs.
Cost of this design will be $350 with two steel nibs. $450 with one steel and one 18k nib, and $550 with two 18k nibs. If you are interested, you can email me to inquire.
Thanks!