Hi Pen Fans!
I’m very happy to announce something very unique that we have never done here at Edison!
We now have a Special Edition Collier in Garolite! This pen is part of the Production Line, so this pen cannot be purchased directly from Edison. It will be sold only by our retailers that you see HERE.
There is a lot to discuss regarding Garolite, but allow me to give a rough outline of this pen before getting into all of the finer details….
- Garolite is a glass reinforced thermoset composite. Put simply, it is a woven fiberglass laminate that is bonded with epoxy. It is extremely wear-resistant.
- Price will be $199 with a Steel nib in EF, F, M, B, 1.1mm or 1.5mm.
- This is a Special Edition, so it is a limited quantity.
- We have manufactured all of the Garolite Colliers for this entire Special Edition, and those pens have been shipped to our retailers. We will not be manufacturing more quantities of this pen. So once our retailers no longer have inventory of this pen, it will be gone.
- This pen is available only for purchase from the retailers that you see HERE.
Let’s get into some details regarding this pen and material…
As stated, Garolite is a laminated glass-reinforced thermoset composite. Many people will want to call this G10. But G10 is a specific type of Garolite. There are G7, G9, G10, G11, and many other types with differing qualities. This is CE Garolite. But for the purposes of a pen, there will be no functional differences in the various types of Garolite.
Garolite is typically used for circuit boards. But most people know of its use for knife handles or gun stock handles, since it is very stable, very durable, and extremely wear resistant. It typically patinas to a darker color, leading to some nice character over the long term.
Along with this excellent wear resistance, Garolite is also lightweight. This Garolite version of the Collier is about 3 grams heavier than an acrylic version (26g vs 29g), so there really isn’t a perceptible difference.
Despite the excellent machining qualities, Garolite still won’t cut as clean as acrylic, especially when cutting threads. As you can see in the photo below, we have engineered the visible portions of outer threads from a solid butterscotch acrylic. This makes the pen much more attractive at that location compared to just using garolite for the threaded portions. This also makes the threads more accurate and feel very smooth compared to if we had threaded garolite-to-garolite.
There is roughly a 10-15% occurrence of some of these pens turning out darker. You can see how a darker version of this pen will appear by looking at the pen at the top of this photo…
We do not have control over the darker versions, and our retailers cannot honor special requests for a darker or lighter version.
Since this material is essentially a woven fabric, many people will wonder how it will react to ink staining. The short answer is that yes…the material can take on ink and show stains. However, we are finding that simply soaking the stain in water for a few minutes and then scrubbing with a test-tube brush or an old toothbrush works very well and has no negative effect on the material. The photo below shows Waterman Serenity Blue before and after a stain….
Of course, Waterman is a relatively gentle ink. But our tests are showing that just about every ink out there can be removed (we were actually able to remove Baystate Blue!). But more stubborn cases might require a household cleaner. If your pen develops stains that you cannot remove with just water, contact us for a more thorough method of cleaning.
But in the end…if you want to avoid the possibility of stains, we recommend not taking the pen ‘on-the-go’ where it might get bumped and jostled, causing ink to spurt from the nib. But if you do encounter stains, we can share excellent methods for removing them.
I think that’s everything! I’m sure that there will be questions regarding this new pen and material, so please reach out and we’ll be happy to help!
Brian at Edison
