About this Material:
This orange material is an acrylic acetate called orange crush. Orange is the color, crush is the pattern. The pattern is called crush because it’s made up of small crushed pieces of acrylic.

Crushed blanks are made by first making a batch of solid color acrylic (in this case solid orange). Once cured, the solid orange acrylic is crushed up into small pieces. The small pieces are placed back into the mold and then the mold is filled again with more solid orange. Once the new batch cures, you have a solid piece of material with a crushed pattern. It creates a very vibrant color, so it’s a very popular pattern. You’ll see several other colors used on my pens such as cranberry red, and sapphire blue.

I’m going to mention this because I think it helps to show how easy it is to have miss communications when you have limited contact with a customer. I do my best to try and ask all the questions to get the information I need to process the order. And when I have a special size and style pen like this, I send the customer the drawings to get they’re approval before I make the pen.

Note I said “what I need”. But sometimes there’s a gap between what I need to process an order, and what the customer is expecting to get. And I only know what the customer wants from what they tell me. And with this order, we ended up having a gap in that expectation. Both of us made an assumption, and in this case they were opposites.

All ready to go…

After spending the time to work up the layout and getting it approved, everything went smoothly. I started making the parts and when they were finished it turned out to be a great looking little pen.

I sent photo’s to the customer before shipping it out and she was pleased with the images. So I boxed it up and sent it on its way. But it all came to a halt once the pen was delivered! As it turned out (from the clients point of view) it was missing something. Because it was going to be a short pen, the client was expecting the cap to post. But posting isn’t something I do as a rule. It requires a few extra steps to make a cap postable, so I only do it if it’s specifically requested. And because it takes a few extra steps, AND more time, I charge additional for posting.

The problem was the client assumed that all pens were made to post, therefore she assumed this pen would post as well. After we worked through how the misunderstanding happened, ultimately I had to figure out a way to fix it, because the customer wanted her pen to post. See posting the cap below.

On a normal pen, making it so the cap will post, even after the pen is completed, usually isn’t too big of an issue. Sometimes it just takes a few extra steps. The main thing is making sure the lower end of the barrel is turned down small enough and with the right amount of taper so the cap will fit snugly over it. You don’t want the fit too shallow or too deep.

Making an adjustment can resolve the problem assuming the diameters of the parts allow for it. The cap must have clearance on the inside, and the barrel diameter needs to be able to be reduced small enough. Lastly, if there’s an accent band on the barrel it has to be smaller than the cap hole. And with this pen this last part is where we had a problem.

As you can see the barrel has a blind cap and accent band on the end. The blind cap was fairly short to fit within the clients length requirements. But the bigger issue was that the diameter of the accent band was larger than the inside diameter of the cap. I didn’t have a smaller band, so I couldn’t just reduce the diameter of the barrel. And the blind cap alone was too short for the cap to post over it securely.

The cap couldn’t be drilled larger otherwise you’d drill out the capping threads. But somehow, I needed to come up with a solution that would allow the cap to post, while keeping the accent band (the part that was in the way). Dropping the accent band would make a big difference in the overall look of the pen, so neither of us wanted to drop the blind cap band.

The solution…

Thankfully, after a little bit of brainstorming, we came up with a fairly simple solution. On that allowed the cap to post firmly, while still keeping the original barrel design, including the accent band, in tact.

I replaced the short blind cap with one that’s about 1/4″ longer and sized to fit snugly inside the cap. But I made it slightly smaller than the accent band. This way when the cap posts on the barrel it stops right at the band. So now the only change made to the original pen was the additional 1/4″ added to the length, and a very slight (about 1/2 mm) step down from the band to the blind cap. This is a feature used on pen brands such as Delta and Pelikan. But it’s much less prominent on this pen. In this case, the difference is so minimal, that you have to look very hard to actually see the step down.

Conclusion…

I wish I could say the solution was my idea, but it wasn’t– the client thought of it first. But I thought it was a great solution since it made minimal changes to the original design requirements the client wanted for the pen. In the end, the client was happy with the solution, AND her postable pen!

This problem was also a grim reminder that you can never ask to many questions! Every time I think I’ve run into the last problem I’ll ever have in pen making, another one pops up. One of the reasons I only communicate through emails is so I have everything in writing so I don’t miss anything. It can be very easy to miss a passing comment in a phone conversation. But no matter how you communicate, or how much, I think it’s just something that can happen once in a while. Since we can’t know what the other is thinking, we (both of us) just have to remember not to assume anything and keep asking questions. And if we do run into an issue, we just have to stay calm and work towards a solution.

This Pen’s Specifications:
Color / Material: Crushed Orange & Solid Black Acrylic.
Length: Capped 5.0″ / Uncapped 3.56″ / Posted 5.125″.
Diameter: Barrel .55″. / Cap .59″.
Nib: 2-tone Steel #6 Jowo.
Clip: Molded chrome plated.
Bands: Silver plated brass.
Filling System: C/C.