Dear Friends,
Again I have taken an absence from writing (for too long). Paul writes in Romans 3:23 that "All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God" and that applies to me as well. Perhaps I can make up for my long disappearance by giving you even more juicy tales of small business.
Part of my silence has been the actual project I've been working on.
Now if making money was my goal, I would be doing things like designing and sending out more marketing emails, texts, and other assorted social media posting. I would be working on the pending website overhaul that should hopefully improve the usability of our site. I would be recording my podcast or building out new advertisements. There are even more obscure but valuable marketing things I can do like "localization" where I work on tailoring the version of our site shown in a specific country to fit that country's language and product selection. But clearly making money isn't my goal because I have been shirking those duties in favor of what I really love... Making something new.
Now the process of making a new thing is always the same for me. I have a version of it in my head, and in my head it works flawlessly. However as was said originally (and at great verbosity) by the Prussian field marshall Helmuth von Moltke, "no plan survives first contact with the enemy" and as always, reality is the enemy. More specifically friction in this particular case.
I am of course talking about my new pen.
In order to protect the greatest of all secrets I shall endeavor to maintain a certain air of mystery of the specifics of the mechanism I am designing as it may yet prove patentable (and yes I know that concept is one I have had mixed feelings on in the past). So if there are areas where you are confused, rest assured so am I.
Where to begin...
Well at the beginning one would suppose. I guess if I were to get technical, this started around last Christmas. As we began the process of bringing the bars in house I contemplated what doors that could open for us theoretically, and the pen immediately sprung to mind. The bar project was a cost saving project, but the pens presented a revenue generating opportunity. The reason this matters is that when buying a new machine, the cost saving aspect of it is limited by the volume of sales of the part the machine is making. If you sell 100 items, and the machine can save you $3 per item, you are limited in the net profit gain to $300.
However, if you can make that machine generate a product that is novel to the company, you are then able to generate additional revenue from that tool which is only limited by the sales that are generated from the new thing, and the machine's time.
I knew all of this as I was looking into what machine to buy to make the bars, and so a part of the purchase was "what machine can make the bars AND other things we could sell." I've always wanted to make a pen so that was the logical choice. Thus the potential machine purchase kicked off my design brain.
It's always easier to be creative with parameters. This is true across the board. We sometimes feel that we would be more creative if we didn't have any rules, but that is folly. Our brain is too powerful to create without limits, and sometimes in the absence of limits we create our own subconsciously. This is often why brainstorming can help. It allows others to challenge our unknown rules and reframe those rules.
So for me the machine parameters became one of the limits to the design. That was helpful.
I have several pens I love, and the dimensions of those became framework limitations.
The fundamental axiom of the company (Products built to endure) created its own parameters.
My desire to make the pen work with the two most popular refill options (despite their very real physical differences) became a part of the design.
And slowly, but surely the framework of what I was making came into being. This lead to the first real breakthrough, which was the novel mechanism. I will be the first to admit, that the mechanism is different than what people might be used to. I knew I wanted the pen to be a click pen, but the usual click mechanism is very difficult to make well in metal due to its unusual internal geometry and becomes prohibitively expensive to make. So when I had a version of a click pen that would work in metal and was more simple I was off to the races.
The next big challenge was getting the design to work with multiple types of refills. For me the priority was the Parker Jotter refill, and the Pilot G2 refill. Those two represent some common, high quality options that cover gel and ballpoint writing. They also are designs that form the pattern for other refills so there was a possibility of other refills working as well simply by their similarity to the primary two.
Those two inserts are alike in precisely one way, their largest diameter at their widest point. Thank God for that. Other than that, their tip shape, tip length, and overall length are very different. The pilot is the bigger of the two, so that is the real limitation. It also has the shortest tip, which affects the designs ability to have a longer point to its nose. You can see this if you compare the Parker Jotter with the Pilot G2 pens. One is long and slender, the other has a more rotund appearance.
This fact happens to work well however, because one of the most common complaints with our Parker Jotters that come with our journals is that the place you hold onto them is too small for most people's hand. Even I will admit that when I have been writing with one for awhile my thumb muscle begins to hurt. So with my design, I aim to give a little more diameter to that spot to help relieve that tension.
One more parameter that matters greatly... It has to work with our existing products.
That fact alone limits its largest diameter, and also requires that the pen has a clip (and a good one at that).
The clip has been a source of great design enjoyment for me as it is inherently complex. I know that when I actually get to the part where I have to produce that complexity in reality I may not enjoy it as much.
My prototyping began in earnest about three weeks ago. I have yet to finish the bar project properly, but I have a good enough method to make them now that I can finally begin work on this. It's all I've wanted to work on since the machine arrived. It's for the best that I needed to do the bars first however, since they helped me cut my machining teeth a bit and get the feel of this process and machine.
So far I have had excellent success in the actual cutting of the material, even though the pen is made of the bedeviling 304 Stainless steel. I attribute the success to the agony I endured making the bars for now I know the nuance of the speeds and feeds calculations. All the tools that I have broken, I am happy to say, have been due to my incompetence and failure to check my paths, rather than due to incorrect settings.
So three weeks ago I began by making the barrel parts for the pen. That process went extremely well and lulled me into an even greater sense of false confidence than my usual. I was even able to finally use my three dimensional designs I worked up in Fusion 360 (the most annoying of all 3d softwares) to generate the code for parts of the production. Up until now I have been able to get away with using the "conversational" programming built into the machine and have avoided using the design software for code writing.
With the barrel parts finished, I began to work on the mechanism component. I was so confident that I wouldn't need to make more than one design, that I decided I wouldn't take notes on the process. That proved unwise. It's not like I don't have plenty of things to write on...
I now have 107 different versions of this mechanism... about 10 of those work, and one of them is perfect.
But at the beginning of the process I didn't know it would take 107 prototypes to get there so I just decided I didn't need to take notes. I revised this decision about 70 prototypes in and for those who are curious as to what I like to use in these situations, I opted for on Onyx folder with TOPS Engineering Computation paper bound in it. The paper is thinner than usual paper which means I can put more pages in the folder than would be possible with regular printer paper. The folder allows me to put loose printed pages in it for things like code printouts or material specs. For those looking to use this, it comes in glued pads and has a slight green tint to it. I usually just tear off the pages one at a time to get the amount I want.
To make the mechanism I needed to setup the 4th Axis.
For those unfamiliar with machining, I will break it down as best I can. One Axis milling (which isn't really milling) is like a drill press. The head moves up and down (known as the Z axis). There is Two Axis milling which is common to old style manufacturing where the table moves forward and backwards as well as left to right, and the operator has to manually move the head down. Then there is 3 Axis milling where the machine is able to move the table left and right (X axis) and forward and backwards (Y axis) and the finally it can move the spindle that has the tool up and down (Z axis). This is all with the piece of metal (called the stock) fixed to the table.
4th axis changes it up a bit. The stock is fixed in place in a rotating chuck. That chuck can rotate a full 360 degrees and is usually setup so that the stock is parallel to the table rather than perpendicular (although that is configurable depending on the machine).
There is technically a 5th, 7th, and 12 axis version of this which is a combination of the table being able to rotate as well as be able to turn its own angle in relation to the spindle or spindles, but this is way more complicated and not particularly relevant at the moment. If you are interested, there are some awesome videos of machining in those machines on youtube.
Getting the 4th Axis setup was a bit of a challenge, and required a little on the fly engineering to attach it to the table in the most efficient way, but in the end I got it up and rolling (pun intended).
Then I had to teach myself how to program in the 4th axis.
So programming in 3 axis isn't too terribly difficult. Fundamentally you are tracing a path with the tool on a non-moving piece. With the 4th axis you have to tell it what rotational position the piece needs to be at on the 360 degree compass. There are linear moves where the axis is still and the tip moves from one location along the piece to the other, there are rotational moves where the tip stays still and the axis rotates the piece under it, and then there are arc movements where the tip is moving as well as the piece is rotating. It can get very confusing.
Fusion 360 was not working for me when I tried to write out the 4th axis parts, so I had to hand code them. It took a bit to get it right, but eventually I got the hang of how to tell the machine what I wanted it to do.
With the manufacturing process nailed down, it was time for production. This is where I discovered that my initial idea for the mechanism would not work. I then spent the next 9 days for 12 hours a day running prototypes.
The process was grueling.
One of the things that made this difficult was the scale. With a mechanism this small, even a few degrees of rotation can make a difference. The deflection of the tool also becomes a factor. A simple change in the direction of the cutting can affect how the mechanism turns out. Much of those details are also nearly impossible to see without magnification, and because its all done on a curve its difficult to measure properly.
This was all made more challenging by some of the specifics of how the design needed to be made so that I could be sure it would last. So it needed to be small, but not so small that it could be broken.
The final twist was that I couldn't actually see the mechanism function when it was installed. It is shrouded within the barrel of the pen, so I could only go by feel and observation when trying to make changes.
I was also on a time crunch. One could say it was a self imposed time crunch, but it was a factor nonetheless. My youngest brother graduated last week (congrats again Sam), and I was going to be gone for several days. My hope had been to get a prototype finished in time to give it to him at graduation. Alas this didn't happen, but by the time I left I had the first working prototype (that was one of the 10 that worked, but not yet the 1 that was perfect).
A week away from the workshop meant that all I could do was theorize and write out new versions of the code for the working one. That turned out to be a blessing though as it allowed me to really dive into the math and perfect some of the calculations. I also was able to click the working prototype about 10,000 times to see how it held up.
Upon my return earlier this week I was able to dive back into prototyping and have nailed down the mechanism. I have also been fine tuning some of the other parts of the pen to make sure it runs smoothly when its all together.
The only part that remains to work on is the clip.
And that brings me to the next part of the story, the future.
Time is not on my side exactly. I am leaving to go back to Texas shortly for the same brothers wedding and when I return from that I will have about 5 weeks before I will likely take some time off for paternity leave. Leah and I are expecting our third and with the oldest become a young child and the second as a wild toddler in the house, it will be necessary that I take a few weeks off to help with the transition.
Thankfully, my team is excellent and will be able to handle things while I am out.
However most of those marketing things I mentioned at the top of this missive need to get done before I leave as well as a mountain of bars I need to make (which is going to take more time since I didn't get the proper medium fixture made yet). So in reality, those 5 weeks will be very packed.
Why must I get the pen finished before I go out you might be asking.
If I don't, its all I will be able to think about. I tend to become a bit obsessive about my new designs. If I can get the clip done before I leave, I will be able to set the project down, knowing that the first part of it is complete and a perfect pen can be made.
When I return I can then begin the process of making fixtures and designs for how it will be produced in large quantities.
I hope this letter is sufficiently bulky so as to help make up for my lack of letters over the last few weeks. I don't know precisely what the future will hold, but it is my earnest hope to have the pens finished, tested, and ready for prime time in the fall. Certainly I want it out before Christmas.
In the meantime I will try to keep you appraised of my progress, and I appreciate your forgiveness if there are gaps in the story from time to time.
Stay tuned for more letters on Thursdays in the coming weeks and be sure to go subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you like and watch the videos it helps us get promoted more by the algorithm to people who may never have heard of us.
Ever your servant,
Colin Murdy
CEO/Owner
Murdy Creative Co.
Cell: 414-434-9001
MurdyCreative.Co
