Behind the Scenes - 6/26/26

Dear Friends,

For those of you who are new here, occasionally I will do a long form letter like this where I go into more detail about the inner workings of the company. If you want to catch up on prior messages, check out the bloghere or just jump right into the story below.

It certainly has been a long time since I wrote one of these. For that I am sorry. In light of that, I will warn you this is a long one. Both this and the podcast went on hiatus a bit before Christmas, and when we rolled into the new year I began a new project with a focus and gusto previously unseen which took all of my time. From when I arrived in the morning, until I left in the evening this project was all I worked on. Some of you may have noticed a barren desert of content in our emails, or social media, and perhaps you (like many) grew tired of our same ads for 6 months. This time, however, is hopefully coming to a close as the project is nearly finished. What project you may ask?

The Pen... The Murdy Memoir

For years (over 2 years to be precise) I have been working on this project in the background. Early on I had nailed down the barrel shape, dimensions, etc. and the focus for the first few years of the design was how to make the perfect click. I didn't want it to be a bolt action style, or the side button ones where you have to click it, and then press a button to release. I wanted it to be a real proper click pen.

The plan to make a pen goes back a long way. I've wanted to make one since I fell in love with good pens in high school, but really the first opportunity came in the winter of 2023. Due to a set of circumstances that I will talk about in a podcast with my coconspirators Meryle and Anna (hopefully soon) I decided we needed to get a CNC mill to make our own bars that we use in our journals. All throughout that process of hunting for the machine, I had in the back of my mind that this would be how I would make my pen.

It took three months of breaking tools before I finally got the hang of the machine, and what an expensive education it was. Tormachs, while being perfectly capable machines, are not really powerful production machines. Their spindle power and rigidity (two factors that make for easy machining) are very weak compared to proper 4 axis mills. So I was already learning on a difficult machine, and I began working on the bars in 304 stainless steel, which is a notoriously difficult material to cut things out of. So those two factors certainly contributed to the longer-than-hoped-for process of making bars.

I can't remember precisely when, but sometime in March or April of '23 I had a flash of inspiration for how I could make the click mechanism work the way I wanted. By May I had a rough working prototype, but from there the project turned into a very long one indeed.

The main issue was galling. I wanted to make a pen that didn't require any lubrication (since who wants to change the oil in their pen, most people don't like getting it done in their car) and wouldn't wear out (so it could have our 120 year warranty). This proved to be rather challenging. The next two years I went through 157 variations on the clicker. Everything from the track design that makes the click feel, to the alloys used, to coatings, and so on was tested.

That was only one of the two big issues.

The other was the clip. Pen clips are one of those things you don't think of much. I don't think too many manufacturers think about them much either. They are usually stamped and folded out of sheet steel and tacked on with pressure or some other basic mounting method. For years my assumption had been that our clip would follow the same design parameters. The clip is key to the design. It actually functions as a retaining ring for a critical part of the click mechanism.

One late night in August of last year a tool and die maker friend of mine came to visit, and I talked him through what I was thinking for the clip. Something stamped, folded and then press fit over the rear of the barrel to retain the mechanism. We went round and round, but the key point he made to me was that it would be extremely difficult to the point of impossible to create a small stamped part like that with tight enough tolerances to be press fit onto the pen barrel. He also made the point that for me to make and test and remake the dies to do it would take 6 months, which at the time seemed like an eternity. Jokes on me.

With the idea of stamping the clip off the table I was left with milling the clip. That is as complicated as it sounds. Think of carving a little pen clip out of a solid block of stainless steel. I tried a few times and the failure was so resounding that I decided it was not going to work that way. Stamping would be fast, easy, and produce a good clip, but wouldn't attach the way I wanted, and milling would be slow, painful, extremely expensive, but would function the way I wanted in the design. It was with this puzzle in mind that I went on my Christmas vacation at the end of 2025.

Small Aside: For those of you who previously had read about this and mentioned that you don't want a clip and remove the ones off your pens, there will be a version that does not have the clip part and just has the retaining collar so no worries there.

While on the 20 hour drive down from Wisconsin to Texas, I had a good amount of time to think, and it was about hour 16 that the first part of the solution came to me. By the time I got there, the rest of it had formed. So the beginning of that vacation was me frantically scribbling in my notes how I was going to fix this. The answer was a bit simple in hindsight, use both milling and stamping. The clip is made from a solid block of stainless steel, but utilizes a combination of drilling, reaming, undercut bits, threadmills, etc. to create a round blank that has the proper dimensions of the clip. The fourth axis then cuts away the excess material to make a clean straight clip shape, and then a stamping die is used to give it the clip bend shape. It's still extremely time consuming, each one takes 30+ minutes of machine time, not to mention about that same amount of time in hand finishing, but it works perfectly.

With this piece nailed down I knew that all the constituent parts of the pen were there and all that needed to be done was to put it all together, and begin production. I told my extended family that the pens should launch no later than the beginning of May, and that was me giving myself a month of margin...

So here we are, nearing the end of June.

I have spent the last 6 months, after getting back from Texas, everyday pushing the pen towards launch. The delays came in many forms. First, I found out that my solution for the pen clickers galling (which was to use a diamond coating) wasn't going to work since the coating was thin enough to wear out on the corners of the design. That led to what I think is the greatest breakthrough in the design.

The Jeweled Mechanism...

It's not technically jeweled. I call it that because that's where the inspiration came from. The issue with two pieces of metal rubbing together and wearing away has been a well established issue since we started making metal things. Usually this is solved with lubricants like oil or grease, but I didn't want to use that. Another brilliant solution was employed in watch movements. The points that contact, rather than being metal on metal have a small gemstone (usually ruby or sapphire) mounted into the part that the metal touches instead. The crystal structure is both very hard, and chemically different than the metal so you don't get the galling, and the smoothness creates a very low friction connection.

While I looked into using jewels in my mechanism, the reality is that the ceramic ball bearings I was already using in its function would be far superior technically. They were harder, smoother, and better for resisting wear than the jewels. So the click design evolved into its final form, where the clicker rides on embedded ball bearings along a mirror smooth polished interior barrel. There is no metal on metal contact at all in the design, only metal on ceramic.

This solved the galling perfectly.

The galling needed to be solved specifically because the idea behind the clip and mechanism required the clip to be press fit in place, sealing the mechanism closed, never to be opened again. It was right about this time, when the galling was perfectly solved, that I decided to change the clip to thread on, rather than be press fit.

The idea behind press fitting the clip was simple. I didn't want to have to go though the trouble of filing a patent on my click mechanism, which would require a lot of time, money, and dealing with lawyers, both now and in the future. By entombing the mechanism behind a tight press fit, there would be no easy way to pull it apart to reverse engineer it without destroying it.

The decision to switch to a clip that could be threaded off, and the mechanism taken completely apart was one that came in a few steps over a day and a half. First I realized that to truly make a pen that would last 120 years, it would need to be able to be opened up to be cleaned. Sure if you're sitting at a desk in an office it wouldn't likely ever get dirty enough to need cleaning, but a great many of our customers operate in far harsher environments. So the pen needed to be able to have the mechanism opened for someone to blow out any grit that might get in it.

I also realized that while we plan to offer engraving on the clip in the future, we aren't quite there now at launch. So by having the clip be easy to thread off and replace we could offer engraved clips in the future that would be able to be easily swapped and replaced. Along that same vein I realized that one of the things that happen sometimes with pens is that people put too much under the clip and bend it away from the pen. By being able to remove the clip you could easily bend it back into shape, which was also a critical part of making it last 120 years. Finally, it meant that every part of the pen was able to come apart in case we need to service or replace parts under warranty.

So it was right about the time that I solved the galling issue that I also made it unimportant with the thread off clip. I decided that with the multiple aspects of utility that I had now figured out, I should file a utility patent. That whole thing deserves its own episode, but for brevity's sake all I will say is that the patent application has been filed, and should be published soon, and with that filing, I am free to share beautiful pictures of how the mechanism works. So for the first time publicly disclosed, here are a few of the patent drawings

The last piece of the puzzle was a little shuffle of material. For the last few years I've been working in 304 stainless steel, and assuming that's what we would use at launch. It's a common, great all-around alloy for stainless steel. However it was February when I decided I wanted to switch to 316 stainless steel. That's called "Marine Grade" stainless since it's designed to withstand submersion in salt water for awhile without corrosion, and I wanted this pen to be the best it could possibly be. It was about a month after that where I switch to 17-4PH stainless steel. It has roughly the same corrosion resistance as 304 (which is very good) but isn't as resistant to salt water as 316, however it can be hardened to 42 HRC. What that means in practice is that it's far more scratch and dent resistant than both the 304 and 316, and I realized most people would rather have a pen that resists scratching and denting while still being very resistant to salt water corrosion, rather than one that is a bit better at dealing with the sea, but is soft.

This transition lead to a whole subplot about electropolishing, acid etching, heat treating in a low oxygen environment, etc. and was on the whole just a huge pain. My first attempt at production at scale had a key issue that meant I had to spend a few weeks retooling the process as well.

However there is light at the end of the tunnel.

The launch date has not been set for sure. I've had too many times we were close, and then something needed to change. That being said, I am hoping that this will be launch very soon (within the next few weeks at the most). For sure when it launches you will be among the first to know.

The reality of the production of the pens means that we will need to release them in batches. It is going to take some time for us to scale up our production to full capacity, and in the meantime I don't want to have to keep you waiting for your pen. So the plan is to make a batch of them, and then release that batch as a stock limited drop, while making more. We are going to have the notification email option setup for the pen product page so that if you miss the drop you will be notified when they are back in stock.

As a side note, I will be the only one in the beginning who can make these pens. I am working on training the others, but it is a complex thing and it must be perfect. Of all the products I have made so far, this is by far the one I am the most proud of and the most excited for. I do have another child coming end of July (God willing) and will be taking some time around then to be home. It may be that the first few drops are small, and then there is a bit of a drought while I'm gone, and then they come back with increasing volumes and frequency as we scale up.

This represents a whole new thing for us as a company. A new horizon of products for us to perfect. My dream is to expand the line to include a whole slew of alloys and even a few exotic ones for special drops. For now though I can say with confidence that this is the best pen I've ever used, and from now on, it will be all that I use. I am so excited for those of you who get one to feel the same way.

If you want to hear me talk about more things like this, check out the Murdy Creative Co podcast on Youtube 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 

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