Scribe

Yeah, always.

Yeah.

So.

Well, Yankee Doodle Andy, will you tell

Cool.

Sure.

The Fire Horse.

He did.

Yep.

The one thing, it only has to

Mm.

Bullet pencil proof.

Yeah.

have a whole lot.

Was it a couple weeks ago?

Thanks guys. Nice to meet you.

Sure, sure. Well, I'm married and I have five kids, ages 9 to 19. I live in Southern California and I have an engineering background and have worked in the manufacturing industry all my life. I started off with a company called Union Carbide, making high purity gases, and I worked for another company making aluminum composites, kind of in the materials arena. I moved on to manufacture surgical and examination gloves. Lived in Asia for a number of years doing that. I also worked for a company that did condom development. So I know everything there is to know about condoms, like it or not. And now I run a specialty coating company in Lakeside, California, which is near San Diego. And we do special coatings that protect base metals, make them more scratch and wear resistant.

No, they aren't. No, they aren't. They don't come in a little foil pack either, but yeah. So these coatings are used in the aerospace industry, they're used for military applications, dental and orthodontic instruments and implants, firearms and the like. And so I like to think that I have a broad enough background that I can figure out how to make things, figure out how to improve things. And that's kind of what led me to the Kickstarter application. My oldest boy, who's 19, his name is Nathan, he turned me on to Kickstarter, told me, if you have a great idea, you present it here. If people like it, you get funded, and then you're able to get your product out on the market. So I thought it was a fun and interesting way to include my son, my family, in this little project. Make some neat products and get them out to the world.

So my first Kickstarter campaign was a product that my son prompted me to look at, which was making a metal pocket comb. He was frustrated with the plastic combs that you can get at the 7:11 or the local gas station. And what inspired me was to think back to what my grandfather carried in his pockets and the sort of things that he had on his person. You know, it's popular now. You see it on Instagram and a lot of these blogs and Reddit and the like, where people do what they call a pocket dump, where they empty their pockets and take a picture of it. And so I thought back to what he would carry and. And he always carried a pocket comb. He had a flat top haircut. He was a World War II veteran. He was actually in Pearl harbor during the Japanese attack. And he, in his retirement years, was a locksmith. So he had just about every gadget known to man. He had a Swiss army knife. He had a regular pocket knife. He actually carried a bullet pencil. He carried his ace indestructible combination. He carried a lot of neat things. A memo book. It wasn't the field notes book. They didn't have that brand back then, I guess, but it was like a little book he got from a feed store, I think. So I thought, well, what would he like to carry in his pockets? And what did he carry that could be improved upon? And that led me to the Metal combworks Kickstarter campaign, where I made stainless steel pocket combs of a variety of different designs.

Oh, yeah. So cool. Yeah, that's. That's one of the more popular ones. And the idea there was to kind of have an art deco styling and include what I think is the coolest US Coin ever made, which is that mercury dime coin that they made from, I guess, 1916 to 1946.

With that winged Mercury head. That's super cool. So it was a bit of a challenge figuring out how to fixture that dime into the comb so that it wouldn't come out without destroying it. But we got that figured out, and like I said, it's one of the more popular combs. So based on that initial success with Kickstarter, I thought about doing other campaigns. I followed on with another comb campaign where I changed the designs and went to titanium alloy on some of the combs. And then that was also successful. Then the third campaign I ran was a cover for field notes or for memo books. And the problem I was having there is that I'd carry around the field notes for a couple days, and the ends and corners would be all tattered. I'd end up rolling or tearing the COVID And I thought, there's got to be a better way. And I looked at the leather cases that were out there, and there's some beautiful leather covers out there that also double as credit card holders and the like, but they were still a little too soft and allowed the field nose to get bent up. So I came up with the. Just cutting some very thin. It's thinner than a credit card, titanium covers. And I wanted it to be more than a cover. So I put some features into it where you can kind of fold it together like origami and use it as a phone prop. You can use it for taking macro photos. You can do some other things with it besides just have it work as a, as a cover. And then I followed on with the fourth campaign, which is currently going right now, and there's only like three days left and it's fully funded. And so folks will be receiving their rewards in the next few weeks. But it was for titanium clips or page markers or bookmarkers.

That's right. Yeah. I basically listened to the backers and they came up with some really good ideas, one of which was to make the page marker clips with travel icons on them. So I have one with an airplane, one with a hotel kind of symbol, one with the rental car kind of symbol. So you can kind of organize your travel documents when you're on a trip. And so that was from one of the backers. So I quickly made up some prototype images and included those. Another lady wanted some wildlife or animal related items. So I did a sea creature set where I have a sea turtle and a seahorse, a dolphin and one other that I can't think of right now, but included in that is the typewriter set. And so one of the rewards is you're able to pick any four letters, numbers, or characters you'd like, and that's what you'll get in your set.

Oh, yeah, perfect. Yeah. And I've had a lot of folks come to me and say, well, my, my name is several letters more than your reward. How do I get a second set? And I've just encouraged everyone to double up the reward value and just click the single reward and then we'll sort out what they need to get through the survey process. I'm really looking forward. I've built some of these clips in advance, so it should be pretty quick that I get rewards to everyone. And it's going to be a little bit of a logistical challenge making sure that, you know, Andy, you get your S E X punctuation mark that you.

Okay. But seriously though, he's kidding, everyone. That's going to be a little tough, but we'll make it happen.

Yeah. Or the Thai symbol for bird or something? Yeah, yeah. That's probably not going to happen. But what I've done is I've put a photo image of, I think it's an old royal typewriter keypad I purchased from one of those photo stock style places, the license to post that image there. But so I have all the letters. It includes a couple special characters, question mark, exclamation point, I think a dollar sign, and then numbers one through nine. And that's the limit of that particular reward is picking your four characters. Numbers or numbers that you'd like.

And then finally that brings us to the current campaign, which is the Bullet Pencil. And harkening back to my grandfather, he carried a bullet pencil and I just thought it was the coolest thing that he could whip out his pocket knife and sharpen his pencil to a fine point where, you know, in my kindergarten and first grade class we've got the old crank style pencil sharpener. And that was tough enough to get a good point or tip on it. And so I decided that I would try to improve upon and maybe modernize a bit the bullet pencil. I have a few dozen of the old style ones, probably from the 50s and 60s whenever they were popular. And I looked at those, I looked at the, I guess there's one called the Buffalo Bullet Pencil. I bought one of those where you basically make your own.

And I bought the Midori Bullet pencil and I kind of looked at all the different features, the, you know, benefits, the things that were good and bad about those designs and rolled them all up and added in a couple new features to try to make this modern version more useful in today's tablet and smartphone environment by adding a stylus tip to it. Andy, I spoke to you and a few other pencil gurus to try to figure out what was a good across the board consensus on what a good quality pencil was and decided to go with The Palomino Blackwing 602 as the filler in the bullet pencil.

Right. And what I thought was extra cool about it is the design of the eraser. And it allowed me to have something completely different. I had never seen a bullet pencil with the rectangular eraser feature, and especially with an eraser feature where you could kind of index up the eraser as you used it to get a more usable chunk of the eraser sticking out. And so that was another factor in the decision to use that particular pencil.

Well, you know, I'd always liked just, just the feel of a wooden pencil. And mechanical pencils are great. And I kind of put that little joke in. I haven't been called on it yet about the Chapter 11 reference to David Rees's book, How to sharpen the pencil.

Right? So yeah, there are other writing instruments out there that are obviously more appropriate for particular applications and you're not going to be able to please everyone. And I'm sure, you know, there's a million opinions on what the best writing instrument is, But I'll leave it to you guys, the experts, to make those decisions. But for me, the pencil, it just feels nice in your hand. It writes well. And then you can adjust the. Sharpen the tip to get it just how you'd like it. And I guess I'm just a little too heavy handed mechanical pencils for me. Even with the larger leads, I'm constantly breaking them off. And then I'm clicking the lead down and it's sticking out too far or not far enough. And it's more of a hassle than what it's worth for me. And I'm on the go a lot and so the bullet pencil just made sense for me.

Sure. Yeah. The. The bullet pencil is made out of aluminum. I considered making it out of titanium because I noticed on Kickstarter that people have a love affair with titanium. I think 98% or something of all the kickstarter campaigns that have the word titanium in them get funded, you know, real quick.

Oh, sure. As kind of a semi veteran now on my fifth campaign, when you immediately launch your campaign, you've got dozens and dozens of people who say, hey, we know how to get you funded. Absolutely. Here's what you need to do.

Yeah, and they're all crawling all over each other trying to help out. I have never used any of their services. But there is definitely an art to it, but there's certainly a science to it as well. And I'm a little concerned on this bullet pencil campaign because all my other campaigns had funded within a couple days of the start. And it's kind of a bathtub curve where it spikes up right in the beginning as you're a new campaign. And then at the very and then it's flat for a while and then at the very end it kind of spikes up again as you get more attention in the last few days. And so we're at about half the target level of $8,900. I think we're at 4,500 and some change right now. So I'm really hopeful that in the next few days, I guess we have 18 days left in the bullet pencil campaign that we'll be able to reach the goal. Because I really want to make this and get the rewards out there to all the people that are so excited to receive this type of a product. But yeah, back to the pencil itself. It's made out of aerospace aluminum. It's 6061 material. And for the prototype I used, it's a three part pencil, not counting the clip. And so the eraser end is machined out of aluminum and press fit into a piece of seven 16 inch tubing. And I've cut a rectangular hole in that eraser and to allow the Palomino eraser to fit in there. And I've intentionally made it a little tight so that I noticed on the Palomino pencil because it's got the thin gauge steel around the base or aluminum around the base, that it doesn't always hold the eraser in there very snug.

Yeah, right, yeah. And I've noticed too that there are a couple little detents on the clip that U shapes around the eraser. And if you don't have those with sharp edges on them, then it doesn't bite into the eraser well enough there and the eraser can still slip down inside of that U channel. So what I was going to do on my pencil is everyone make those holes a little sharper so that hopefully the eraser can be indexed up and not want to slide back into the, the butt end of the pencil.

And then for the other end, the traditional bullet pencil works kind of on a friction lock type of a mechanism. It's got a little bulge in it or sometimes a little slot or a groove where it kind of snaps into place. And with this thicker gauge aluminum that I'm using, that's not an easy option. And so what you can't see in the images and what I hadn't revealed until now. So drum roll please. Right. I've put a little spring loaded detent. They're called a ball plunger. You may, you know, sometimes they're on drawers or other devices where you want it to stick in place, but you don't want it to hold with so much force that you can't get it apart.

And so it will be hidden inside the body of the pencil. It's actually going to be in the stylus tip, pencil holder section. And it's basically all you'll see on the side of that little tip is a little ball bearing head. And that ball bearing is going to hooks into a slot inside of the body of the, the pencil holder. So it's going to snap into place securely and then it won't over time wear out and end up slipping or falling out. So you should have a good content, good contact and you'll actually hear a little click when it goes into place.

And then the capacitive tip that I've chosen is off of the bamboo, I guess, stylus, which is a popular brand. And so you'll be able to purchase your own capacitive tips. Down the road. You're going to get a few with the bullet pencil itself. But if you lose them or wear them out over time, you'll be able to get a readily available tip and there are no tools required to put it on. So basically you pinch it in your fingers and kind of expand it over The. The tip, and then it closes down and holds securely in place onto the end of the bullet pencil. And then the last feature, which is kind of new and not what you see on a lot of traditional bullet pencils, is adding the clip. Midori's clip was the first thing that broke on the pencil when I purchased it. I passed it to my daughter, and she gave it a try, and the clip immediately broke off. So I'm making a much heavier gauge clip, and it's bolted in place. There's a couple little screws that hold it in place, and so it should never come off. But if you do want to remove it and have the pencil more of a traditional, streamlined look, you can unscrew those two screws and remove the clip.

Yeah, well, thank you. And, you know, since the campaign launched, I have been keeping an eye out on ebay and everywhere else for bullet pencil references and to see what's out there. And I came across a really cool one. It's actually a bullet pencil promoting a nightclub, and it says something about ladies night, get in free, something like that. And instead of having an eraser on it, that ends is a really cool bottle opener. So it's really streamlined. It's not much bigger in diameter than the body of the bullet pencil. So I bought that one up, and I have it here, and I've been looking at it thinking, how can I incorporate that into fitting into that rectangular slot of the pencil, so where you could, you know, slip it out, maybe you would have that little device on your keychain. And then if you wanted to use your bullet pencil to open a beer or soda, you just pop that onto your bullet pencil and crack it open. So that's more of a stretch goal. And, you know, something that I think is down the road.

Yeah, so the top level is the bullet pencil we've been talking about. And so in that configuration, which is a $39 reward, you get the bullet pencil with the stylus, you get a refill for the pencil. And by the way, you get two pencil stubs out of one Palomino pencil. So cool. You know, by cutting off the usable length of the pencil, basically splitting that in half, you are set up with two pencils and then obviously one eraser. So you're going to get that, you're going to get some spare capacitive tips and it comes with the clip. And I'll include a little Allen wrench that's the right size. If you want to remove the pocket clip from the pencil, then one step down from that is a $33 version where I've got. I'm calling it the bullet pencil TT and that configuration is more like a traditional bullet pencil where it's going to have a bullet or bull nosed tip without the capacitive stylus tip. I've had a few folks say, hey, for the purists. Exactly. And by the way, back to my grandfather, his bullet pencil, he would use that rounded tip for the old rotary dial telephone. And rather than sticking his big fingers in the hole, he would use that to dial up the phone. So I imagine there's some other uses. I've seen the guys on Instagram that have pens that are what they call tactical pins, where they basically have a pointy end. So you can do whatever with it, I guess. But so it'll have that same function where it's just got a pointy tip and then the final one. And this took me a while to get the pronunciation right. I'm sure you guys have seen the movie A Christmas Story where the dad gets the a few hundred times and he gets the package in it and fragile is written on there and he pronounces it fragile. Must be Italian. And so the last one I am calling the Ancille, which is the proper pronunciation, but it's a reference to the ancient Roman myth of the God Mars lost his shield that fell to Earth. And as long as the shield was in the possession of the Roman Empire, the Roman Empire would flourish forever. I love that.

Yeah, yeah. So this is a shield for the tip of your pencil.

There you go. There you go, full circle here. Yeah. So that's the entry level reward. And so for $22, basically, you get the bullet pencil with a stylus tip, protects the pencil, but you don't have the clip or the eraser feature on it. And it's going to actually be a two piece unit. Because one thing I was concerned about is if you had your pencil in the ansile and it was in your backpack or whatever, and you broke off the tip inside of the. The shield, how would you get it out? And so I'm gonna leave the stylus tips separate. It'll have that same little detent feature. And so you'll be able to take off the tube.

therefore, if the pencil were to break off, you'd be able to pull it out and use another pencil to push out the broken pencil and put it back together. So I tried to keep it simple on this campaign, like the clip campaign. I probably. If I ran the calculation, there are probably a million permutations of what you could get with all the different letters and icons and all. But this one is plain and simple with the three rewards.

It's Ohio.

Did you say that?

I did say that, but I'll repeat it again. There are three levels. The entry level, to get the ancilla, which is the tip shield with the stylus tip, that's $22. And then it's $33 for the bullet pencil TT, which I'm calling tactical tip or traditional tip. And then the bullet pencil st with the stylus tip is $39. And that includes shipping in the United States. And I'm sure that these parts are robust enough that I'm going to be able to put them in a bubble mailer to ship them worldwide. So I've tried to keep the shipping costs internationally down to make it more international friendly. So it's three extra bucks to ship the bullet pencils abroad. Now, I'm not going to ship a pencil with the shield internationally because that would be much more expensive. I'd have to put it in a box so the pencil wouldn't get broken. But in the United States, you'll be getting a pencil along with the shield.

A heartfelt thank you.

I'm going to try to help everyone out. What I was going to think of doing is that the page marker clips, I'm sure I'm going to have spares from the earlier campaign. And I was thinking to throw in a clip for everyone as part of the of my thank you to them to help support this campaign.

I don't really. You know, I was thinking of adding on things like maybe doing a black anodized version. I don't particularly like doing cosmetic things to the products. I like them to be in their raw, unadulterated form, for lack of a better term, simply because over time, the coating would scratch and wear off and maybe not look as attractive. And if it was raw aluminum, you can just, you know, get a Scotch Brite pad and scuff it up and it'll be looking bright and nice again. But potentially adding the anodizing, adding the bottle opener was one thing I was considering. I was also. Right now the system is built to exclusively handle the Palomino, and I was thinking if there was enough momentum that I would configure it or add a separate pencil that would be able to accommodate the smaller diameter pencils like the Ticonderoga and some of the others.

Yeah. On the current prototype it would be loose and so you would have to maybe put, you know, wrap it with some cellophane tape once or twice to get it to be nice and tight. But I'm looking at setting it up so it'll be universal. Now the eraser tip is going to be Palomino exclusive where it's the rectangular shape but the pencil stub and final configuration. It's my intention to make it accommodate basically any number two traditional shaped pencil.

Yeah. So I'm going to take a single pencil, cut it in half, I'll sharpen it up and I give a semi sharpen to the other tips so that it'll go into the bullet pencil. So you'll have one preloaded and you'll have one spare and then have the eraser loaded up already. And then you'll have a couple stylus capacitive tips as well. If you pick the ST model or the anseal.

Yeah. I had the same experience and I intend to reach out to the Palomino people and see what they can do about helping out in that regard because it seems like almost a bit of a cheat not to get the clip. Yeah. But yeah, it would be nice if you could have a spare clip or two. But I guess the clips are infinitely reusable as long as you don't lose them.

Yeah. I did have the experience, however, when I was test fitting the eraser that when I had it much too tight, when I tried grab that little clip with my fingernails, I unrolled that little rolled section. So I've got it tight enough now that that doesn't happen. But, but those, you can damage those things too, that's for sure.

Right.

I definitely will. I know that I've seen in the Instagram world that there are some other bullet pencils under development, and some people are saying, hey, I want more of a blunt tip, I want more of a pointed tip. And so I probably am going to offer an option or two, one of kind of a more tactical tip and one of a more traditional shape. And that's something that I hope to do this week and make up the prototype tips so that you'll be able to see exactly what they're going to look like. The other thing that I'm going to add that's not in the current photos is the tip itself is a little smooth, as shown in the prototype. And I'm going to give the tip a spiral groove to allow you to get much better grip on the tip. So it's going to be real subtle, so it's not going to change the appearance much, but from a friction and tactile point of view, you're going to be able to get a nice grip on the tip. So. So when you pull it out, you're able to flip it around.

Yeah, for sure.

Well, I had targeted $8,900, and I think we're at about 4,500 right now. So a little over halfway, and we've got about 18 days or so to go. So I'm pretty confident we're going to reach our goal. My very first Kickstarter, I was at like 500% of funding. And this is back to your comment about the art and science of how to run a campaign. I tried putting a slightly higher funding goal on this one because there is, you know, quite a bit of work in this project, and I wanted to make it. I wanted Everyone to really commit to it and to be able to make the investment from my end, including time and resources to get it done. So I'm confident that we're going to get there, and hopefully with this podcast and with your viewer base, we get the momentum we need to get over the threshold here in the next couple weeks.

No, I think it's really cool. And in fact, I don't know those guys other than what I've seen on Instagram. And I reached out to them and talked to, and I apologize because I'm terrible with names, but I've talked to both the guys that are involved in that project, and they're really great guys, and I think it's a beautiful instrument that they're putting together. And so, yeah, more power to them, hopefully. You know, if somebody doesn't like mine, they like theirs, and vice versa. And there's more than enough room, I think, in this niche of a market that hopefully we can both be happy.

And so, yeah, I'm really looking forward to what they're doing. I think it's neat how they've overcome the friction loading issue by putting a few threads on there. That's a great idea, and I think it's going to be a robust product. So, yeah, it's really neat.

And you know what's a little spooky is that the metal shop ct, which is the, I guess the machine shop behind the bullet pencil. I'm relatively new to Instagram and I had my field notes cover in development and then once I got on I started poking around and those guys had developed a field notes or memo book cover. It's kind of a clamshell unit made out of aluminum. And then so we did that coincidentally. And then this bullet pencil has been coincidentally. So I've been looking around my shop. I'm sure there's a spy cam in here somewhere. But no, it's really neat and I'm glad. You know, I think it's important for people in this, you know, kind of fanatical type arena to be cooperative and to work together because to be competitive and cutthroat and, you know, doesn't benefit anyone in this small little market. So I think it's super cool that these guys are doing the bullet pencil and I hope that they appreciate what I'm doing and more power to them when they do their launch on Kickstarter or whatever they're going to do.

Well, you know, I actually have an interesting connection. The company I work for now is called Coating Services Group where we do these special coatings on all sorts of metal devices. And we're also the OEM supplier to X ACTO for their Z series hobby blades. These are blades that are sharper and longer lasting than any hobby blades that are out on the market because we do a step we call atomic sharpening and we apply a very thin but hard layer of a material called zirconium nitride, which is about five times hard, harder than steel onto the very edge of those blades. And so I know the innovation team and the development guys within Elmer's, which owns the X Acto brand name. That's correct. So they've been talking about new pencil sharpeners and we've been doing some R and D work with them. Now I'm under an NDA about what those specifics are.

But they, they're constantly looking. You know, they have a continuous improvement program. They, as much as they can, given the economies of scale and all the other issues, build their products here in the United States. The Z series blade as an example, the raw blades are manufactured in New Jersey. We do the atomic sharpening and the coating here in the San Diego area. And so I've been with their innovation team several times and working on new designs on paper trimmers and pencil sharpeners and all sorts of paper handling and stationary related items. So they're looking at it, they're looking at a better pencil sharpener and hopefully someday we can invite Elmer's Exacto to come on the podcast here and talk all about it.

Sure. So for the metal pocket combs, I have a website, it's metalcomb.com they can go there and take a look at the stainless steel and titanium combs I have to offer on Instagram. I'm metalcombworks or Metal combworks. I try to post up pictures every day or two of the process, including the bullet pencils and all the other products I have. For the field assistant covers, I have a website, thefieldassistant.com and for the bullet pencil, I was lucky enough to get the URL bulletpencil.com that's amazing.

Yeah, I got bulletpencils.com too, Andy. So I'm happy to have those addresses. And they're basically holding pages now until the Kickstarter campaign is finished up. And then I have a Facebook page, metalcombworks. And anyone's interested in the coding work we do for X Acto. It's codingservicesgroup.com and you can always fire me in email, metalcombworksmail.com and I'd be happy to reply to any other questions anyone has and about any of the products that we offer.