Good ideas don't stop because you've left your desk.

This pencil came from a personal need: a super durable, practical, pocketable EDC pencil that didn't feel like a compromise when I was using it. And that felt good, solid, inspiring to hold, and felt equally at home in my machinists' apron at the workshop, jeans at the coffee shop, or suit pocket in a formal setting.

I had the idea several years ago, and sketched and sketched it in my ever-present pocket notebook (with inferior pencils and collection of loveable but leaky fountain pens). Iterating again, again. Before bed one night, I felt like I'd gotten it right... so I didn't go to bed. I went to my shop and cranked out #1 at 3am.

The following night, people noticed it at dinner, asked about it, and were infatuated. Someone else saw it at bar, tried it out, absolutely couldn’t be separated from it, and had to take it home.

So I had to make #2. And that brings us to now.

Like everything I make, I believe in minimalist utility that embraces evidence of life lived through materials that age gracefully, and acquire character with use. I have a strong aversion to things that won't outlive me, and base my design around "sustainability via intergenerational, heirloom quality."

No detail is overlooked. I use the best tips of this style I can source. I'm cutting non-standard threads with very difficult to source tooling, for very specific mechanical and geometric reasons. These are made as *units,* not collections of parts: essential final machining steps are actually executed with the pencil fully assembled to ensure a smooth hand feel and perfect alignment.

Every one of these pencils is made *by hand* in my Newburgh workshop (in NY's Hudson Valley). "By hand" can mean different things in different contexts, but in my case: except for the consumables (erasers and tip), every component is precisely machined from solid bar stock on a pair of manually-operated lathes from the 1950s and 1960s. At this point in my machining career, a lot of things are done intuitively by feel, but when it's time to measure to the thousandth of an inch, even that is done by hand with analog measuring instruments (micrometers, vernier calipers, etc). Heck... I have no need for a CAD file, so these are entering production with nothing but a dimensioned pencil-and-paper engineering sketch.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no Luddite. I love technology... but not for its own sake. These will be held in hand, so they deserve handmade attention.

Your ideas have intentionality and soul, and they deserve a writing instrument that follows suit.