Write On! – Talking Titanium

Talking titanium is an unscheduled detour to our regular-scheduled programming for this blog, but there have been quite a few questions recently about our use, or lack of use, of this material. This topic is one we frequently talk about on our YouTube Livestreams, probably every month going back to last fall, we've talked about titanium pens in some fashion. But the questions keep popping up, and an easy way to refer people to the answers rather than retyping them, is to put up a blog and link to it. So lets talk about titanium, and why you haven't seen very many titanium pens since 2023.

Though we often said that we wouldn't make pens out of titanium, that all changed around 2019 when we bought several new machines that offered us far more flexibility in how we manufactured pens. As we went through the process of learning how to maximize those machines, it became clear we could make titanium pens on them. And in late 2020, we made the decision to get an order of titanium rod so we could make our three retractable pens out of this material. This turned into a bigger deal than we imagined and the machining process took considerably longer than expected with the Titanium Bolt finally hitting the website in late 2021. We moved directly into machining the EDK and Retrakt out of titanium and continued working through the problems titanium brings with it. The Titanium EDK hit the site in 2022, and the Titanium Retrakt was launched later that year. In that same year, we started to see the beginning of a contracting market in terms of our sales and customer interactions in general. As we reached the end of the titanium manufacturing run and the end of they ear; we began looking to source another batch of material, however, two things happened at the same time that made us stop and reconsider. Our yearly sales declined dramatically, specifically in the area of titanium and other higher priced products like our more premium fountain pens. Secondly, the cost of the same amount of titanium rod had risen dramatically. The decision to pause titanium manufacturing was made in our January planning meetings for 2023, though we still had some titanium parts on hand that we could roll out over time, there wouldn't be any new manufacturing with that material.

It's difficult to convey how much different titanium manufacturing is compared to aluminum, brass, or copper. Titanium is vastly harder and requires special tooling that is considerably more expensive than the tooling we use for other materials. Stainless steel is incredibly hard as well and requires special tooling, but is "safer" because it won't cause your machine to catch fire whereas titanium can do that if you're not careful. There is this idea that titanium is really strong, which is true, but raw machined titanium is pretty easy to scratch with sharp tooling or even when two titanium parts hit each other inadvertently. Those scratches are incredibly difficult and time consuming to get out of the material. The amount of work involved in our titanium machining runs was so much more than we ever imagined, more than four times the machining time as our aluminum pens, and they required hours of post machining sanding and tumbling before they could be assembled. All in all, it was an eye-opening experience, and when we talk about titanium now, we have a lot of first hand knowledge and understanding on why the spectrum of prices is so massive when it comes to this material.

Which leads me to the next question, why is your titanium pen so much more expensive than company (fill in the blank)'s pen? A valid question, when you are regularly advertised a titanium pen for 60 dollars, why is the Karas Pen Co Titanium Bolt 120 dollars. The companies out there selling titanium pens under 75 dollars are almost all sourcing those pens from overseas manufacturers. There are plenty of brands that market themselves as US manufacturers of EDC pens and tools who simply design products and have them made overseas. Some of these companies made their own products at one point in time, and when they began to explode in popularity, they needed a fast and inexpensive manufacturer for their products. This doesn't mean those products are in any way defective or function poorly, plenty of those pens do exactly what they purport, they're just not as transparent as we are in terms of their branding.

The second way a company makes pens out of titanium and sells under the 100 dollar mark, is by designing a pen that doesn't require the use of titanium rod. Many titanium pens on the market are designed in a way where 90% of the pen body is one piece and is made out of grade 9 titanium tubing. These pens feature other elements made out of grade 5 titanium but they are usually small pieces like the tip, clip, and a top piece that keeps the parts all together. However, the use of tubing significantly cuts down on machining time as well as broken tooling. The tubing usually requires just some threading work, and maybe a slot milled into the side or a single very light external pass to clean up the finish. That's a ton of savings in time and money when all is said and done, plus this is no way detracts from the durability of the pen or functionality, the only negative of using tubing is that your design will be limited from an aesthetic perspective which is why many of those pens from different companies look very similar to each other.

We've always made a point of keeping as much manufacturing in-house as possible, and as time has gone on we've even begun bringing more of that manufacturing in-house to control the quality and the pricing of those parts of our products. We source parts of our products from other companies when it makes financial or business sense. There are some things we just can't make ourselves, like nibs, springs, refills, or ink. Other items are just far cheaper for us to work with another brand known for making those parts and have them do it for us, refills and nibs come to mind, but also our Vertex grip sections are partially molded by a local plastics company before we get them and finish machine them. So we don't have a mindset of outsourcing because we are, at heart, a manufacturer.

When it comes to designs, none of our pens are designed in a way that would allow the use of tubing. Our two-piece body pens like the Bolt, EDK, Retrakt, and Modals all require the use of rod to get the final look of the pen. These models are designed differently with an external look that is relatively unique in the pen community. It's one reason we don't brand our pens, they speak for themselves. People know a Karas Pen Co pen when they see it because it stands out in the pack of pens that largely look a lot alike. This limits our use of less expensive methods like titanium tubing or other methods of making metal pens. A long time ago we had a slogan "we make it out of metal" and that's still the case, except to clarify, "we machine it out of metal" and for our pens, that means rod stock.

Let's come back to the talk about titanium, and where this leaves us. We're not saying that titanium will never be an option on a Karas Pen Co product ever again. But the price of titanium has continued to go up since 2021. The market for titanium pens and more expensive pens in general has continued to cool. For those reasons, we're continuing our pause of titanium production. However, we have a considerable amount of titanium "rework" pens. These are the pens I mentioned above with scratches or requiring a lot of handwork. This type of product "loss" occurs during every manufacturing run. There is a percentage of pens that are damaged beyond repair, a percentage of pens that are damaged and require some form of rework, and a percentage of pens that go straight into assembly. Normally, we do the rework immediately because it's not time consuming or difficult. With titanium, we just set aside all the rework pens until we could dedicate some manual labor time to get them in sellable condition. We'll be focusing on that project quite a bit over the next several months, allocating a lot of time to sanding, polishing, and tumbling these pens. Which means, in a few weeks we'll have some batches of titanium pens pop up on the Karas Pen Co site. These aren't new production pens, we haven't gone back into production on titanium. These are the last remnants of pens from our 2021-2022 production runs. They'll be fully functional, looking as good as the titanium pens we sold before, and likely the last of the titanium pens we'll sell for quite some time.

That's the Shop Talk on titanium, hopefully this clears up any questions you have on our titanium products and production of that material in general. If you're looking for one of these pens, subscribe to our social media platforms they'll be notified first when these hit the site.