Making a BOLT ACTION Pen

Welcome back to the machine shop! This video I’ll be tackling a project I’ve wanted to revisit for 8 years; a bolt action copper pen. I manually machined a custom pen years ago as a Christmas gift for my father-in-law and have been itching to make one for myself. While I was able to find the old prints I threw together back then, I’ll start at the drafting board and put together proper engineering drawings. The will be made from both 110 copper and 410 stainless steel, with a few button head screws, and a nice ballpoint pen ink cartridge thrown in the mix. Most of the work will be done on the manual lathe, though I do get to visit the vertical milling machine and try out the rotary table chuck adapter I spent 3 long videos building. The final part of the pen will be a stainless steel clip that I’ll use a ball peen hammer to work harden before forming into its final shape. Enjoy!

inheritancemachining

9 responses to “Making a BOLT ACTION Pen”

  1. Yow Brandon,

    I am Pascal originally from Berlin, Germany. Currently I am studying mechanical engineering in Karlsruhe at the KIT (the german MIT). At the moment I am working on building my own espresso machine.

    I have been enjoying watching your videos, especialy the Bolt Action Pen. Would you be interested in sharing your drawings? I would like to adapt some of your features for my own desingn.

    Yours Truly
    Pascal

    • Hi Pascal!

      I do share all of my designs over on my Patreon. Feel free to check it out.

      Also, I am very familiar with Karlsruhe! I spent 6 weeks there for a study abroad in 2011 and we used one one of the classrooms at KIT for our Calculus III course. Fasanengarten-Horsaal was the building and Durlacher Tor was my stop 😁

      Thanks for jogging the old memories!
      Brandon

  2. Brandon:
    I am coming late to machining at age 76. I recently purchased a milling machine that is the same machine as your grandfather’s ( except it only has one head). It does not have a drawbar and I have been having difficulty finding the specifications for the drawbar. If possible I would very much appreciate it if you could reply with the dimensions of your machines drawbar so that I can fabricate one for my machine. Thank you for any help you can provide or the name of a source where I can purchase a drawbar since all of the sources I have contacted to date with thexmachine information indicate they require the actual dimensions.

  3. If you ever consider producing a small batch of these, please let me know! I would absolutely love to buy one!!

    • I’ve quoted a few as a limited production run but might be looking into contracting some CNC since there has been a TON of interest.

    • Hi John. The pen cartridge is a Waterman “Rollerball” I bought on Amazon and the copper comes from McMaster-Carr

  5. Hey, I was wondering if you could send the prints for this pen. I’m in high school and my teacher and I thought it would be an interesting project.