Curious on price difference between pen based on materials

[Bob6794]

Said best here. I deal with machining and production costs regularly and this is spot on. Not to mention machining Ti in any way can be really tricky if you have not done it before. Not to mention costs on it can be VERY steep just for the raw material.

Not really, there was a lot more into it than I realized when it came down to machining that I learned from this thread. That is the broad answer and I wanted to know the details and what was going on behind the scenes. Knowing all these little details on how things are made really makes me appreciate the work and quality of a product such as a finely made CNC pen. Before I just thought it was a nice pen that someone designed in a computer program and put it in a CNC machine and pressed start and it was done. Now that I know more about what's going on I have a whole new level of appreciation of it.

I didn't realize how much the consumables (drill bits for example) could cost and how much fast they can be eaten up by Ti, how using a CNC wasn't a load the machine with a part and push start and grab a cold drink and wait for it to be done. Not to mention all the little things I learned which make it far more difficult than I thought it was.

 

[scale3.5]

"when I sit down or kneel down I can stab myself in the leg with the pen and disloge it from my cargo pocket"
maaan, forget that shit, buy a good vest. 5.11 sure will do for the first time. i forgot it as a nightmare.

 

[Bob6794]

I think I would look funny in college wearing a vest to carry my pen. On the other hand if I go that route I would have to get one that says "Writer" on it just because I occasionally watch Castle to see who catch the reference.

I actually ended up buying a different pen that uses the same type of cartridge which is something I want to test out to see if it writes good enough for me as I tend to use light pressure. And it is pretty close to the same size but slimmer when it's in the closed position and I am going to test out carrying it with it rubber band to my wallet which is nothing more than my credit cards/id's with money wrapped around it. With any luck after carrying this for awhile it will tell me if the Investigator is a viable option I could pursue. I don't want to mention what I bought on this sub-forum as it's Rick Hinderer's and I bought a competitors, but if you're curious I started a thread in Gadgets & Gear asking for advice and eventually posted what I picked up.

 

[Need2Know]

It's not our (forum contributors) job to teach "you" the skills of machinists and manufacturing...I'm pretty confident there are schools for that.

As for the making of Investigator pens...hop over to YouTube, find Hinderer's channel and Bam! There's a video of Rob R. making Investigator pens.

 

[Bob6794]

Wasn't the intent I originally wanted to know if there was something special going on with the titanium pen, and what drove up the cost over the other material pens as the price difference from an uneducated view seemed quite high when you compared $60 to $200 for a different material when all I thought you did was press "start" on a CNC machine.

I found out that wasn't the case and that it was just a lot more difficult to work with and took more time, and wore down parts faster. And those parts are significantly more expensive than I thought. A good chunk of what I learned was from the posts of what people made here and telling me to take a look at a competitors pen as they posted a lot of information on how they built theirs. That provided me all the answers I wanted and quite a few interesting bits of knowledge that I didn't originally want to know but found interesting between the posts and that research.

And I am not a machinist or manufacturer as you can tell, going to school to become one to simply learn what drives up the cost of a titanium pen compared to an aluminum one is ludacris. And it's quite hard to search for an answer when you don't even know what the right questions to ask are, which is why I came here.

Oh and if you're referring to how I mentioned I wanted to know the details or how things worked behind the scenes in post #21. I meant was there more difficulties with working with certain materials (titanium) over other materials which drove the cost up. Because for all I knew when I made the first post they could have needed a different CNC machine, specialized tools, more steps, different processes, etc to get the job done and that could have even been specific to just their pens, I didn't know. I honestly expected an answer confirming such a thing or some other simple answer I haven't thought of, instead I ended up learning a lot of what went on when they use CNC machines which wasn't my intent but I found very interesting. And then I mention how I have a new level of appreciation for it because I now have a better idea of what's going on when it's made.