The Pocket Clip That Puzzles Machinists

At first glance, the pocket clip on our pens looks like it was carved from the same block of titanium as the body. No screws. No weld marks. No visible gap. Just a seamless form that feels impossible to make with traditional machining, because it is.

But if you’ve ever looked closely and thought: how did they do that?

You’re not alone.

Retract Click Pen and Contrail Pocket Pen

Greg emailed us:

“Are the pocket clips laser-welded on? Because they look like it. And a perfect job too, might I add.”

They’re not welded. They’re not snapped in. They definitely don't rely on fasteners.

Instead, we machine each clip, press-fit it into a matching dovetail slot in the pen body, then machine again as one joined part. We don’t just attach the clip. We integrate it.

This approach gives the pens their ultra-clean lines and solid feel but getting there wasn’t clean... or easy.

Top view of pen cap manufacturing process

WHY IT HAD TO BE DIFFERENT

From day one, theContrail Pocket Pen had to follow our core principles: minimalist by design, precise in execution and built to last. Every feature had to earn its place.

We weren’t going to just bolt on a clip on the end. That adds parts, seams and potential failure points. The clip had to feel like part of the body — integrated, intentional and unshakably solid.

• Pens typically solve the pocket clip problem in one of three ways:
• Screwed-on clips (visually cluttered, high part count, can loosen)
• Sheet metal spring clips (fragile, can look and feel cheap)
• Snap-in inserts (limited lifespan, often breaks)

All are technically functional but none of them were what we were looking for.

We wanted something that felt permanent, refined and seamless. So we kept asking:What’s another way to do this?

Before machining the clip and body as one, this is what the clip looks like

EVERY BAD IDEA LED TO THIS ONE

The first viable concept was a monolithic clip — machining the body and the clip from a single piece of stock. Cost and complexity killed that idea fast.

Then came the question:Should we weld it?  

Welding? We do plenty of thin-wall titanium welding in aerospace but even we know the pain of making it clean, stress-free and invisible. Heat distortion and altered material properties ruled it out.

Fasteners were a complicated yet easy way out. Spring clips scratched the body.

Dozens of prototypes later, we landed on the method that finally felt right - a dovetail press-fit, followed by post-machining across both parts.

It was mechanically secure, clean-looking and honestly, really cool.

But even that introduced a new set of challenges:

• Tolerances had to be held within a thousandth of an inch
• The press-fit had to be strong enough to hold but not distort the pen body
• Alignment had to be perfect to allow for post-assembly machining

That's when the real work began.

Dave deburring the clip's dovetail post machining

PRESSED, THEN PERFECTED

Once we had a reliable press-fit dovetail design, we took it one step further. We put the assembled pen back into the lathe and machined across the body and clip as if they were one piece.

This post machining is what erases the visual line between the two parts.

We even add a slight chamfer around the cap rim to help hide the parting line, just enough to soften the light reflection and blend the junction.

Left to right: turned on the lathe, dovetail pocket milled, barrel and clip pressed together, final machining completed, tumbled and laser engraved.

Peter wrote us:

" I had to use a 30x jeweler’s loupe just to figure out how you attached the clip. Ninja level.”

Exactly.

There are also proprietary turning techniques we use that, in our shop slang, “smear the titanium.” You won’t see tooling lines, weld discoloration or gaps, just one continuous form that feels right.

It took dozens of design iterations, endless prototyping and months of trial and error to dial in the geometry. Once we did, we knew it. This was the right clip.

Prototypes

THE CLIP MADE THE PEN

When we started designing the Retract Click Pen a couple years after the Contrail, we knew we had a new challenge. We had to figure out how to make a clean and reliable retractable mechanism but do it in a way that worked with the pocket clip we’d already spent so much time perfecting. It was too cool of a feature to not try to make it work with theRetract.

On theContrail, the clip came later in the process. For the Retract, it was on the table from day one. Why? Because the retractable format gives us less to work with: thinner walls, tighter internal tolerances and a hole right where we used to hide geometry. 

That’s part of the fun though — designing something new and finding a way to carry forward a detail that already works beautifully. It's not meant as a shortcut but done because, honestly, we think this pocket clip just rocks.

Post-assembly, machined view of the Contrail

For both pens it's the same clip, same dovetail and same post-assembly machining. It just has different internal geometry to support the same seamless finish.

And this is the lesson. Simple design rarely means simple engineering.

It means we said no to 100 other ideas until we found the one that worked. Then we made it beautiful.

If you own a Contrail or Retract pen, flip it over. Take a close look. Now that you know what went into it, maybe it won’t look so simple anymore.

But hopefully, it will feel even better.

→ Check out the pens in our shop