Yes, we’ve introduced another pen kit and it’s a click action ballpoint.

It’s called the Notus and you can check it out here

The thing is though that pen turners don’t make click pens - right? They prefer twist action ballpoints and it’s true to say that there are far more twist action ballpoint pen kits available than there are clickers.

Why is that? Well, simply put, the perception amongst many pen turners is that click action ballpoint kits quickly fail and cease to work. It’s far safer to make a twist action pen because click pens are just not good enough. They’re unreliable and they go wrong.

Hmmm. The perception was once well founded, but is a little outdated these days, thanks to us (yes, I am unashamedly blowing Beaufort Ink's own trumpet ) but I’ll come back to this in a moment.

In the meantime though, have a good look around. Notice the people who use pens in the course of their work and everyday life, not just the people who are inspecting the pens on your craft stall. Look at the doctor, the nurse, the warehouse manager, the shop keeper, the service engineer, the teacher, the surveyor, the estate agent, the driving instructor, the travel agent, the sales rep....

Do they delve into their pocket and pull out a twist pen? No, they pull out a click pen, click the button using one hand, then scribble away (although I'm certain that many of them write very neatly).

You should also pay a visit to your local stationery store. If you’re in the UK, you can simply pop into WH Smiths. Look at the pens they stock - it will be a revelation. Hardly a twist pen in sight!  Unless they’ve got Bic on the packet, in which case they have a cap that often gets lost within nanoseconds, they are nearly ALL clickers.

The fact is that real people want a click pen in every day life, because with one simple click it’s ready to write. And yet pen turners make twist pens, largely because of what since 2016 has been nothing more than a misconception, so lets go back to the question of the quality of clickers for a moment.

It is true to say that many click pen kits can be prone to, dare I say it out loud, reliability issues. Goodness knows why, because you can wander into any stationery shop and pick up the cheapest of mass produced click pens that will keep on clicking for years. The fact remains though, that you can find references to other makes of click pen kit all over social media that warn others off, simply because of reliability. However, the resultant favouring of twist pens amongst pen turners versus the demand for click pens amongst end users has always seemed to us at Beaufort Ink to be a huge disconnect, so several years ago we set about designing and producing a click pen that could be relied on, specifically to address that disconnect.

We introduced it in 2016 and called it the Tempest. It immediately proved to be, and still continues to be an extremely popular pen kit, and to this day, barring accidents or mistakes made during assembly on the workbench, we have never had a single report of mechanism failure, or failure of anything else for that matter, and to the best of my knowledge you won't find any comments on social media that criticise its reliability - in fact quite the opposite.

The Tempest has proven itself to be supremely reliable and is possibly the most reliable click pen kit on the market.

Or at least it was until January this year, because we introduced a companion to the Tempest - the Notus - which has also demonstrated itself to be supremely reliable.

The Notus has come about purely as a result of feedback about the Tempest over the years. We always welcome feedback from our customers, and more than a few comments received about the Tempest have been along the lines of "can we have a clicker that’s as reliable as the Tempest but with a single tube please, as opposed to two tubes".

Job done - I hope you like it.

I also hope that our customers continue to address the glaringly obvious demand for click pens out there in the real world, and as ever, your feedback, be it good or bad, is always welcome.

Notus Pen Kits

Phil Dart
February 2024