Today we came to Manaus to show you how the ballpoint pen is made. Let's go! Let's start with the pen body.
It is made from a plastic called polystyrene. In most pens, it will be transparent, so looking like this it looks like glass and this stuff comes in pellets. It's a format that looks like dog food, it's produced right here in Manaus.
The pellets will arrive at the top of the factory in a pipe, they are moved by a vacuum, they are pulled by this vacuum here. Afterwards, they will enter a thread. In the thread, they are being compressed and, at the same time, heated until they reach 210 degrees Celsius, which is a temperature very similar to what we use in the 3D printer.
Finally, a plunger will push this plastic, which is already soft, into a mold. The mold is the shape of the pen, it's the most important part, it's the heart of this thing here. This mold has 32 small holes where the plastic will be injected, it stays in there for a while to fit the mold, to take the shape of the pen body, and then cold water is injected to allow it to cool quickly.
All this lasts only 12 seconds and, at the end, we can already see the body of the pen coming out warm. The mold is such an important part, so expensive, that the body of the pen is already marked with the machine that made it and which hole the pen entered, meaning that, if there is a problem, you can know exactly where in the factory it that's happening. We've got a thread from the injection machine here, this thread is undergoing maintenance, we can see it better.
Here the plastic comes in, right? You can see that the space it has is quite large, right? That groove is pretty deep.
Then, at that point, the plastic starts to melt. It will be very pasty and here it starts to be compressed. You can see that the grooves are much shallower, which means that the plastic will be very compacted.
This weird tip serves to give homogeneity, for example, when the plastic goes in together with a colorant, this is where the two will mix and become a single color. The detail is that this piece is made of solid steel. Let's see if it's easy to lift.
All this plastic friction generates a static energy so that if I put my arm here it already makes all my hairs stand on end 4 inches away. There are people who think that the body of the pen is polished, that's why it's so shiny, so smooth. No, it is not.
It is the mold that is extremely accurate. Two interesting things about the body of the pen. First, it has this little hole that prevents a partial vacuum being created inside the pen, which would stop the ink from coming out.
So, you have to let air in for the ink to come out. And it's hexagonal, it has this shape, which is so that when you're at school or at the office, the pen doesn't keep falling off the table. With that, you have a flat part here, so it doesn't fall.
One more thing you can see if you look very closely at the pen is the injection point. That is, the hole where the plastic entered the mold to form the pen. You can see that it is very small and that means that a lot of pressure is needed to push all the viscous plastic into the mold.
For colored pens, the process is practically the same. But they have to put colorant. This we will see shortly.
The cap of the pen is made of another plastic, polypropylene. It is much more opaque and also much more flexible, this is important so that you can fit the pen cap onto its body, and the cap hugs the pen. It's much harder to take off.
The main raw material is white and, to add color, they use this colored pellet here. It's a solid colorant. All this is mixed in the equipment called the pot.
There is a thread here in the center of the machine that pulls the material that is at the bottom and brings it up. And that makes it mix it up really fast. Look, it's a little hard to believe that this mixture here is going to come out 100% red.
With the amount of white it has, I would guess that a very light pink would come out. Let's see the machine there. The machine that injects plastic for the cap is practically the same as the pen body, with the difference that this time it will have a cap mold that makes 140 caps at the same time.
Look how red it turned out in the end. There's nothing pink here, no. This little hole in the cap exists so that if childs swallows the cap, they doesn't get asphyxiated.
They can still breathe through this hole and, contrary to what many people think, it doesn't let the pen charge dry, because the ink was already made to be exposed to the air. No problem at all. If we hadn't added the colorant, this would be the color the cap would have been.
This is the natural color of polypropylene. The cap that goes on the pen is made with a third type of plastic called polyethylene. It's also a bit see-through, so to make these little caps white, they needed to add a bit of dye.
One interesting thing is that they come out of the mold with so much static energy that they want to climb the wall of the box. As this is a very small piece and it has to fit perfectly, they do a test to see if the piece doesn't have a burr, nothing that gets in the way when it goes into the machine. Then, the caps are placed on a vibrating table, then go in single file towards a channel.
This one is the plastic injection mold for the cap that goes on top of the pen. Here we can see where the plastic enters, very hot, from the back and it will be distributed through these little channels for each of the caps that will be formed. We can see a concave space here, it will form this convex part on top of the lid.
The other mould, which is the part that moves, we can see the rest of the cap body, that part that fits the pen. Inside, there is a pin that, when the plastic hardens, will come out and eject the part. Up here you can still see the water supply, which will serve to cool, and also a hook to be able to transport this here, which is extremely heavy.
This piece has to be made of steel, with a lot of steel, because it has to withstand a lot of pressure. We also got the mold that makes the body of the pen. So this piece that looks like it's made of bronze, which goes in the middle, it's the one that will open that space where the ink will enter.
And on the other side, we will open to understand how it works. It's that super polished, precise surface that will give the impression that the pen was made of glass. Of course, this piece doesn't work alone, it goes inside this gigantic support that we just saw.
And everyone is behind the camera here looking at me in desperation, because if I drop this here on the floor and scratch it, we lose the mold. Because any inaccuracy you have here, any little hole, scratch, misalignment will cause a leak in the plastic that will be injected here. You can calm down because I'm not going to take it down, okay?
The last piece missing from the pen body is the nib holder. In the more traditional model, it's made in this bronze color, and this machine behind me is capable of making over a million pieces a day. A nice thing that we were able to see here is this rest formed by the pipes that will inject the plastic.
So, the entire plastic injection machine will end up forming this part as well, but this is not thrown away, okay? In this machine that is behind me, simply when this comes out of the machine it is already crushed and goes in to become plastic again. So it's 100% recycled.
Filling the pen will be done a little differently. The polypropylene will be vacuum sucked, then it comes here to be heated and a screw, just like the one we've already seen, will push the plastic mass forward. The difference is that here at the end, instead of a mould, we will have an extruder, which is a machine that works more or less like the one for making pasta or the one for making bricks that we have already shown.
The plastic is pulled out to form a channel. Then, while it is still hot, it passes through a vacuum chamber. If you look here, you will see that we will have minus 0.
1 bar more or less, which is negative pressure. This causes the pip to expand a little. The more vacuum there is here, the bigger it will be.
Next, it needs to be cooled down, so there is a kind of pool here, about 11 yards long, where this little channel will cool down. At the end, when the plastic has hardened, the diameter of the pipe is measured by laser and it is logical that they are not going to make a pen 11 yards long. So, at the end of the process, this little channel needs to be cut.
This is done with a swivel knife. This drum under me is simply 200 kilos of pen ink. Her formula is secret, and the ink is imported, it arrives ready-made in this barrel here.
And I know it wouldn't be any fun if I didn't put my hand in this delicious ink. You know when people go to the oil rig and get the oil coming out of the bottom of the ocean, I'm feeling that way. The consistency is very sticky, very oily, because this ink is made so that absolutely nothing comes out.
Just imagine if you wrote something on paper and, after a while, the ink started to disappear? This will not happen. The real color of this ink is golden, but as it is in large quantities, it ends up being very dark.
Here we can see a little bit of gold and, the most interesting thing, is that I just passed my hand here and it has already started to dry. Look at the middle It's dry. And it is an ink that at the same time has to be liquid and dry very quickly.
The ink we just saw will be used here. The tubes arrive, they are marked with the batch and then the ink is injected into the tube. It has to be hot to flow well, so the entire reservoir and hose are heated.
Shortly thereafter. . .
Shortly thereafter. I put my hand here on the sensor that protects people from getting hurt. It's an elevator thing, but I'm adept at machines, I'll press reset and next and it's working again.
Right after that, the support for the tip will be placed in the channel, which already has the ink, and then comes that little pen tip that is made of brass and a tungsten carbide sphere, which is a very resistant material because this ball needs to be very hard. And it is because of this sphere that the pen is called a ballpoint pen. At the end of the process, 100% of the tips are scanned to see if there are any balls missing, the brass tip is not missing, if it will work at all.
Here I have a pen tip, it may seem like a simple thing, but here there is a lot of technology. This one in dark blue design represents the tip of the pen. Here we have the ball that is super hard, the ink gets in, occupies all this space and it won't come out because the ball is touching the brass edge.
When we touch the pen to the paper, the ball enters a little, starts to spin, it picks up the ink and, because it is further inside this metal structure, it will open a little space for the ink to come out along with the ball and scratch the paper . This ball on the tip is one millimeter in diameter. When the ink is placed inside the tube, a small amount of air may enter with it and this will cause the pen to stop working in the middle of its useful life.
This cannot happen, so they will place the ink inside a centrifuge and, when the centrifuge turns on, it will expel the air bubbles, the ink will be thrown towards the tip of the pen, and the bubbles of air end up coming out. And the ink is much more compact. In addition to making the pen last all the way, this also keeps it from leaking.
The time has come to put it all together. This machine will be fed with the ink tube, pen body, lid and cap for the other end. After everything you've seen, we have a pen that can write over a mile.
The next time you write a love letter, you will remember the whole process that you saw today in our video. Don't forget to give your thumbs up, okay?
