(upbeat music) - Welcome to Newton Pens, I'm Sean Newton.

This is my shop.

We're in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and I make fountain pens.

(upbeat music) I was an art teacher starting in 2010.

I started off making pens for my students.

The way I was set up was, buy a pen, give a pen.

So you would buy a pen, you would get that.

I would make a twin to that pen to give to a deserving student at the school I worked at.

After a while of doing that, I learned about guys making pens in their home shops.

I wanted to do that to be able to make a better quality pen to give to my kids, because a lot of the cheap pens that I could afford to give away weren't very good quality.

And you know, with high school kids, you put something in your pocket and it breaks pretty quickly.

After two years of pens part-time, I was able to quit teaching and make pens full-time, and I've been doing it for eight years now.

Once I start a pen, I'll start with the section.

The section is the part of the pen that you grip and hold onto.

If the section's not comfortable, the whole pen won't be comfortable.

So this part's very important.

This is also the part that holds the nib.

This is the writing point.

The writing point can have a fine tip or a wide tip, for a fine or wide line.

And this is the part that you can customize to give you many different types of writing experiences, too.

After the section I'll make the barrel and then I'll make the cap, which protects the nib when you're not using your pen.

And a cap can have a clip, so you can stick it to your shirt, or it can have a little stud sticking out for a roll stop, so that if you put it on a table, it doesn't just roll off onto the floor or just for decorative purposes.

Most of my pens store ink in a converter like this.

To fill ink in the converter, you put this into your bottle of ink and you turn the converter knob backwards and ink would flow up into this.

And then wipe it with the paper towel when you're done and you're good to go.

Fountain pens are messy.

That's part of the fun.

A pen like this is better in that you don't ever have to throw it away.

If you have a pen that you really like and you're willing to spend the money to have a pen made in the material you want, in the shape and size that you want, with the nib that you want, it's going to last you the rest of your life.

It's not something you have to buy over and over and over again.

You have to buy ink every so often, but a bottle of ink will last months or years, depending on how much you write, how many bottles of ink you have.

Fountain pens have been around since the late 1800s.

They've always been on the more expensive side.

People always used pencils, that was always the inexpensive, cheap option for most people.

But people with a little bit more money who wanted something really nice to write with or people who would save up to buy a nice pen to give as a gift, they would use a fountain pen; they would buy fountain pens for that.

In the 1950s is when they started coming up with systems like this to hold ink in the pen, because a part you can take out and replace was a lot easier to deal with, than having to change a rubber sack or a seal that was in the barrel that you would use to put ink in the pen.

This made pens more affordable and more people could use them.

And in the last 15, 20, 25 years, people have gotten back into fountain pens in a big way.

Especially with all the technology that we have around us, to be able to pick up something that's basically been unchanged since the late 1800s and write or draw with it, it's a good way to slow down.

Writing with a fountain pen is really, really nice.

They're a mechanical and engineering oddity.

They're just a lot of fun.

It puts a smile on my face thinking about it and I write with them every single day.

(upbeat music)