Built to Mark: the Soul Built Marksmith
We’ve been busy here at Penquisition, prepping for the upcoming BWI Pen Show. But that hasn’t stopped us from taking a look at some of the new stationery items entering the market. One of these items is the titanium bolt-action permanent marker from Soul Built, called the Marksmith. Soul Built launched the Marksmith on Kickstarter, and later on Indiegogo, in 2020, but I was late to the party and didn’t know about it until I stumbled across an Amazon listing for the pen. The seller there, Engineerable, is a Parent/Sister company to Soul Built, so it made it easy to try out the market while still directly supporting the small business making it, and also taking advantage of Prime shipping and some Amazon credit I had laying around.
I don’t honestly use permanent markers very often these days, and I still have a handful of T-Mobile branded sharpies from my days in cellular retail so that I’m generally set when I have a need, but the clip doing double action as the bolt on this pen is what caught my eye. I’ve posted my love for the Urban Survival Gear TiScribe Go to my Instagram story in the past, which has a similar clip/bolt mechanism, to bypass having an extraneous bolt sticking out.
The Marksmith has a similar origin story to that of the DDC pocket notebooks that grew into Field Notes. Enginerable is an engineering design firm, and Soul Built primarily sells knives, but the story goes that internally they decided they wanted to have a Titanium EDC permanent market to use around the shop, so they designed it for themselves and then decided to market it externally as well. I can’t speak to the experience of watching the pen and packaging evolve from an internal tool to an external commercial good over the course of the Kickstarter, but coming in after the fact I was pleased with the packaging of the pen I received. Between the magnetic closure and the foam cut outs for both the pen and a spare refill, it definitely comes through as a consumer retail package.
Speaking of the refill, the Marksmith uses a fine point retractable Sharpie refill, with the back end trimmed down a bit. When I purchased my pen late last year refill options direct from Soul Built were rather limited, but they provided instructions to cut down the back of a Sharpie refill yourself. At this time, however, Soul Built offers a range of colors both in permanent marker and in highlighter colors, so that you can have a plug and play experience. One neat thing about the design of this pen is that the spring is integrated into the refill, so there is no spring to worry about in the pen barrel. The barrel, the nose cone, and the slider with clip attached are the only three components of the pen, aside from the consumable/disposable refill. This means that when you eventually change a refill you don’t have to worry about having a spring fly away, but it also means that chances of hacking in a different refill are slim to none. The Ultra Fine Sharpie retractable refill, for example, is not compatible with this pen, although I’ll circle back to a bit of news on that later.
While different finishes were tested during the Kickstarter, the only finish currently on the market is a beautiful brushed satin. This finish hides the seam between the nose cone and barrel incredibly well when screwed down, giving the pen the appearance of a solid piece of titanium unless you look closely. The clip and internal slider are both made from solid titanium as well. The brushed titanium on brushed titanium can give a little bit of a stiff feel, compared to the tumbled and anodized finishes on other bolt action pens I’ve tried, but the mechanism was never actually frozen or stuck in my usage.
The clip of the pen has a stepped slope which makes pushing down on it very easy. The branding on the pen is hidden on the side of the internal slider and only shows through when the tip of the pen is engaged, which makes for a really nice design touch. A little more branding wouldn’t bother me personally, but the minimalist way that it is done here is very classy. The one downside of the slider design, with the closed dome on the back end of the pen, is that when the tip is engaged there is also an open gap behind the slider that could potentially collect lint and detritus. In my personal usage I never ran in to an issue with this gap, and I don’t believe it could be removed easily without a major redesign of the back-end, so I see this point as being moot and not a a very big deal, but it’s worth being aware of.
So why do you need this marker over a regular Sharpie? Well, as Soul Built points out in their latest Kickstarter campaign (more on that later) you really don’t. A standard Sharpie does it’s job well for a lot cheaper, and if you want something a little more substantial in the hand, there have been shells you can put over-top of a Sharpie for ages, like those from Sherpa. Having a shell over the pen isn’t an option for the retractable models, though, and not everyone wants to have to remember to cap their pens in the middle of their work. Weight wise, a standard sharpie come in at 9.2 g capped and 7.2 g uncapped. The retractable sharpies are a little heavier at 14.0 g, but the Marksmith definitely feels more substantial at 49.4 g. That’s what you’re getting with a Marksmith instead of just a standard Sharpie, a larger more substantial and more durable pen. It writes exactly the same, but honestly with the popularity of Sharpie markers over the years, that’s a positive.
The best thing I can say about the Marksmith is that it works. Retractable pens aren’t so rare of course, but those usually use ballpoint or rollerball refills that are sealed so that they don’t dry out in the open air. The mechanism required for a wet-tipped implement, like a marker or fountain pen, is a lot more involved. On the fountain pen side, beautiful designs like the Lamy Dialog 3 have had their reputations marred by imperfect air seals that cause some units to dry out. By taking the entire mechanism from Sharpie, rather than trying to built out a new one, Soul Built has followed the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” school of design, and it really pays off.
For this reason, writing performance here is the same as with a regular Sharpie. Not pictured below is where it bled through the back of my writing sample sheet, which is 100% expected with a Sharpie. If you buy this pen it’s probably not for writing on paper, which is totally fine. There’s a need for implements to write on things other than paper, and why shouldn’t they be highly-engineered and made out of titanium?
The brushed satin finish Marksmith is on the market now, available directly from the Soul Built website, and also fulfilled by Amazon if you want to support the maker but still take advantage of prime shipping like I did. MSRP is $119.00, but it seems to be on sale pretty often for $99.00. Also worth taking a look at is a new Kickstarter campaign from Daniel Bauen, the man behind Engineerable and Soul Built. Daniel has put on Kickstarter a Black Ti version of the Marksmith, complete with a black Diamond-like Coating (DLC) available in either a matte finish or a satin finish. The text of the campaign does a great job of portraying why no one really needs a Marksmith, but they are still fun and functional. I’ve gone ahead and backed the campaign myself, in hopes that the addition of DLC coating will fix my one real hang-up with the original Marksmith, which is that feeling of brushed titanium against brushed titanium; the anti-friction properties of DLC make this incredibly likely. The Kickstarter is also a way to save a little bit of money at the moment, as the black version will retail at the same $119.00 MSRP, but the Kickstarter reward tiers currently provide a discount from this price. The Kickstarter is set to run for another two weeks, as of this publication, so definitely worth taking a look at if you’re reading around the time this review posts up, and you’ve read this far.
Mentioned as well in text of the Kickstarter campaign is that a different model of Marksmith that takes the Sharpie Ultra Fine refills instead is in the works, and should hopefully be coming to Kickstarter soon. I expect I’ll be jumping on one of those as well, and I look forward to seeing what else Soul Built has up their sleeve in the future.
Penquisition paid the full listed price for this pen on Amazon. The above post contains Amazon Affiliate and Kickbooster links.
