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Press a button on most pens, and you get ink. Press the lever on the Gennai Pen SL01, though, and you get mechanical theater instead. This stainless steel ballpoint, designed by Japanese artist Hidetoshi Nakayama and built by TACTICALGEEK, swaps the usual click-to-retract routine for a lever borrowed from telegraph keys. It’s a pen that behaves like a tiny machine, and that’s exactly the point.
Nakayama built his reputation on a specific look: mechanical steampunk, heavy on exposed screws, stacked metal layers, and hardware that seems pulled from a 19th-century workshop. His pieces are usually handmade in tiny batches, making them rare. The Gennai Pen SL01 carries that same visual DNA into a pocket-sized body, without smoothing over the rough, industrial edges that make his work recognizable.
TACTICALGEEK doesn’t simply slap a designer’s name onto a stock pen body. This marks the studio’s first project with Nakayama, and the brief was straightforward: keep his mechanical quirks intact while running the design through proper EDC engineering. That meant precision CNC machining, careful material choices, and quality control that daily carry gear actually needs. The result reads like a handshake between an artist and a toolmaker.
Up top, the SL01 behaves like a normal ballpoint. Push the button and the refill snaps forward with a crisp, satisfying click, the kind that tells you the stroke landed cleanly. It’s the familiar half of the experience, the part that reminds you this is still a pen you can grab and write with without a second thought. That familiarity matters, because it sets up the surprise waiting on the side of the barrel.
That surprise is a lever styled after old telegraph keys, mounted on the body. Press it lightly and the refill retreats with a smooth, weighted motion, closer to flipping a switch than clicking a pen. Push to extend, press the lever to retract, and you’ve got a full mechanical loop most pens never offer. Even with no ink extended, the lever still clicks under a thumb.
The pocket clip keeps that mechanical mindset going, instead of settling for a plain spring strip. Press the top of the clip and the lower section swings open, ready to slide onto a pocket edge, bag strap, or EDC organizer. Let go, and it locks shut on its own. It’s a small detail, but it shows the design team didn’t reserve the mechanical theatrics for one part of the pen.
Underneath the theatrics is a body machined from solid stainless steel, the same grade Nakayama favors in his own handmade work. After CNC machining, each unit gets hand-chamfered and polished at the edges, which explains why the details feel crisp instead of sharp against skin. The finished pen runs about 3.8 inches long and about 0.4 inches across the barrel, widening to roughly 0.9 inches at the telegraph key, and weighs about 2.2 ounces.
None of this mechanical flair comes at the cost of writing well. The SL01 takes standard Parker-style G2 refills, so swapping in a favorite ink takes seconds and opens a wide pool of options. It ships with a Schmidt P900M cartridge already loaded, a refill known for smooth, consistent ink flow. That combination keeps the pen in daily-tool territory, not shelf-piece territory.
Beyond the natural stainless finish, TACTICALGEEK offers a Cerakote ceramic coating that adds wear resistance and a muted, field-ready tone. A separate Timascus version introduces layered metal with natural color variation, so no two pieces look quite alike. At the top sits a set of hand-engraved editions crafted by artist Xunmu, featuring 24-karat gold inlay set into carved surfaces, turning the barrel into a small sculpture in its own right.
TACTICALGEEK backs every SL01 with a lifetime warranty, covering free repairs for damage that turns up under normal use, an unusual commitment for something built around this many moving parts. Carry it long enough, and the novelty fades into muscle memory: push to write, press to put away, flip the clip without thinking. Somewhere in that repetition, the pen stops feeling like a gadget and starts feeling like a habit.
The name is a provocation, not an audit. Tom Pearson’s debut furniture and lighting collection, shown at London’s APOC store during London Design Festival this September, contains 6,264 rivets, not 10,000. “Who knows where the rest have gone?” Pearson muses. That playful ambiguity runs through the collection’s title, yet the objects themselves are the product of strict material logic, shaped at every stage by the limits of a one-person workshop in Lewisham, south-east London.
Before there were joints, there was a tank. Pearson built an anodising bath in his studio and taught himself the process, not to streamline production, but to gain control over colour. Standard anodising yields a flat, uniform finish. Pearson wanted something irregular, so he went in by hand, applying dye with brushes, airbrushes, and pipettes. The results read like water suspended mid-movement: droplet-shaped patterns frozen across the aluminium surface, each panel uniquely marked by the gesture that produced it.
Designer: Tom Pearson
The tank had a second, unplanned consequence. Its fixed dimensions set a ceiling on how large any single sheet could be. Sheets that could not be welded to another without compromising the finish needed a different kind of joint, one that could be applied after anodising was complete. The rivet was the answer. What began as a process limit became the collection’s visual signature: rows of exposed fasteners, grid-like and deliberate, stitching planes of metal together in a way that makes the logic of construction impossible to ignore.
The decision to expose rather than conceal those joints is worth sitting with. Furniture design has a long habit of hiding its own making: flush panels, invisible fixings, surfaces that give nothing away. Pearson’s pieces do the opposite. Every rivet is a record of assembly, a mark left in a south-east London workshop where no stage of production was outsourced. The process is entirely his own, from the acid bath to the final fixing.
Shown at APOC, a space whose brief runs to contemporary fashion and singular objects, the collection served as display furniture and exhibition subject at once. Tables and freestanding shelves held garments; the aluminium held its own. Pieces are made to order, individually fabricated, and marked at every surface by the process that made them. They read less like production furniture and more like arguments about what metal can carry when the maker leaves the evidence in.
Pearson trained in speculative design at the Royal College of Art and previously co-founded the fabrication workshop Jamps Studio before establishing Tom Pearson Studio. The 10,000 Rivets collection is where that background becomes fully tactile. The constraints were structural. The craft was entirely deliberate.
