New(?) version of the pen trick!

[Guy McVer]

There is a widely known swiss army knife pen trick which was popularized by Felix Immler. The trick is to use the parcel hook tool to trap the swiss army ballpoint ink pen so that the pen is more comfortable to hold while you write with it.

I figured out my own unique version of that trick. My version still works if your swiss army knife doesn't have a parcel hook. As far as I know, nobody else has shared this before.


Step 1:

Pull out the pen and open the corkscrew.


Step 2:

Carefully twist/rotate the pen through the center of the corkscrew as shown in the picture.


Step 3:

As shown in the picture, close the corkscrew so that the back of the pen is pushed against the plastic handle/scale where the tiny straight pin hole is. This will keep the pen stable. Now you can write with it while holding the swiss army knife like a pen body.

When you are done, simply open the corkscrew and twist/rotate the pen in the opposite direction to remove the pen from the corkscrew. This part can actually be a little tricky at first. You need to learn the correct alignment of the gray plastic piece on the pen to allow it to untwist from the corkscrew. Once you figure that out, the pen comes out easily.

 

[hsherzfeld]

Spartan owners, take note!

 

[Guy McVer]

Bad news...

It turns out that this trick won't work on every corkscrew, and luck may actually be a huge factor in determining if it will be able to work or not.

So I have an abnormally large number of swiss army knives, and I used some of them this morning to do some testing with this trick.

Out of maybe 12 different corkscrews, the pen would only twist fully through 3 of them. That's only 1 out of every 4 SAKs, or a 25% chance to have a corkscrew that will work for this this trick. On the other 9 corkscrews that I tried, the pen would get stuck either halfway, three quarters, or roughly ninety percent of the way down.

What this shows me is that there are some real inconsistencies with Victorinox's manufacturing of the corkscrew. At first I thought it was just the age of the corkscrew which was making the difference, but that doesn't seem to be true at all. The three corkscrews this trick worked on were from (1) the custom SAK shown in the example pictures, (2) an old nylon scaled Camper, and (3) a new Compact where it doesn't matter anyway because the Compact has a parcel hook.

What I think this means is if you tried this trick on your SAK and it worked for you, then you simply got lucky. You just happen to have a corkscrew that the pen will twist all the way through. Most corkscrews probably won't allow you to do that.

Of course now I'm realizing that I did all this testing with only 1 pen. It would be really funny to find out that the pen itself was playing a role too, and that different Victorinox pens will also give different results because of small variations in the size or shape of the small grey plastic back piece. That actually wouldn't surprise me at this point.