For the Smoking Enthusiast

When I was a boy, my father owned a machine shop where I became a Precision Machinist by the time I was 16. In 1967, at 21 years old, I graduated college with a Bachelor of Engineering degree, and worked for a large company as an Engineer designing high speed automation machinery. In 1968, at home, I designed and made the first AXIS clip using the brass tubing of a ballpoint pen refill. At that time, ball point pen refills were made of brass. I made the clip from a length of stainless steel spring wire. I then took some thin brass tying wire and tied the clip to the brass tubing. This is a picture of the original AXIS 2000 made in 1968. It worked great until the inside of the tubing got dirty, so I found a piece of steel rod that fit well inside the brass tubing and made a cleaning rod.

It worked great, and I used them for many years. I thought of manufacturing them, and marketing them, but didn’t feel it was the right time. Hand rolled cigarettes were not that popular. Now that the laws have been changing and more people are smoking hand rolled cigarettes I started building machines to help make them so that we could produce them in quantity. I designed a mouth piece so that it would hold the back end of the clip instead of the brass tying wire and a front triangular piece to hold the front end of the clip.