Fast forward a couple of years, by this time several work days had been lost to pencil hunting and a number of investigative internet searches found very few solutions to the (albeit minor) problem, all of which seemed unsuitable and somewhat cumbersome.
Attaching a chunky device to the side of one’s glasses or safety glasses that holds a pencil, didn’t seem like the right way to go about it. One strong magnet, a paperclip and a bit of gaffa tape later, a solution had been found at last! Until the pencil inevitably got shorter and needed replacing. Instead of reapplying a new strip of tape to another pencil, the drawing board was approached and the Pencil Mate was born!
After a brief trial in the workshop, several friends were offering enthusiastic praise for the little gadget, so we submitted a patent application and started experimenting with different materials to make several prototypes.
Trying to work out how we could make a pair of glasses ferro-magnetic was challenging and we had lots of ideas: