Description
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"A ball-point pen is more complicated than it looks. It is much more than a tube with a ball bearing at the end of it. Its tip is designed especially to take advantage of certain properties of liquids. The ink is not just colored water, but a liquid selected for qualities that result in uniform writing.
Additionally, a ball-point pen can be more than an instrument for writing. By taking it apart, you can construct other tools: a balance, an eyedropper, a thermometer, or a prism. And these are only the beginning.
Tools made from parts of ball-point pens can be used in experiments that will help you learn how pens work. With the balance you make you can weigh the ink, for instance, or test how sticky it is. The following pages suggest further experiments, and give instructions on how to make other useful and fun devices with parts of the ball-point pen.
When I was initially devising these experiments, I used a Bic pen. This is especially useful because it has a clear plastic barrel. For many of the experiments, however, other brands such as Great Western or Write Bros. would work equally well."
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