Update is early this week as it is my birthday on Saturday and I am going out with friends tomorrow, due to these two things I won’t be in a fit state to do an update until Sunday at the earliest. It has been a good week.

So I have taught myself some new techniques this week but I also had a bit of a mishap. Unfortunately the victim of my mishap was my daughters pen once more. I snapped the new blank, I think I knew what I did wrong so hopefully it won’t happen again. I turned it from square to round and started to turn it down, well I think I must have turned it too far before turning it around and turning the opposite side as it snapped. I bought some replacements and I am just waiting for them to turn up, next time I will succeed. This is the current graveyard of blanks.

So the image in the main post, that displays what I started with and what became of the blank that was once mangled. I am quite proud of it. So, how did I get the sweet taper to the end on a metal lathe? So I got the cylinder to the right diameter and measured where the end of the hole for the converter was. I then set the lathe tool to be about 10mm back from that point and took off a thin sliver of material. I repeated this process moving up the blank towards the end creating steps. When I had hit the end of the blank I took the live center away and reached for the file. I smoothed out the taper and put a curved end on it. As you can see here I think it turned out ok, rough but ok.

When I came to make the cap, which I did today, I got it to the rough diameter and cut it from the blank (hopefully I can get 2 caps from the one blank). I drilled out the centre with a 12.5mm drill bit and then put a 9mm drill bit to finish the hole so that the nib fits. I then reached for the file and put the curves on the cap, I made it so that the end was domed and it tapered in to the barrel. Like a doughnut I forgot to time how long it took. The next pen I will try to remember this and report back. One I had finished I sanded it and I put lacquer on both. I had a bit of a cockup the other day and dropped the barrel while it still had wet lacquer on it. Totally ruined the finish so I sanded it again and reapplied. Here is my Lacquer station, basically it’s just a bit of 2 by 4 with some 5mm x100mm wood screws through it that pens and caps can be mounted on and then sprayed this I put in a storage box so as I spray the lacquer will rebound and I will get a better coverage, well that is the theory anyway.

As always I welcome comments and criticism. See you when I am older, and have a good weekend, I will.