• Pen making

So, well, sorry about last week. My head wasn’t in the right space to do one of these or to do much of anything but I kicked myself up the arse and got back into it.

First of all I tried something new. I had a piece of brass laying around the place from when I set the lathe up that I had intended to make into a pen for a really long time. It came from an alcohol fueled conversation with my brother in law after he had said he will help me buy the lathe. He liked the pens I had done up to that point and mentioned that he would like a pen made of brass. Well I managed to get a rod of brass and it has been laying around since waiting for a time where I could use it.

Well, I used it earlier this week. I think it turned out well. What do you think? Here is it capped, here is it uncapped. Here is the section before I sanded it. He wanted a gold nib and I had a gold clip on it too. It is my first time working with metal and is the first time I have turned metal on my lathe. I was kind of nervous and read up on it a lot, figured I needed to change the gear on my lathe up to the higher speed, ran it up to its max and used that to turn it and cut the threads at it’s minimum speed, I think they are about 2350rpm and 60rpm respectively.

I have started to make another pen which I will hopefully finish tomorrow. I love the blank the white swirls in it look super bright. I am going to try something a bit different by incorporating a roll stop into the cap. I have started to look into making my own blanks but at the moment it is a little too cost prohibitive for me, like a lot of things unfortunately. Maybe this time next year that plan will be in action.

The latest development however is that I have the tooling now to make pens that fit Jowo #6 nibs. Which seems to be the nib type that people prefer, I don’t know why though, I have not had any problems with Bock nibs. Just need to await receiving my first Jowo nib and making a few practice sections then I can make them for people.

I have sorted some blanks out to work on next. Not sure what I am going to do with them yet.

• Other stuff

My brain has seemed to return to normal, so yay for that. I am looking to expand on my abilities in the pen making game, I want to learn more aspects to it and maybe come up with some ideas that haven’t been done before. I have some ideas about different filling systems, I am not sure if they are feasible though.

Oh and too all you Americans out there, Happy Thanksgiving.

Any comments good or bad feel free to leave them here.

That is it for this week. Have a good week.