* Pen making

So, we made it through the year and at times it was tough, very tough. I am sure that it hasn’t been a good time for most and I just wanted to say thank you for following my progress in these trying times and I really appreciate your feedback. If I can help distract people from everything I will. Anyway on with the rest of it.

So I had planned a lot of things for this update. I had planned to go over what the year has taught me and how things are going with the pen making and getting things up and running to a safe and efficient manner in the workshop. I was going to go over a few things that I had introduced to help with those efforts in the hopes that it would help other pen makers just starting out. I was going to go over the mistakes I had made and how I got over them in a very brief overview. Those things will have to wait as I am exhausted and I left the writing of this to the last minute… again.

With that in mind I shall go over what has happened over the christmas break (spoiler: I made a lot of pens). Other than that it was pretty normal apart from not being able to see anyone. Anyway I digress.

Pens, yes, pens. I made a couple of new designs. I combined this with a few other things. I now have triple lead taps and dies to do the cap and barrel threads, what this means is that I can have quite deep threading barrels but it only takes one or two turns to undo the pen. There is of course, like many things, a disadvantage to this. Firstly the taps and dies themselves are so damned expensive, single lead tap and die set would cost £20, triple lead tap and die set costs £190. Then the other disadvantage is that if you have a patterned blank or a design that requires the cap to thread onto the pen and finish in the same place every time then triple threads are unsuitable for that as they will have 3 starting point to go on. The Zeus design for example will never have triple lead threads on them as the ends wouldn’t match up, I mean I will give it a go but I can see now that it won’t work.

I have been working with metal a lot more too. Making steel and brass bands on the pens, the steel, being stainless, is a very hard material to work with. I plan to get some nickel at some point but that is expensive.

Now the new designs. The first design takes the aesthetic of a wing and plays with the shape of that. I filed off the ends of the barrel to a point then on the end of the blade of pen I filed flat and then put another slant on it to the rest of the barrell giving it a unique shape. On the cap I filed the end to a point. The cap I am not 100% sold on so I may change that. Anyway here are some pictures. [Cap on](https://i.imgur.com/UfstaXs.jpg) and [Cap off](https://i.imgur.com/KOnDAcT.jpg), finally [detail](https://i.imgur.com/LzYtn7k.jpg) of the [end of the barrel](https://i.imgur.com/MWjakuq.jpg).

The other design I have been working on it one that has threads that screw on further into the cap so that the step from the barrel down to the part the section screws into is set further back. This I have found works well for over size caps but I am not sure how it will work for flush caps. I shall give it a go and report back. Anyway here are the pics [cap on](https://i.imgur.com/TMtyWif.jpg) and [cap off](https://i.imgur.com/NRmqDf1.jpg).

Any feedback on the above designs would be greatly appreciated.

I am working on 2 different runs of special pens, I will show them next week. I have a few done but not many.

Oh and happy new year, let’s hope this one isn’t as much as a crap heap as 2020 was.

As usual feel free to give suggestions for where these updates go in the comments. Please take care of yourselves and your loved ones and stay safe.