From Garbage to Beauty

This all started when my son was looking at a pile of skids that I had brought home to heat my studio.

He ended up pulling out 1/4 of the wood for his stash.  While I was out there the other day thinking hey this kid has a good eye for wood grain.

So I took one of the smaller pieces and because I have always admired Pilot's wood pen though what the heck.

There were no kits used on this pen.  All the inserts were made up and epoxied into the wood.

I went with clip less on this one because it is going to be my desk pen. Because I don't like to post pens I made the body 3/8 of an inch longer to give it some weight.

For a nib I used a nice Cross F  that had in stock and it has made for a nice looking pen.

Now all I have to do is make up the cap and it is complete.

Well I got the cap done up today but the same wood looks a lot darker.
Not sure why.  Thickness of wood, temperature, humidity.
There were a few voids in the wood that I filled with a black epoxy to
match the trim and it is done.

My daughter loves it so that is the main goal.

Sooo Blue

I got this material in on Friday and I had forgotten how much I love this crushed velvet material.

This was the same type of material that I made my first kit pen out of about 18 years ago.
I used one of the new clicker units from Richard Greenwald's site.
It is so smooth with no noise at all when it is advancing the refill.

It is made to take Parker @ Itoya style refills.

The clip I had from a bunch of parts that I got a bit ago.

I love this blue.

A Pen Repair That Got Away

It all started out with really great intentions. 

I was given this Modern Parker Duofold by a friend of mine but it had one small problem.

Well my thought was it would look great with a black lip at the bottom of the cap.

As things usually go when I am in the studio with the fire going things get a bit out of hand.

Here is what I ended up with.

I was able to use the clip as well as the final on the cap so if I ever come across another green or black cap I can still put it all back to original Parker Duofold.

In the mean time I have a new pen for my pocket.

A new click pen

This was a color that I have been trying to get a pen made out of for a bit now.

I was finally able to get it done this weekend.

It will take a Parker style refill but right now I have the Itoya  .07 refill  in it.

For the clip I used the Parker AD Pen clip from the 70's and 80's

Afternoon with my Freaky Daughter

Today, my daughter came home from Oakville for Easter weekend. She brought her cat along, and some new, funky ideas.

My daughter is in the process of stretching her ears, and at the moment she's resting at an 8g, which is 3mm.She plans to stretch up to a 2g, which is 6mm. She asked me if was possible to turn some earrings, and I thought I'd give it a go with some scraps from my box.

Starting with some fun acrylic squares in a medley of colours, I started to round the square edges, while my daughter took all the pictures.

Here it is on the lathe, with the router coming in to shave off another half millimetre of acrylic. This is probably the most time consuming part, as there's a lot of excess material to be rid of.

Eventually I got each square down to 7.4 millimetres for each plug. 

After, I shaved off the little X mark I put on each square to find the center.

 Looked like this by the time I shaved it off.

 Carved out the shaft, which needed to be only six millimetres.

This also took a lot of patience.

A lot of patience.

Cut it down to size, and smoothed the end off on a fine grit sandpaper.

This is what the unpolished plug looked like. 6mm shaft, 7.4 mm flare.

This is where the fun began.

 I sent the plug flying, and my daughter had to go after it.

Looking good- just about ready to go.

One last run on the buffing wheel--

And there she is, ready for wear.

This set we gave an equal flares, so they're also reversible. 

I think she likes them.

Another ED Conversion

The problem with this pen was 

"the section hole is too wide for the nib/feed and is also allowing air leakage through the threads with the barrel"

So he had a spare nib unit that I made up a new section, threaded it to take the nib unit.  I also made it to take a converter for him.  I think that it will only be used as a ED so I sealed the threaded nib unit into the section so that hopefully it will work out as an ED

On the original section there was a small O ring added, but then the section would not sit tight to the body of the pen.

By making a step inside the body I was able to get it so the O ring sets just inside so the section sits tight to the body now.

Making A Pen To Use The Zebra Style Refills

I have always like the refills that Zebra has for their F series ballpoints but they did not seem to work in any other pen that I had so I built one.

This has no clip because my wife is trying it out for me and she is not keen on clips.

Very simple and clean design.

Royal Ball Point

I got this little pen a while ago because I thought it was sort of cute.

It is only 3 1/2 inches and does not seem to have any cap.

The refill was all dried out of course.

But I was able to cut down a Bic refill and now I have a pen that writes but no idea about it's history.

Anyone?