Sometimes when making your pens I goof up a bit. And by a bit I mean that I have to start ALL THE WAY OVER. 😀 It makes for good practice, even if it’s sometimes quite frustrating. Here are a few examples of my goofs recently.
First, a group shot. The yellow one in the middle is probably the 5th or 6th pen I ever made a year and a half ago. I’ve come a long way. 🙂 I use it now for inking and testing my #6 nibs.
The black ebonite barrel in the back? What could be wrong with that? How bout this…
While cutting the threads something went awry (I fixed it for the next barrel I made) and the thread cutting tool GOUGED into the barrel hard. In hindsight I should have just trimmed the barrel back a bit and extended the threads farther up the barrel, but it was late and I was tired, so I cut the barrel off and started over. 🙂 It’s okay, the new one is better.
But what about the blue pen? Check it out….
Yeah, super goof. I drilled the barrel out, threaded and shaped the barrel, and cut it away from the rest of the blank. The problem? I cut too close to the hole, and when shaping, I noticed how incredibly thin the end of the barrel was. So I took a drill bit and shoved it through all the way, breaking the end away as you see in the picture above. The end was so thin I could push it in with my thumb nail. Now it serves as the tester pen for my #5 nibs. 🙂
And a picture of the replacement barrel, after some shaping. 