Author: newtonpens

I no longer make or work with micarta style materials.
Yep – Micarta.  Or at least a laminated fabric material.

From April 2012.
Okay – so I made some laminated denim with fiber glass resin from O’Reilly’s. It was about $50 for the resin, $6 for the denim (should have gone to the thrift store and bought big pants), and a maybe $45 for rubber gloves, plastic, squeegee, and some groceries, which don’t really count.
So not that big of an investment really, and I could have done it cheaper if I had thrift shopped.  It is time CONSUMING.

And the torture test.  🙂  (from last May 2012)

Here’s a bit of a quick torture test. No student had picked it, and the year is up, so I’ll have it until August at least. So while I have it, and to easily answer questions, I figured I’d be mean to it. Worst that happens is I mess something up and make a new part. No big deal.

I added more threads to the barrel and changed the shape of the section. I prefer a pinch.  Why’d I add more threads?  Because the cap didn’t engage with the barrel properly at all.  Now it’s perfect.

First test was to throw it across my tiled kitchen floor. Cap on of course. I don’t want to ruin the nib. No damage.

Second test was to flick the cap off my table across the dining room onto the hardwood floor. No damage.

Third test is to ink it. Stained like crazy, but I think that’s kind of cool. Note that this pen isn’t sealed. I don’t think it would stain if sealed with several coats of CA glue.  Just a note – all the Micarta pens I’ll make from now on will have either an acrylic or ebonite section.  So staining won’t be an issue.

I showed one of my students this pen, and as he was handing it back to me I slapped it out of his hand and across the lobby. He was shocked – but then I told him why I did it and he laughed. The converter shook loose.
Still no damage.

Pen in the freezer, on top of the ice. Was in there all night.
Didn’t hurt it. Though I’m not sure what was supposed to happen.
A little frost on the clip and nib. Ink thick – but still wrote.

Well – I finally did it. I cracked the cap.
I tossed the pen again yesterday, about 8 foot up in the air, demonstrating how tough this stuff is to my pen turner buddies, and the cap fell off when it hit the ground. THey all gasped and I just laughed. “FINALLY” I said. It wasn’t so much of a crack in the resin, but a separation of the material at the seam. So where the denim was layered up is where it split. It’s still scuff and scratch free surprisingly – now it needs a little super glue to hold things together. No big deal.  Note – and it did hold together beautifully.  It’s back in my pen case waiting for a student to grab it up.

Note of caution: don’t repeatedly throw, smack out of hands across a room, or toss your denim pens. Eventually it will split or crack.

A review

I do not do my own urushi finishes anymore and have no plans to do so in the future.  Thanks.

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I’m going to start offering urushi finish for some of my pens.  Ebonite for sure.  I still have a denim pen around here that’s been through hell.  I’m going to put some urushi on that just to see how it looks.

Hopefully the photos will show that the finish on the cap is a bit, um, rougher than that on the barrel.  A guy in Japan did the pen finish for a customer, and when I got it back I scratched it.  Funny thing is, the next day a little birdy delivered a tube of urushi in the mail.  🙂  So I was able to ‘fix’ the scratch.

It’s a different finish from the barrel, but still looks pretty cool in my opinion.  I really really hope the customer agrees.  I really like the texture of it.

But yeah, you shouldn’t touch the urushi oil when you’re putting it on the pen.  It will cause you to break out into a monster rash.  Urushiol is the oil in poison ivy and other nasty plants.

More practice with button fillers.  This is going to be fun.  🙂

I got asked today how big my oversize pens really are.  Hopefully this will help to give an idea of how big they are.  If you’d like an oversize pen photographed next to something different that you’re more familiar with, let me know.  🙂

The kids are with Gramma and my wife is at work.  I’ve got a few orders but I’m waiting on materials to ship in so tonight I thought I’d play.
A secret santa in Europe sent me a few sticks of celluloid and I thought I’d try to turn this zebra stuff he put together into a button filler.  My very FIRST button filler.  Yeah – I should have practiced on some acrylic first, but what are you gonna do.

Wow what a pain my very first button filler became.  If I had done one thing differently, no wait, two things, the whole pen would have turned out a lot better.  I just need to buy a few pressure bars now – I squished the one I had fooling around with this.  😛

You know, I think I may be able to salvage this thing.  I’ll have to do a bit of turning off and changing around and flipping and stuff – but I think I may be able to salvage this zebra celluloid after all.    Hmmm…  Good thing I left the back of the barrel so fat.  What I’m thinking is to take the button end and and drill it out, thread it to accept the section, and make a threaded insert/plug thing for the other end and turn off those jacked up threads.  Normally when turning on some threads, I push the die against the pen a little as I turn it – not with this stuff – big mistake.  It’s so soft that the threads just mooshed right off.  I went again and you can see that those threads turned out fine.

That was easy.

Now that I’ve made one my students are going to be bugging me for them.  🙂  That’s okay though.

I’m in a lot of videos but you don’t get a very good look at me for the most part.

I’m mostly pretty funny looking if I do say so myself.

Here we are.  Hair long and shaggy.  I’m planning on selling raffle tickets at school and letting the winner of a draw cut my hair and get a pen – maybe at a pep rally.  Hopefully will raise a bit of money for my art class – buy more supplies.

Got an order from Tennessee to make a couple small pens and have enjoyed these quite a bit.  It’s always fun turning new materials to see how they’ll turn out.

And of course a new section.  Made the oversize yellow pen for a local customer and I just wasn’t sure about the section.  He wasn’t either.  🙂  I made another and am very glad of it.  This is one of those times I wonder – WHAT WAS I THINKING?  I’m very happy with the new section.

Finally finished the celluloid pens tonight.  What was supposed to be one turned into two with three sections.

First – I wasn’t happy with the cap I made.  Too short and squatty lookin.  Not tapered enough.  Then a thing with how deeply I threaded the barrel and how long the threaded tenon on the section was and how it left a little bit of barrel threads unoccupied and just looked kind of funny.

Now you may be wondering why there’s no nib in these monsters.  Well, the customer also happens to be a pen maker and all he wanted was round sections with an 8mm hole bored through so he could fit a Delta oversize #8 nib and shape the section himself.  The photo in the link shows the #8 at top, then 6 and 5 nibs below it.

 

Also finally got around to tuning and grinding a few nibs for customers.  Two cursive italics and smooth writing fine and medium nibs.  Saw a video of Richard Binder going at an Edison Pearl with a red cutoff wheel for a dremel.  I’ve been using the green aluminum oxide wheel and it’s a little slower going than the cutoff.  I tried the cutoff tonight and absolutely LOVE it.  Quick and easy.  Then just a couple minutes getting it nice and smooth and I’m all done.  Very nice.

The two CI nibs on the left, then fine and medium points.

Drying out after a bath.