MattTheHat
Member
I just thought I'd introduce myself...
I'm a long time collector of vintage fountain pens. I've been building pens for about a year now on my 10x22 lathe and 8x30 mill. So far I've done about a hundred, all given to friends as gifts and customers.
A few weeks ago I started doing some small custom touches such as turning matching finials, blind clips, single-ended designs, contrasting cap rings, indexing flats, and soldering up copper wire blanks.
Trying to figure out how to do those thing without any kind of machinist background was a bit challenging. Then I ran across the forum here yesterday. I sure wish I'd have found you folks a few weeks ago! The library section has numerous articles that would have saved me a huge amount of time and frustration. As it is, I'm sure I'll learn better ways of doing these things by reading through the library more closely.
Most recently, I've been playing with some tooling to polish the insides of the more transparent blanks to keep the drilling scratches from showing through). I noticed the article on painting the insides of the blanks, which sure would be a lot easier! I'll have to give that a try.
Lots of cool information here!
-Matt
I'm a long time collector of vintage fountain pens. I've been building pens for about a year now on my 10x22 lathe and 8x30 mill. So far I've done about a hundred, all given to friends as gifts and customers.
A few weeks ago I started doing some small custom touches such as turning matching finials, blind clips, single-ended designs, contrasting cap rings, indexing flats, and soldering up copper wire blanks.
Trying to figure out how to do those thing without any kind of machinist background was a bit challenging. Then I ran across the forum here yesterday. I sure wish I'd have found you folks a few weeks ago! The library section has numerous articles that would have saved me a huge amount of time and frustration. As it is, I'm sure I'll learn better ways of doing these things by reading through the library more closely.
Most recently, I've been playing with some tooling to polish the insides of the more transparent blanks to keep the drilling scratches from showing through). I noticed the article on painting the insides of the blanks, which sure would be a lot easier! I'll have to give that a try.
Lots of cool information here!
-Matt
