American Beauty Navy Camo

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A buddy of mine prefers matte finish pens. I found an American Beauty kit in satin gun metal at Rockler. The blank I chose is an AA Navy Camo. In the past, I've polished acrylic blanks then hit them with 0000 steel wool to dull the finish. But with this blank, for some reason, the steel wool left visible scratches. So I took WriteON's advice, and used Micro Mesh "backwards". It's not what I would call matte, but is definitely less shiny. And most important, there are no visible scratches.

 

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You can see the scratches here. I repolished it with 3M Tri-M-Ite, then reverse polished it with Micro Mesh wet.

 

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I also had an unrelated problem with the pen. I pressed the clip assembly into it, but couldn't push the tip/transmission assembly into the pen by hand. So I pressed it together, but it was almost too stiff to twist. My guess is there was maybe a little epoxy on the inside of the tube. I disassembled it, scraped out the inside of both ends, then pressed the clip into the opposite end. I was able to easily push the tip assembly all the way in, and it rotates very smoothly.