Dan_F
Member
Finished this a few days ago, the last of three blanks I went through to get one pen. For those who haven't tried an El Grande, they are designed to leave very little blank left on the tubes, so there are problems with translucent blanks. On the Mars, the blue is opaque, but the copper part is pretty translucent.
The first was reverse painted white, but after painting was unable to get the cap tube through the blank, so tried to drill out from 33/64" to 13.3mm, and blew it up. The blank was then trimmed even again, and turned down to check on how the reverse painting looked, and I decided that white wouldn't work for me, sort of bleached out the copper parts.
I successfully drilled out the other half of the blank to get rid of the white, and reverse painted in pearl blue, and turned it down and liked what I saw, so broke out another blank painted it pearl blue. Turned those down only to discover that I hadn't gone far enough on my trial blank, and that the blue paint really sucked the life out of the translucent copper component of the blank.
So out came the third and last blank, which was reverse painted in metallic copper, which I was finally satisfied with. I gave each section of the pen a slight belly in order to enhance the 3D effects of the blank.
Dan
The first was reverse painted white, but after painting was unable to get the cap tube through the blank, so tried to drill out from 33/64" to 13.3mm, and blew it up. The blank was then trimmed even again, and turned down to check on how the reverse painting looked, and I decided that white wouldn't work for me, sort of bleached out the copper parts.
I successfully drilled out the other half of the blank to get rid of the white, and reverse painted in pearl blue, and turned it down and liked what I saw, so broke out another blank painted it pearl blue. Turned those down only to discover that I hadn't gone far enough on my trial blank, and that the blue paint really sucked the life out of the translucent copper component of the blank.
So out came the third and last blank, which was reverse painted in metallic copper, which I was finally satisfied with. I gave each section of the pen a slight belly in order to enhance the 3D effects of the blank.
Dan
