El Grande Finial failure

[jjjaworski]

I was wondering if anyone has experienced a finial failure on an El Grande pen.

I am attaching before and after pics.

I had a customer contact me about the black finial falling off her pen. The brass threaded insert that was in side is still holding her pen together. Seems odd to me.

I guess just about anything can happen when dealing with all the parts that are used to make pens. She has had the pen for over two years. I will be sending her a replacement finial so she can do a quick fix on her own. I see no sense in spending money to ship both ways for something so simple.

 

[toddlajoie]

The black plastic finial on EVERY El-Grande I have ever made has developed a crack from the center to one side (picture drawing a radius on the top of it...), which makes it constantly loosen up, which makes the user constantly overtighten, which eventually causes the entire thing to crack.

That, along with the fact the the tubes were somewhat variable in diameter, and sometimes too tight to get them easily pushed into the blank, made the kit just not worth it to me...

 

[jjjaworski]

Thanks for that insight. I don't care for them because of all the plastic parts which makes them too light for such a large pen. I have switched to pens like barons, sedonas and vails.

I made these and and churchills when I was first getting into pens. I don't even think about making a slimline anymore *G*

 

[zig613]

I have never had a problem with the cap. To prevent it was becoming loose I add Loctite to the threads. However, I have experienced the plastic finale on the end of the lower barrel section separating.

Wade

 

[jj9ball]

I've had this happen many times. The first time I ever did any actual customizing to my pens was because of this. So look at it this way... its a design opportunity. I took some acrylic that matched the acrylic I used on the pen and turned it round. I drilled a hole in it and glued in the brass insert. I took a measurement of the cap to see what dimension I needed to land on. Then I used the insert from a different el grande kit (yes I burned an entire kit to fix one part) and glued it into another scrap piece of acrylic. I chucked this up in the lathe and used it to hold my "new" acrylic cap and turned it down to proper size and polished it up. Whats really cool is that once you do this the first time you'll be customizing every el grande pen you make after that . I hope this helps.