Paint inside a Kitless?

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Gilrock

Gilrock

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Oct 18, 2011
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Tucson, AZ
I have a kitless pen I'm working on and the blank is Ancient Amber Lucite so it's fairly see through. I can see the chrome from the converter and I see inner threads and the edge where I have a step down on the holes that were drilled. I had the idea to tape up the outside and spray black paint on the inside of each part. Anyone ever tried anything like that?
 
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My concern would be the threads, specifically the paint scraping off from capping/uncapping.

In the future, you could design the pen so the internal threads are hidden in an opaque material, and then the reverse-painting should work!

If you decide to try it, please post pics!
 
Gil the best color I have seen the ancient amber reversed painted was with an almond. Lupe did that last year and it looks really good, but like Joe says, the concern would be the threading. So far customers have been receptive to the translucency of the ancient amber.
 
Yeah I think I'll just leave it as is. I posted this photo in the metal lathe section because I was talking about all the tooling I was working on for making the pen. In this photo is my partially completed pen and the mandrel I made on the metal lathe. I can see from the photo I need to sand/polish some scratches from the body.
 

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For this one I'd definitely leave it unpainted. It looks great as is! Yea it needs to be sanded some more, but that's no issue to do.

At the MPG I saw Dennis' (Soligen) kitless that he did out of the same material and he did what others have said. He made the threaded areas opaque by using alternating ebonite accent pieces. It was sweet!

I did a kitless click a while back that started out clear and I ended up painting it black. You can see where the paint wears on the threads so I'd definitely be aware of that. I think I've got a pic...

Unpainted:

100_4002700x375.jpg


Then painted:

100_4051700x441.jpg


You can see the painted threads in this pic pretty good. Even with a black section to try and mask it even more it still stands out.
 
Not a great solution, but I've used clear converters inside transparent/translucent materials to avoid showing the chrome plated part on the Schmidt converter. Exotic has them I know, and probably others.
 
I've never worried about it. If you look at what the big pen makers turn out, none of them are painted or colored on the inside. They show off the translucent materials with pride - and if you can see the workings then some people really like that.
 
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