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Berlin desk pen

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So, in order to procrastinate before starting the fancy pens (and also because I was on-call this week so I didn’t have much shed time), I wanted to try out a new pen kit. See, brexit (that gift that keeps on taking away) has started driving up prices for UK based vendors and I don’t really see there being a lot of potential for that to stop anytime soon. There are a lot of good UK pen kit vendors and retailers but if I have to pay an extra 20-30% on top of the price tag for customs, duty, handling fees and so on, well, there are a lot of good French and German and Dutch vendors and retailers as well, so I’ve been looking at a few.

The IAP have a nice list of vendors from all over the place, and I basically started going through each of those on the continent and looking at websites for something to jump out.… Read the rest

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Fancy pencil

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So the first of the fancy pens is going to be a pencil 🙂 Not the normal mechanical 0.7mm lead pencil but a clutch pencil (or I’ve heard them called lead holders as well). 5.6mm lead, so a bit beefy, and more intended for sketching than for handwriting. So I can actually use this for the shed sketchbook as well, for sketching out ideas for turning, which don’t seem to get as many dimensions as the woodworking stuff, mainly because most of the time the exact line of a piece is whatever random shape I wound up getting when I stuck the tool into the spinning thing on the lathe what the wood said it should be. 😛

This is the kit I’m using, and that picture is what Feinesholz says it should look like when you’re done, if you didn’t cock it up 🙂 It’s not hugely spendy (I mean, it’s more than the basic slimline 7mm pen kit which is about the cheapest standard kit I know of, but compared to fancy fountain pens, it’s less than half their price tag).… Read the rest

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Pen practice

PensWoodturningWoodworking

Friend of mine got married recently and he made his own wedding pens. Which were very pretty.

So I thought I’d like to try making a fancy pen or two. I got a pen turning kit a while ago, and made a single pen before six other things cropped up, but I did enjoy it so I’d been planning to make more and this got me off my ass to do so. First up, made a shedmade pen press, then went onto Feinesholz and Taylors Mirfield and spent a lot more money than I normally would on these things, and got some nice kits and blanks and tooling. First though, I wanted to get a bit more practice in before ruining a few hundred quid’s worth of raw materials, so I picked out one of the acrylic blanks I got when I bought the lathe, one of the padouk wood blanks I got at the same time, and thought I’d like to use the third pen kit to try out making a segmented pen blank.… Read the rest

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