WELCOME!

Welcome to my Custom Fountain Pen website/blog. I put this site together a while ago so that I could let some of my fellow pen enthusiasts and penmakers, as well as my customers, see what I have been up to lately in the workshop. I don't publish all of my pens here, but good percentage of them.

A Little About My Pens: I love doing fine work on the lathe, which is what got me into this work. That is, I enjoy the focus on the details of a project - the material and colour selection, the form, the fit and finish of the pen. I also test all of the my nibs before shipping. I fill the converter, run ink through the nib and feed, and write with it. I spend a significant amount of time smoothing and adjusting the nib of every pen that I sell. My goal, with each pen that I make, is to create a writing piece whose fit and finish will impress you when you first pull it out of the packing, and that will serve you well as a great writer when you fill it up with your favourite ink.

Have a look at my posts to see some of the work I am doing lately, or see my pricing guide in the link below to the right, or check the link to my current inventory of already-made pens (usually small, as most of my work is by commissions/orders).

Or, if you are interested, you can see some of the work I have done previously in my Custom Pen Gallery on Photobucket!

If you have a Twitter account, I am @drgoretex

If any of my posts generate particular interest, I will pin them as links on the right (eg 'Basic Nib Adjusting 101').

* ORDERS: Please contact me at kencavers@gmail.com to place an order.

* PRICES: Please see the link on the right side of the screen 'Pricing Guide' for an idea as to the cost of a pen.

* REVIEWS:
Have a look at the bottom of this page for some reviews done by previous buyers!

* HOW LONG WILL MY ORDER TAKE?:

IMPORTANT NOTICE: I am happily overwhelmed with pen orders. This gives me great joy in that my work is so well received, but saddens me that I cannot fill orders anywhere near as quickly as I would like. I am still trying to work through back orders, but if you have ordered from me and heard nothing for some time, feel free to email me and ask how things are going.
I still only make these pens in my spare time, when work and family time permit, and even then the productivity slows down during the coldest winter months thanks to my unheated workshop.
Given that I make these pens primarily as a hobby, I also reserve the right to pursue some other interesting pen projects in between filling orders.
I apologize for long delays in order fulfillment, which may in some case be over a year and a half. In the meantime, you are welcome to contact me to inquire about new pen orders, or to check up on a previously submitted order.

-Ken Cavers








Thursday 11 June 2015

Modified Bamboo Style Fountain Pen In Rainforest Acrylic - With Grain Matched Cap to Barrel



Hello all,

I received this lovely acrylic from a repeat customer who wanted just the right looking material for her Bamboo pen.    A perfect choice, I have to say!  The mix of browns and greens give it a wonderfully forest-like look, while the linear streaks of colour add a definite organic wood-like feel to it.   I was very happy to have opportunity to work on this one!


The buyer also wanted to modify my usual Bamboo style to give it a more symmetric, balanced look.  And while this in not particularly likely to be found in real Bamboo, this is after all a very whimsical take on the real thing, so why not?  The addition of a second node to the barrel added some very definite challenges to chucking the piece to work on the end inset, but on the other hand, what's the fun of hobby work without challenges?


The biggest challenge was finding a way to make the cap and barrel grain match up so that it would look as though (because it actually is) it is cut from a single long piece of material.   The problem lies in the fact that the barrel must extend beyond the point where it meets the cap, in order to screw into the cap.  This necessitated turning a separate piece of this material and insetting it into the barrel from which I could fashion the threaded part that screws into the barrel.   Ya…a bit finicky.  The readers digest version is that it was more complicated than the usual.  But, it seems to have worked out very well, as the grain match shows quite nicely that this the body of the pen was made from a single piece of source material.


To finish the whole set off nicely, I made a matching pen rest out of the same Rainforest acrylic, and inset the ends like the pen itself.

The nib is a two-tone JoWo broad nib, and the fill system is cartridge/converter.

Thanks for looking!

Ken

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