Extra Long Converted Wood Pen- Revisit.

Wood Pen- Extra Long Converted Hero 332:

I have been studying the purchased readymade pens for a while but the few pens I had made myself kind of took a back seat ! This week , I have taken out some of them and would like to study them closely. Started off with this extra long pen, which is a cladded Hero 332.

At about 17.4 cm this pen is quite long, but does not feel that heavy as such, because both the inner Hero pen and the wood cladding are light-weight.

The background behind this pen is interesting. I had bought two fake Hero 332\s at Mumbai while joining my ship and these pens had stayed on with me. While on board I learnt about making pens on lathe by reading from the internet. Been lucky with the correct port sequence and managed to buy some kits from PSI and receive them at a US port and made some eleven pens. Some times later, the motor of the lathe machine burnt out and due to long sailing schedule , we  had to wait over a month to receive the replacement.  It is during this phase I went about making two pens, without lathe machine and without kits.

The wood was from the scrap from engine room, generally comes as packing material in the crates for spare parts. Whitish and soft , may be some low cost pine or similar hardwood. It is soft to turn and oily. That is as far as I can ID the wood. The grain in this wood is always faint.

I used the vertical drill to drill to create the pocket for inserting the parts of the original pen and created the square section by  hand  using sanding paper. The double taper of the pen body was inspired by the shape of a square file. It took me a lot of measurements along the full length to get the final shape.  The only part of the original pen  discarded was the clip as that clip would not match the new look. Instead I made one from a piece of scrap brass. With the pen body stuck inside the wood pocket, I wanted a different colour of the end finials and cap band. I used a mixture of saw-dust and araldite to make this. I also tried to make brass-dust inlay near the cap to barrel join as well as near the finials- but these did not come very prominent. Final finish was about 8 coats of CA and hand polished on grit 600 to grit 12000 micromesh in may steps. Because of the huge labour spent in making this unconventional pen I developed a special liking for the pen- it will always stay in my collection.

The mechanical part of the pen had no problem. Being a low cost fake, the filler mechanism was made of aluminum, recently changed this by taking a stainless steel one from a damaged pen. The nib is fine medium and required a little tuning. Now it is writing very smooth. 

I have made another square section pen during this time- will detail that sometime later. I call this technique "Cladding", and in future will use this to re-model less famous old pens. However experienced pen turners may not like the idea! Just a thought- this is unconventional after all.

Below there are some photos and a handwriting sample.

The Pen :

 

 Close up the attempted inlay work :