Three Indian Pilot pens

Three Vintage Indian Pilot Pens

Paid a visit to Pen Hospital yesterday, there were some fine vintage pens including one Eversharp  marbled celluloid with missing nib and filler lever. And there were these Indian pilot pens from 1970’s. I picked up three for just Rs. 300/-, these are almost in mint condition. All these are eyedropper filled pens, I clearly remember having seen these pens with some of our fellow students-definitely 1970’s.

The pens had minor scratch marks on the body and required a  mild polish with grit 12000. Ink test was good, the medium fine nibs write very smooth.

Here are the photos for lovers of Indian Pilot. Please could anyone remember the model numbers ?

 The nibs :

Atrax Gold kit- Inspired by praying mantis figure.

Atrax  Gold kit- Inspired by praying mantis figure.

I had always contemplated finishing this semi- finished pen body. Now at home , without the support of a lathe machine, I chose to use a kit.

After a long matching and mixing session , finally decided upon using the Atrax Gold kit I had with me. The clip and end finials of this kit seemed to match with the mantis image. I do not know why this pen body always reminds me of a mantis, perhaps the articulated segmented look.  Nevertheless  I would call this mantis!

The body is made with steel and brass with four segments of wood rings. There is very fine misalignment due to the wobbly lathe machine , but unless looked closely these are not visible.

For the fitment I had to little bit modify the inner tubes using a die grinder [  my only tool ahead of the stone age!] and for the pen press I used a C-clamp !

The wood part retained the original CA finish, perhaps a few more coats would have done it better. But I decided to avoid the messy stuff for now.

Overall I am very happy that this one tuned out just the way I wanted.

Please  let me have your comments and critiques.

 

Atrax Chrome Kit pen : Tulip bud shape.

Atrax  Chrome Kit pen : Tulip bud shape.

I made this pen last night.  As usual, I do not have a lathe at home now, so I used a previously  made part finished  pen body and an Atrax kit.

This is the semi-finished body I used from stock.
 

Regular Atrax Kit pens come with parallel sides, but in this one I have tried to add a curvature. The overall shape is inspired by tulip bud. Seemed to

 look good.

 

The Body

 

 

 

This pen has come out with almost no construction flaws. I am happy that I could do the assembly and finish all by hand.

 

 

The wood is some scrap wood from ships engine room , perhaps packing crate for machinery spare parts. I had stabilized this wood by a vaccum chamber made on board at near to 1 atm vaccum, but the medium  used was ordinary wood varnish . Can not say how effective the stabilization, but the wood had become much better for turning, ie no chipping etc and the dust was very smooth.

 
 

 

This pen can not be posted. Writing balance is good, though the section is very slippery. The nib is excellent.

This is my first work on Atrax kit , I liked this simple and elegant

 kit. Handwriting sample :

 

Vertex Steel Cap

Vertex Steel Cap  

I had made this pen much earlier but might had forgotten to post in this blog. It is made with Vertex magnetic steel cap Kit. The section is octagonal , good looks but very awkward to write with. Hardware is rhodium plated Chrome colour.

Inspected and tested this pen after quite some time. This is a reasonably well made pen, in reality there is not much for  the turner to do in this pen except the barrel tube.  Rest is supplied in the hardware.

In this one the parallel barrel wooden tube is slightly oversized in diameter than the end couplers. This affects the look of this pen. Perhaps I  would need to find a way to bevel down the ends.

The pens wooden part has retained the CA finish quite well.. Overall this is fine looking pen, but to a trained eye the flaw in the barrel machining would become apparent.

Writing was smooth and easy with the iridium point nib. I found that holding the pen at the section coupler gives a more comfortable grip.

A fine pen for the collection.

Sample handwriting:

The Ultra large Shot gun pen:

The Ultra large Shot gun pen:


I had sometime back,  seen a Pilot Maki art pen in some airport showroom that was really very much oversized. Kept wondering for days as to what size of a hand would be needed to use that large pen.  Anyway, I had been contemplating for days to make one similar sized pen  and last couple of days that idea seized me.

Now at home I do not have a lathe, so kept thinking how to make one. Well I had a few part finished kit-less pens lying with me and searching for the largest kit, I found a Shotgun kit. Let us try.

 

This was the kit-less part finished one that  I chose- it was made with a thick brass tube cap and aluminum tube barrel, the external part of the barrel tube were threaded for the cap, both ends. To use this  with the kit required me to cut off the barrel extensions and using a hand reamer to bring the aluminum tube to correct size for fitting the couplers from the kit. The process took me half a day and sore hands but at the end the barrel tube came off at the glue leaving the wooden sleeve. That was good in a way, I could use the brass tube from the kit and with no further re-sizing could fit the couplers. To the pen body is ready.

For the cap : this brass tubed cap already had a brass collar, adding the cap part ferrule would give a excessively long cap band. What to do- but I kept it because I wanted a long pen. I managed to find a die-grinder at home and the size moderation in side the tube to fit the kit part was not much difficult.

So in effect the pen was ready, only needed a little more polish.

Now I wanted to try one more technique , that is , a simple inlay design. My daughter helped, she is good at drawing. A simple vine branch with a few leaves. This pattern was drawn with a pencil first and made 0.5 mm deep grooving using curving knives. The grooves were filled up using a microtip permanent marker- chosen black colour , in retrospect green would have been more lively.

Now comes the hard part. These grooves with the permanent ink fill and the body in general were coated with CA. Five successive layers were given with drying and rough sanding in between and finally a full sequence eight grade hand polish by micromesh stick. Did three sets of this treatment to finish. Lots of time and struggle as I did not use a lathe!

The finished pen looked somewhat close to what I imagined. But the wood part brightness became darkened due to a minor part of the ink dissolving in the CA and a small amount of brass getting mixed.

 

 Compared with a standard sized shotgun pen: This pen is 18 cm long , capped!

 

The design by hand  :

 Close up :

 

 

I

Inspected closely by a lense, there are very small pores on the surface. This is on the top CA layer. Later I would give  more coats of CA and mix a lemon yellow dye to the CA to eliminate the blackish hue.

 

Generally happy with what I started out to do, here is this oversized Shotgun pen.

Definitely not a practical writer, perhaps none in this size are. But does look good as a showpiece.  Welcome comments and critiques.

Over & Under Shotgun Kit Pen- Revisit.

Over & Under Shotgun Kit Pen- Revisit.

I had detailed about this shotgun  kit pen earlier in this link :

  http://www.soumitrapencollections.blogspot.in/2013/10/over-under-shotgun-handmade.html

Still do not understand why this kit is called Over & Under!

Most  other  pens I have seen  made on this hardware come in two colours , different for the barrel and the cap. But I had chosen same colour for the barrel and cap. Actually this material is not wood but bamboo.  I took an old sledge hammer handle piece and machined the blank out of it- a piece of scrap on board ship that would have been incinerated anyway!

The  finish used on this pen was 6 to 7 coats of CA after graded sanding and later finishing the CA with grit 600, 1200 and final buffing using all eight grades of micromesh stick finally upto grit 12000. After all that done the pen does not look very impressive to me, but is a hot favourite with my daughter- how widely person to person likings differ!  The pen body however has a very smooth tactile feel.

The writing experience with this pen is good but the pen is a bit too large for my hands , particularly after posting the top heavy cap. I would wish the section was made curved rather than parallel. However I am sure many others like this pen. The original nib was very smooth, but this pen had fallen down on the tip and got damaged. Since then it has taken me too long to go through cycles of repair, grinding and smoothing. Finally now the pen writes good again. But the damage has created small corrosion areas near the tip of the nib [ please see the macro shot].

 

 

 

 

 

Though personally this is not my most liked writing instrument, I like this pen for the impressive looks of it. I was fun to inspect this pen after a few months.

Pasted here is a handwriting sample and some recent photos of this pen.

 

 

Look the back of the nib-small pitting corrosion marks, these appeared after the damage repair!

Apollo Infinity Kit- copper body pen- Revisit.

Apollo Infinity Kit- copper body .

This is a kit pen , made from Apollo infinity Chrome kit.  Originally I had made a wooden  pen using this kit [ a photo is given] but somehow did not like the fat looks. So broke that up to salvage the kit and in the process destroyed the brass tubes. As you don’t get any supplies on the ship, I decided to make a tubeless body. By now I had turned many brass rods , so wanted another material. Took up a pure copper  rod- only learn later how difficult machining copper can get!  If  you are turning or drilling at slow speed the tool tip or drill bit will stick and braek [ I was not using any coolant] and if you raise the turning speed the metal will over heat and the shavings will melt and stick [ unlike brass] and eventually the hot job-piece would bend. Given a choice, I would not make another pen like this again. !!

The pen came out in good shape, fit and finish. But bad luck, it popped out of my boiler-suit pocket and fell through a height of 25 feet onto steel floor, thus shattering the cap finial inner bush. Had no replacement, so stuck with Loctite 396 and it is going on. Do not want to buy a full kit to replace only this part. May be some retailer can give me one, but have not yet approached anyone.

In spite of the relatively heavier weight the pen has an excellent balance in writing. However posting the cap makes the pen too large and heavy for me to control. The iridium tipped nib of this kit is very smooth [ medium point]. I particularly like This kit, for the good looks and the nice shape of the section.

Maintaining the shine on the body is a regular problem as the copper tarnishes [ I personally do not like that dark look, see a photo] , so every time I pull out the pen from the underworld, I give it a good shine with brasso. Even the chrome plating on the decorative cap-band has started to look like gun metal after so many brasso polish.

Later if I have time, I would want to machine a bush and repair the cap finial. Somehown the extra work carried on the pen has created a bond, so this pen would stay in my collection..

 

Posted below are some photos and writing sample.

 

Put the pen on a notebook cover photo, liking the result ! Sample Writing using Sulekha Pink ink.
 
 

Tarnished in storage.

 

 

After Brasso polish :

 

 

This was the fat old original !! Good riddance.

 

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 :

Safe Storing of the Pens

Pen storage is an important part of pen collection, but mostly neglected. my father had some 150 good pens of those days. All of these disappeared over the course of time- I would say mainly
because these were never kept in a dedicated storage place. Loosely kept here and there , all of them disappeared.
 
That said, another truth is that, low budget collector like myself would barely cough up the money for the pen itself, but as for the storage, it is a no no. Most of my pens are kept in the 48-pen Wallets made of faux leather as shown below, sourced from e-bay for around $ 30/- each. Though logically each of these is cost equivalent of two to three of my average pens, - every time I have actually purchased one there has been a long debate session within myself.
 
Recently, I took one of these to a local Bag-maker for a sample, this guy has agreed to make same ones for Rs. 400/- each. I have to actually see how is the quality, praying for now, at least let these be functional !
 
All other storage arrangements I checked over the internet , belong to the luxary end and are much more expensive. Some people have advised me to contact the people who manufacture Jewellery boxes in Bowbazar Kolkata and get some custom made. Somehow I have not yet walked up to those shops.!!

 

The Right Flap

 

The left Flap

 
                                          The Full View  with the separator and closed view.