Thread: I've made some new pen friends

I'm not wild about generic black scales. Replacing busted-up old plain black scales with new plain black scales just seems to be a waste of a creative opportunity. The trouble is, most of the really fun stuff is targeted toward the knife guys and the pen-turners, with their stingy 5-inch blanks. Occasionally, lightning strikes and an exotic material shows up in the right size for razor scales. Usually it's too short, or too narrow, but sometimes it all works out. These three razors are wearing scales made from materials originally destined to be wasted on pens.

First up is a Frederick Reynolds in ebony. This was my first CA finish, and, barring one cosmetic flaw, turned out quite well. I finished this one in October and used it almost exclusively for three months, so I feel it's already paid me back for the work of applying approximately 1500 coats of CA. White acrylic wedge, stainless collars and NiAg pins. This thing was a real learning experience, and as I discovered this week while doing two more sets of wood scales, I need to start writing things down so I don't have to keep re-learning them. Anyway, I'm quite pleased with the outcome here, since this is a phenomenally nice blade.



Next is a Wostenholm IXL. This blade came to me with a lot of rust and smashed scales. It's been lightly sanded and buffed and rescaled with this very, very loud yellow-and-red swirl acrylester. The wedge is brass, with brass collars and pins.



Last up is an Itsapeech. The pen blank I used was almost exactly the right length to make these scales; there was maybe a millimeter to spare. The photo doesn't come close to showing the depth of this material, or the metallic copper swirls. It's interesting stuff and really came to life on the buffer. The blade got light sanding and buffing, and the scales were initially traced from the original scales (all three were traced from their respective scales) but the official Itsapeech scales are very weak at the pivot, so I widened that end. The spacer is plain-jane black acrylic, the washers stainless steel and the pins NiAg. I left the scales a little on the thick side here, to capture more of the depth from the translucency. I may need to try again on the photo.



Just think, if I hadn't got to these materials first, they could have been squandered on some obsolete technology like pen-making or worse... bottle stoppers.

I love the material on the last one. Got a link for it?

It's Blue Copper Lava Lamp Acrylic from Woodcraft.