I hadn’t planned to write a blog entry today. But we received word this morning that one of my best friends in the hobby has died, and that’s all the excuse I need. Al Mayman was one of the truly good people. An experienced collector and dealer, he never used his knowledge to gain an unfair advantage; rather, he went out of his way to share information and to give the other guy a fair deal. The last of a long series of deals between Al and me is not yet resolved, in fact, because at the Philadelphia show in January he brought me a user-grade Waterman 52 with a to-die-for artist’s nib. That pen’s peregrinations are the subject of another blog entry, but the point here is that we still had not settled on a price he’d accept. (I offered him more than he thought was fair, and he flatly refused to accept it, saying simply that we’d sort it out later.)
Al Mayman. Photo © 2007 PenultimateFountainPens.com
Al was the kind of guy who was your friend thirty seconds after you met him. I knew him only for about five years, but it feels as if I’d known him forever, and his passing leaves a terrible hole in my heart as well as in the community of pen collecting at large. We will all miss him.
On a happier note, today was the day for Pinkie’s weekly visit. Pinkie (Susanna Rose Binder, my granddaughter), comes every Friday morning and stays with us until it’s time to take her home for family dinner at Kate and Don’s. Today Julie was here, spring break having released her from college for the week, and I was busily customizing nibs for tomorrow’s shipment. Pinkie was watching me, and when I turned away from the bench to stretch, she instructed me, “Work some more.” (Pinkie turned two this past December 30.) A brief round of adult hysterics followed, after which Julie used my phone to take this shot:
Had I known my daughter was going to loose a pint-sized Simon Legree on me, I might have thought twice about congratulating her on the occasion of her second pregnancy!
After lunch I was able to turn to restoration work, and the prize of the day was the completion of a brown Hundred Year Pen. I’ve been photojournaling this pen’s resurrection, and here are the pix.
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1. Here is the pen’s barrel as it arrived.
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2. Here it is after I’ve turned it down to remove all the crystallized barrel wall material. The center at this point is still filled with crystallized stuff.
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3. Here I’m drilling out the remaining crystallized material.
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4. With the barrel prepared, I’m now turning a tenon on one end of a short length of amber acrylic rod.
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5. This is the barrel with the new acrylic end fused in place.
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6. Fast-forward a week while the fusing solvent flashes off. This is the first pass at trimming the new end to size.
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7. The new end is now cut down to the right diameter, and I’ve trimmed its end to the proper length.
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8. After creating the final slightly domed end profile, I’ve wet-sanded the acrylic to finish its shaping.
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9. Here’s the new end with the sanding slurry cleaned off.
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10. And here it is after the final polishing.
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11. At the other end of the pen, the cap was missing its clip. Here’s the cap with the remains of its aluminum clip rivet cleaned out, ready for installation of a replacement clip.
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12. And here, for fun, is the burgundy cap that sacrificed its clip for the brown one’s greater glory.
Installation of the clip consisted of bedding the clip and rivet into a bed of epoxy and flaring the rivet slightly to hold it in position while the epoxy set overnight. And here is the final result:
I can’t be sure, but I think this pen’s owner will be happy to see it again.
