I Made A Mistake So I Get To Keep It

[jj9ball]

I made this blue pen recently. I thought when I was making it that I should just intentionally make a mistake so I could keep it. (wife gets made when I spend a day in the shop and don't sell what I make... and I have a LOT of pens.) I got all the way through and inked it up only to realize that I made the hole for the bulb part too small. Not even too small as much as exactly the right size so that it binds a little when you put the cap on. So I called that a mistake and kept it. It has a fine bock nib, a #20 bulb. It is 5 3/8" long capped and just a tiny amount under 5" uncapped. The cap does not post. The cap to body threads are 14mm single starts. The threads on the bulb are 9mm X .75... in hindsight I needed at least a 10mm hold to let the sack clear properly. You may notice in the picture that the sack/bulb is twisted slightly. This is an illustration of the binding problem. The rest of the pen works great. Its been in my pocket for a week and is currently full of Bernanke Blue. I would love to hear any questions and comments... both good and bad. Thanks for looking. One more thing. The only time in the history of me making pens that I got a dead on grain match was on this pen. You can see it in the picture of the blind cap. It took me about 45 minutes of sanding and testing to get that to work out right.

[SteveE]

Hmmm. . . I'm not an engineer, but I work with some pretty good ones. It looks like you're always going to have some degree of interference between the inner diameter of your blind cap and the filler bulb as long as your bulb is stretched over the end of the threaded sleeve on which the blind cap threads. Could you have turned down the threads on the last 1/4" or so of the threaded stub/sleeve? Then you could have used a slightly smaller bulb and maybe avoided the interference between blind cap and bulb. The threaded part of the barrel and blind cap would then be larger diameter than the installed bulb.