I saw a picture of a Nakaya with a band of mother of pearl around the barrel a while back. Very striking, black with the mother of pearl band. I asked the owner a time or two about the cost and never got an answer (a reply for that matter) so I'm curious in general about custom made pens. I've seen several Nakaya and I THINK Dani Trio makes custom pens too. I finally got one of my Holy Grail pens, a Dani Trio with the Golden Gate Bridge in mother of pearl.

I realize that my question is vague, that it depends on the design and materials and so forth but I'm curious if anyone could give me a ball park figure on say a pen with a single reed of bamboo in mother of pearl... How much are we talking here?

skyp

No idea... that really is a question for Nakaya.

If the owner of the pen you saw doesn't want to reveal the price, there isn't much you can do.

You may look here for a rough indication of one inlay design: http://www.nakaya.org/special/ekandra.html

I think you've just changed what kind of Decapod I want.

http://www.nakaya.org/special/ebamboo.html

That pen reminds me a little of this pen. One of my favorite as I like the surface treatment of the rurushi. Added tactile sensation is always nice








what can I say, I like inlays.

Kevin

speaking of custom pens, generally it can be as elaborate or not depends on your taste. It would be good to have some idea what you want on design and a realistic budget. Custom pens are generally more pricey since it is often one of and the artist time sit "idle". Most artist prefers doing 3 to 5 pens at a time... meaning, while waiting for the first pen to dry or cure, he or she can work on 3 or 4th pen, and by the time 5th pen has been work on, the first pen is again ready to go etc. so, this must be taken into account when ordering instead of taking one "off the rack" sort to speak.

Here is a very elaborate one custom made for a customer, tiny pieces of quail egg shells, abalone shells, blue turban snail shells etc. VERY time consuming.




Here is one made for someone based on his own design. It means absolutely nothing for rest of us, but meaningful for him:




Of more traditional theme, here the customer select the pen body she prefers "Mae West".




Kevin

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That is gorgeous! Is it a Dani Trio?
skyp

Yup a prototype. I assume smaller version can be made. As seen, it is on the large Mikado size.

Kevin

Kevin, I'll never tire of seeing that Danitrio pen! Was there ever a name ascribed to it? If not, I'll just call it Raden Extrema.

Deirdre, it's funny--I was just looking at that Ekandra pen on Nakaya's website over the weekend, lusting quite uncontrollably too. I think it's one of the most interesting designs. I wonder if the capping is indiscriminate, so that the Raden streaks can be alternating or continuous. $2000 is an enormous sum, but... wow. I'd have to set myself a pretty high goal to make that my reward.

I wish Nakaya would have more customizations itemized. A "Raden band" would be a great one to have, priced based on thickness by millimeter.

I was thinking that alternating shobu or kikoy and raden would be pretty spectacular, though originally, I'd just considered having the plain urushi with raden on the very ends. That'd be a lot less expensive.

From what I've been seeing on pricing, the cost for custom work outside of detailed drawings does not have a 1:1 correlation to surface area. So, if you want a Raden treatment, like a band on the cap and one on the barrel, the cost begins to approach that of the decapod Raden shown above (which is a ~$2,000 pen), even though the decapod has several times the Raden surface area. Maybe it's the act of customizing that brings with it a default base cost, and then the extent of application grows from there. Something to keep in mind when coming up a proposal for Nakaya. For instance, if a quote for custom work totals $1000, cutting back on half the surface area for the work won't cut the custom work cost in half.

Oh, I understand that, but part of the cost of the $2000 pen is the stone-like texture as well, which is very labor intensive.

On Nakaya's website, a base Long model in your choice of several urushi treatments is $460. In their custom section, they show a Long model with a full stone treatment (entire pen covered), for $540. An $80 difference isn't all that much... unless those custom ones have outdated pricing.

Per the info on nibs.com, it appears that the $80 upcharge is only for the grip area in the stone treatment; if you look at the pricing page, it seems that the upcharge for a stone-textured pen over the plain black one is a delta of $205. I admit I was probably thinking originally of the difference in cost for Housoge work.

Sorry, I don't quite follow you. On nibs.com, the stone finish pen complete is $540, as priced on the Nakaya website. The same pen in a base urushi treatment is $460. So how's the delta $205?

You're looking at a translucent urushi. Look at the price for the black urushi on the price list; it's $335.

Ah, you're right -- I missed that top line. I've always thought of the base Nakaya as $460, from looking at the more popular finishes too much. Still, even from that price difference, I'm still not getting how Nakaya figures out their estimates. If anything, I know to start with a simpler design first, then work upwards (QM2 went downwards and it didn't bode well).

I figure I'll just pay whatever they quote and suck it up.

(Probably why I haven't ordered one yet.)