How Much Do You Expect A "handmade" Pen To Be Handmade?

[woleizihan]

This is just an interesting question I have been thinking about recently.

 

Nowadays, there are tons of pens labeled "handmade" floating around with various price point. Very few of them are rather explicit about what does "handmade" even mean, or which parts are handmade. But almost all of them use (or at least try to use) the handmade label to justify a premium.

 

We all know very very few pens are actually 100% handmade. So the question is, what will you expect from a "handmade" pen? Or more directly speaking, what kind of hand work justify a premium for you? Of course this is entirely personal preference and I'm just curious about how you guys think about it.

 

To make the discussion more concrete, here are different kinds of "handmade" we commonly see:

 

- Entirely hand turned pens

- Kit pens with hand turned barrels

- CNC lathed pens and polished by hands

- Hand tuned nibs

- Hand assembled pens (just kind of handmade)

- Hand painted/coated pens (I'm thinking about urushi or makie)

- Hand decorated (I'm thinking about silver/gold filigree work or a custom rollstop)

- In house nib production (Aurora, Sailor......)

 

As you can see, these things are not entirely mutually exclusive and far from being a complete list. Just let me know what you think.

[Mech-for-i]

to be very honest I consider most of todays so call hand made pen no more than just hand made handmade barrel and cap ( and some sections too ) most are just yet another to house stock Jowo / Bock / Knox / Schmidt nib unit ... which is really the real pen parts. In a fashion that is also why I have a lot of respect for like of Aurora, Pelikan, and even Hero. They literally making pens ; not just turning out beautiful barrel and caps. But yet I would not deny that any of the stated, and then some, could be termed a handmade pen but I would view them more as a craft item than a PEN so to speak. And I think the Hand Made part had been all too often over rated unfortunately.

[A Smug Dill]

I doubt you'll find any manufacturer or producer that actually (cut, shape and) makes nibs by hand, and to me that is a crucial part of a fountain pen. Not just the barrel, section, cap and trim, or even the filling mechanism – eye-droppers came to mind as possibly not requiring handcrafted pistons or converters – but what actually allows the finished product to make the sort of marks with ink on paper that the pen is designed to make.

[zaddick]

I doubt you'll find any manufacturer or producer that actually (cut, shape and) makes nibs by hand, and to me that is a crucial part of a fountain pen. Not just the barrel, section, cap and trim, or even the filling mechanism eye-droppers came to mind as possibly not requiring handcrafted pistons or converters but what actually allows the finished product to make the sort of marks with ink on paper that the pen is designed to make.

Romillo in Spain does handmade nibs. Shawn Newton used to with a jeweler. There are a few out there.

[bass1193]

Romillo in Spain does handmade nibs. Shawn Newton used to with a jeweler. There are a few out there.

Ah, Romillo! Definitely on the bucket list! Such beautiful nibs 😍

[katerchen]

(That was actually on my list, but then I had a weak moment and commissioned a Scriptorum pen instead)

[KBeezie]

For me if I were to purchase a 'handmade' Pen, at the very least I would want something more than a "kit pen" that had a blank lathed down, and the nib wasn't even tuned from the generic batch of nibs. (The nib tuning part of it is important to me if I wanted to get something 'custom', they need to know their product doesn't just look nice it has to write nice too).

[JayKay3000]

To me a handmade pen would probably cost more than a standard pen, but be personalizable to a degree and the nib made by the maker. A handmade pen would probably be of lower volume and be expertly tuned by the maker.

 

Often, in some companies the final part - the smoothing and tuning of the nib is done by hand even if the rest of the pen is made by machines. Machines can create accurate, high quality items, but I can't really see a worthwhile business in fountain pens making fully handmade pens.

[JakobS]

Hand lathed and shaped, handmade sections, handmade furniture (rings, clips etc.), handmade filling system (piston, lever, button, bulb etc.), hand ground nib either on handmade nib, or stock. By being able to grind the nib, it fundamentally changes the quality of the nib to a point one can not say it's just another Jowo, Bock, Schmidt etc. because if the person knows what they are doing, and I suppose especially if the don't, they create a grind to the nib that no one else does exactly the same.

 

I struggle to accept kit pens as handmade, certainly the are hand lathed, but they are hand lathed to someone else's design, to fit furniture someone else created for that design, that is then sold en masse. I see them similar to paint with numbers kits, the image is there, its just a matter of filling it in.....perhaps that's a little harsh...it's a little more advanced than that...but has a similar feeling to it. Kit pens are a great foundation in learning to make pens, but they shouldn't carry the premium of a handmade pen....

 

I suppose it really doesn't matter, as the most important thing is does the pen write well? If a kit pen can write well, than one should be happy no matter how handmade it is to be....

 

At the same time, when investing a dumb amount of money into a handmade pen, you want it to be something that does have a uniqueness about it, that has a little bit of you in it perhaps, a bit of your idiosyncrasies....

 

This has been part of the debate I have been having while figuring out and waiting for a handmade pen to be made. If I am going to have a pen handmade for me, and spend the money for it to be made, than I wan't to have it be a pen that cannot be found in the wild, not just more difficult to find, but simply not made, because otherwise I could just buy it without the wait, and probably invest less money in doing so.

 

So I would expect a handmade pen to be handmade to a point that I couldn't find the pen design, furniture, filling system (specific to the pen design), and nib grind in any other pen available from other pen makers.

Edited October 22, 2018 by JakobS

[XYZZY]

This is a thought exercise on my part. I'm not sure where I'm going with this.

 

Technology evolves over time and I expect part of the debate is frequently around whether the new technology is "cheating". When lathes started to become more common I expect there were old masters in guildhalls having this same conversation--is it handmade if it's turned on a treadle-powered lathe instead of whittled & sanded "by hand"?

 

Fast forward: is it cheating if the lathe is powered by a water-wheel and overhead belts instead of a treadle? Fast forward... ...electric motor... ?

 

To me I think it has to do with the involvement of the artisan that conceptualized the thing. For example... from what little I know of Edison & Brian Gray, he recently went through some growing pains when he switched to new CNC machines (instead of lathes?) and apparently programming the CNCs took much longer than expected. Is it "handmade"? I might say "yes" in this case because it sounds like Brian programmed the CNCs himself. I think that gets to an important part: was the artist able to transform their idea into a finished product? For many that is an insurmountable barrier. It doesn't matter to me whether his sits at a lathe, turns a blank, decides it's not quite right and tosses it, starts over, rinse and repeat.. or changes some code using a keyboard and mouse, has the CNC turn the blank, decides it's not quite right, tosses it, rinse and repeat. The process, and the "hands on" aspect is the same, just the tools that are different. [my apologies to Mr. Gray & Edison if I have misrepresented them]

 

Yet the fact that it's computer controlled takes something away: the craftsmanship in the previous paragraph doesn't come into play when making the second or thousandth unit and that certainly makes it less handmade, if not negating it completely. Does that mean the first one (in the paragraph above) wasn't handmade either? Is that what "handmade" means--that there are unit-to-unit errors? What if the CNC is programmed with a random number generator so that each unit is slightly different just as with handmade [nope, that doesn't make it handmade, just stupid] An in-between example: if I'm turning stock on a lathe but make a template to guide the tools so that I can reduce the unit-to-unit variation on successive units, is it still handmade? [Yes of course]

 

Now to switch examples: Imagine a truly old school pen that was carved from stock with no machines, and nibs hammered from bar stock, the slots cut with a wee saw. In other words, something "by hand" enough that nobody here would dispute it's done by hand. But now imagine that artisan has trained some employees to do exactly the same thing--the process is exactly the same, and he has increased his output. But how is what those employees produce different from a kit pen? It seems dumb to say it's a kit pen and not handmade because the employee didn't design it themselves. It seems dumb to say it's not a kit pen merely because the designer is supervising at the factory. Is a kit pen "not handmade" because the person assembling the kit hasn't met the person that produced the kit? In other words, because of the lack of involvement of the originator of the kit?

 

Or that person handcarving the pens and hand-hammering the nibs, that is unarguably handmade? ...what if it's Lt. Cmdr Data doing that work, and the 1000th pen is exactly the same as the first because he's just repeatedly invoking the "make_pen" subroutine. Nope, not so much.

 

TLDR: Here's what I think I think... it's not black and white. And like many things in life, I know it when I see it, and you know it when you see it, and it's OK that we don't agree 100% of the time (or... it should be OK).

 

Also, trying to nail down terminology like this scares me. It makes me think of government regulations, and of the lawyers and lawsuits to enforce such regulations. "No you can't import that pen because the package says "handmade" and it doesn't fit our definition of handmade"

Edited October 22, 2018 by XYZZY

[woleizihan]

No one is nailing down terminology here.

[JakobS]

 

 

Now to switch examples: Imagine a truly old school pen that was carved from stock with no machines, and nibs hammered from bar stock, the slots cut with a wee saw. In other words, something "by hand" enough that nobody here would dispute it's done by hand. But now imagine that artisan has trained some employees to do exactly the same thing--the process is exactly the same, and he has increased his output. But how is what those employees produce different from a kit pen? It seems dumb to say it's a kit pen and not handmade because the employee didn't design it themselves. It seems dumb to say it's not a kit pen merely because the designer is supervising at the factory. Is a kit pen "not handmade" because the person assembling the kit hasn't met the person that produced the kit? In other words, because of the lack of involvement of the originator of the kit?

 

 

 

A pen maker, training others how to make pens, is different from someone making kit pens. The employees are still learning how to make each part of the pen, they aren't, as with kit pens, only making a barrel and cap based off a design available to whoever buys the kit, and then take a mass produced section, clip, and nib that can be found at numerous wholesalers, attach them together, and then sell them equal to a pen that has had the barrel, cap, section, and filling system handmade, and the nib at least ground to the pen maker or clients expectations. As I mentioned, kit pens are really about learning the foundations of "how to make a pen", when more than half the pen is not made by the maker, it's difficult to think it's really handmade....

 

But as I also mentioned, in reality as long as they are great writers, it really doesn't matter how "handmade" a pen is, it is what is done with it that matters, the most perfectly "handmade" pen is nothing if it never is allowed to write, and create something that is unquestionably "hand" made!

Edited October 22, 2018 by JakobS

[XYZZY]

No one is nailing down terminology here.

 

I apologize if I implied I thought that was your goal.