A New Pen For A New Material

[Carl Fisher - F3 Pens]

Giving this new material a spin. I like it but at the same time it's pricey for what you get and a little gimmicky which I'll get to in a second.

 

This is the new M3 Titanium Mokume. M3 material for those who haven't worked with it before seems to be some sort of composite resin / metal mix. It turns pretty similar to most resins. It isn't chippy like PR but not smooth cutting like Alumilite. Somewhere in the middle and cuts well with carbide tools or the metal lathe.

 

It gets a bit fragile when the walls get thin, so keep that in mind when threading. Polishes up to a soft satin shine and seems to pair up well with Ebonite in terms of sheen.

 

The gimmick is that this stuff glows under UV black light. So the next time you find yourself at a rave party or under the lights at midnight bowling, you can break out your pen and be the life of the party

 

It's available in several color combinations, but this is the red/black. I have a better looking clip on the way to replace what you see in these pictures.

[darrin1200]

It's a nice looking pen Carl. I like the pairing with the black.

 

I have only worked with the M3 once. It was a kit done using the damascus. It came out really nice, but I needed really sharp tooling, or the cut would leave micro chips behind. It took a quite a bit to get a good polish on it using the companies special two part polish.

 

I would like to try it again, on a custom one this time, but as you say the cost makes me a little leary. Its double the cost of the ebonite and cumberland I have been eyeing up.

[Carl Fisher - F3 Pens]

I did the majority of the material removal on the metal lathe just because it's so easy to do. Then moved it to my wood lathe to work the final profile by hand. I was using a round carbide tool and it seemed to remove material without much fuss. I didn't bother to break out a normal skew or gouge, so I don't know how well it works with steel tooling.

 

I didn't use their polish though. I did my standard 400/600/800/1000 sanding and then hit it with a quick dose of Novus 3. Normally I skip the Novus part but this material seemed to benefit from it. Then it was to the buffer for a quick shot of Tripoli and dry buff. Turned out decent but I'm kinda curious what benefit a good metal polish might have on it.

 

Now all of that asside, I'm not planning to stock any of this stuff at $26/stick. Realistically I would use 2 to make a pen like this, but skipping the section and adding a rather tall finial to the cap made it so I could stretch the one blank without a cutoff to spare. But if a customer asks for it, I wouldn't turn down working with it again.

Edited May 29, 2015 by Carl Fisher