First off, I'm really kicking myself for not having a before picture of this pen, so I apologize for that in advance.
A while back I picked up a 1920s oversized Wahl rosewood that was in rough shape. There was already superficial damage to the ebonite on top of the oxidation that had already occurred. The whole pen had this yellow/olive haze over the body. Anyhow, I pulled the nib, feed, and section, and cleaned out the guts, but was still left with this terrible oxidation. The pen was a bit beat up, as I mentioned (and will show in pictures) and I decided that it was a prime candidate for some weird tooling.
EXPERIENCED REPAIR PEOPLE THAT ARE FAINT OF HEART AND PEDANTIC GO NO FURTHER.
I also do some simple jewelry making on the side and had a few polishes lying around. I didn't have sandpaper fine enough to remove the oxidation and my only micromesh is the 12000 grit one, which is useless for removing oxidation. What I did have around was #0000 super fine steel wool used for cleaning up lacquer.... Oh yes... I did.
I took the barrell, taped off the metal bits, and went to town. It worked beautifully.
Then I took my flex shaft drill and attached a 6 micron radial bristle disc from 3M and gave it a pass.
Then I removed the tape and used the 1 micron disc (that I have used to polish up gold nibs before) for a final buffing all over.
The end result was great:
Blasphemous? Maybe. Effective? Definitely. I like that it maintained that vintage look and didn't make it into a super high-gloss pen that has very obviously been polished. Always find that level of shine a bit off-putting.
so there you go.
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