Ever wonder what a pen repairer does when off duty? This picture shows where I spent part of the Sunday a week and a half ago, before the NY/NJ show.
What’s not intuitively obvious is that the bendy piece of brass rod is a replacement for the flush lever from the toilet in our back bathroom. It’s a side-lever design, and the original flush lever had a hole drilled through it for a pin to keep it in place. It corroded at that point, and one of our elves found himself one morning with a toilet flush handle in his hand. I bought and adapted one of the “universal” flush lever kits that you find at Home Depot, but it wasn’t universal enough, and it wouldn’t stay working. So I bought a length of brass rod. After bending up the rod and mashing and drilling its distal end for the flapper ball’s chain, I discovered to my dismay that the broken stub that was still attached to the lever (also in the picture) wouldn’t come out of the handle. It was setscrewed in place, but they apparently didn’t trust the setscrew because both the screw and the end of the lever were epoxied in. Enough application of a micro torch killed the epoxy holding the screw, but I had to drill the stub out. Without access to the tools in my studio I’d have been on a lee shore in an onshore gale. As it is, the toilet works again. And I designed my lever without the need for a pin, so I won’t have to do this again.
The real work part happened today. Last week, before we took off for the NY/NJ show, I fused two Hundred Year Pen ends in place. Yesterday and today, I finished them. They’re both clear; the blue cast in the one is due to light leakage down the inside of the pen’s translucent cobalt blue celluloid body.
I really enjoyed doing these babies, knowing that there are two happy clients in the offing.
