In my case they are not mutually exclusive… He fucked off to a tax haven (monaco) leaving my mum a penniless.immigrant with 3 kids, however he saw in the news I had won a competition and emailed me saying he is proud.

When they reply can you re-reply so i can see

Or not having a father

Well its response to finishing varies hugely on a sample to sample basis, due to prior heat exposure, moisture, age and other things hard to verify (more than other words) so it’s a matter of getting lucky

thank you so much

Brazil

My status symbol is one i made from cigar wood

wow

a kit but I electroplated the pieces with gold and the wood is turned by hand.

Thanks, the problem is very few people have made pens with this wood on those sites.

I used purpleheart, which is probably 4-6x more expensive than any of those in the etsy shop (I primarily make furniture, and a log of olive is even 10x cheaper than purpleheart of similar size). It is also somewhat harder to turn due to it’s density.

edit: there are some purpleheart pens but nobody really knows how to finish it properly. A furniture guy from the uni of Edinburgh once told me that you should use turpentine and a fat coat of linseed oil.