A Birthday Gift to Pentrace
Preserved from the original Pentrace.com site. Offers, contact details, forms and links on this page date from that time and may no longer work.
Most pen collectors, 
as they acquire and use new pens, discover an interest in nibs that are designed to produce exaggerated line variation: italics like the one shown here, obliques, and stubs. You’re not most collectors, you’re you, but you want a specialty nib anyway, you know you do. Here’s your chance! Richard Binder is offering, at auction, one specialty nib regrinding. Richard will regrind the nib of any one pen to a cursive or crisp italic, a cursive or crisp oblique, or a stub.
This auction is a birthday present, admittedly a few days late, and all proceeds are to benefit Pentrace, the best pen site on the Web. (Actually, this is a birthday present in the hobbit tradition; as everyone knows, hobbits give gifts on their birthdays.)
Here Are Richard’s VERY STRICT Rules.
Read them all, especially the last one. 
- Richard will open the auction by posting a notice on the PenMarket board. All bids must be posted to the PenMarket board. If you try to post a bid anywhere else, the Mariachi Crickets will not be pleased, and trust us on this, you do not want to make Pancho, Jacinto, y José unhappy.
- To make things easy for poor long-suffering Richard, your bid must be in the subject line of your message so that it will be visible from the main PenMarket board page. if it ain’t there, it ain’t a valid bid, got that?
- The auction ends promptly at 12:00 noon Central Daylight Time, October 17, 2003; no bids entered after that moment will be accepted. The final arbiter of time is the atomic clock at the U. S. Naval observatory in Washington, D. C. (Really. Richard‘s Macintosh uses tick.usno.navy.mil as its NTP server.)
- This is a real auction. Bidders are allowed to raise their bids; if someone overbids you, don’t let this custom nib get away from you! Bid again! This is, remember, to benefit Pentrace.
- The winning bidder will be notified by email. This means that you must include a valid email address in the space that the message board provides. If you are the winning bidder but email to you bounces, the second-highest bid will become the winner.
- Richard will grind the winner’s pen as soon as it arrives instead of putting it in his queue. Return shipment will be at Richard’s expense; thus, you will spend only the cost of shipping the pen one way. This leaves you cash for ink and paper to write to all your friends when your pen comes home.
This offer does not include retipping, so the winner will need to be sure there’s enough iridium on the chosen pen’s nib. As a general guideline, a Broad nib yields a 0.9-mm italic or oblique, or a 0.8-mm stub; Double Broad gives 1.1 mm and 1.0 mm, Medium gives 0.7 mm and 0.6 mm, and so on.