a vintage fountain pen restorer's story of an All American Fountain Pen.

For the past year my bench has been a place where other people's pens come back to life. I don't keep many for my own collection. Watermans with hairline cracks, Swans with sacs gone to tar, oxidized black hard rubber that somebody sanded flat in 1974 and called it a repair. Restoration teaches you, part by part, what makes a pen worth the trouble. Eventually you want to build one worth spending 8 hours polishing.

Six pens made in collaboration with Logan Merrill of Little Hollow Customs: mottled ebonite from a vintage formula, ebonite feeds, and restored vintage 1930s American nibs. These are the first pens to carry my own imprint: Heron's, in the possessive, the way Waterman's Ideal was imprinted on the pens I spend my days restoring. Every part was made in America, from finial to nib.

The material

The bodies are ebonite, based on a vintage formula and mottled the way hard rubber was from the 1900s through the 1920s. Mottling happens when two rubbers of different colors are worked together and left deliberately heterogenous. The swirl runs through the rod, so the pattern on each barrel goes all the way down; it cannot be printed, and it never repeats. Modern production ebonite is clean, uniform, and, in my opinion, sterile. This formula misbehaves in the old way and becomes even more unique.

These first production prototypes came out in four patterns: a mottled yellow and black, a solid mandarin orange, a mottled blue and ivory, and mottled red and black that anyone who collects early Watermans will recognize on sight.

The making

Logan machined and finished the bodies at Little Hollow Customs. I met him in person at the 2025 Washington DC Pen Show, and what drew me in was his attention to detail and his willingness to work with experimental materials most machinists would rather avoid. His LHC Mistress with a Gem Bronze section was my first custom modern pen, and it is one of three fountain pens made after the 1960s in my private collection.

The nibs are restored vintage American 14k gold nibs from my own stockpile, heat-set and tuned at my bench to an ebonite feed threaded for Jowo 6.

Vintage nibs mean every pen writes differently. Decades of writing wear a tipping surface in a way no production line reproduces, and no two of these came off the same desk. A nib nobody else has is the whole appeal.

That is why every pen from here on gets its own listing rather than a boring page with "100 in stock". You will see how that specific nib writes, how the mottled pattern runs down that cap and barrel, and the feeling I get writing with it.

Each one left the bench tested the way I test a restoration: inked, measured, and written with until I stopped wanting to put it down.

On "Made in America"

Nearly every modern pen, including most handmade ones, writes with a Chinese, German, or Japanese nib and feed. Those are excellent combinations. But the nib is the pen, and I want to see more makers building that part here. Luckily that is beginning to change again: Hooligan Georgia cuts their own nibs in-house, and Thompson Pens partners out the finishing.

"Made in America" has been a hard sentence to say about a fountain pen for decades, and typing it does not get old.

The run

Six pens. Five are spoken for, and I am keeping the sixth as a demo. They were claimed before I finished photographing them, which I am sorry about and still a little stunned by.

Future runs will appear on the site unannounced. Small batches, ready when they are ready, gone when they are gone. The email newsletter and Instagram are the most consistent places to hear about them.

The longer road

Heron's Mooncake began as a restoration atelier, and that work is not going anywhere. This collaboration is the first step of a longer project: learning to make pens that deserve the same century of service as the ones I restore. I will be documenting a lot of this journey here, from the stressful hurdles to the exciting launches.

To follow along, join the email list or find me on Instagram. For the day-to-day, Stories is where the bench lives.

Restored with patience.
Made to be worth restoring.
Heron's Mooncake.