Meet Your Maker: David Broadwell, Broadwell Studios

(Caroline Foty's first fountain pen was a 1970s Sheaffer No Nonsense that still writes perfectly. Since she discovered pens by independent makers, she wants "one of each, please" and wants to meet all the makers. Maybe you do, too. She lives in Baltimore with pens, cats, and all kinds of fiber arts supplies.)

You can’t talk to many pen makers who do anything with metal, before you hear mention of David Broadwell, and how he has been an influence or inspiration for their work.

So it’s particularly fun to hear that this artisan and artist began with pens close to my heart, the inexpensive Sheaffer school fountain pens, and the Skrip cartridges they take. “I wrote with Sheaffer school fountain pens in the fifth grade. One of them burped all its ink into my pencil bag.” He just cleaned out the bag and carried on with the pens. “Nobody else was using fountain pens, everyone was using Bics. We found that if you warm the ‘clip’ on the cap of a Bic stick pen with a match or a lighter, you can modify it so you can actually clip it to things.”

Broadwell, like many kids growing up in the US, had art daily until sixth grade. “I drew pictures of tanks, ships, and cars with my fountain pens.” After that, he took as much art as possible, and also mechanical drawing and wood shop. “Wood shop isn’t there to turn you into a cutting board maker, it’s about how to have skills and take pride in making things.” Sadly, high school wood shop classes seem to have died out in many places, but Broadwell went on from that background to become a machinist.

His father was a Mason, and he liked playing with his father’s Masonic sword. “I made a cardboard shield with our coat of arms, I put on my dad’s bathrobe, and I fought the mimosa tree dragon.” Knives were the first thing he specialized in, beginning in his mid-twenties. “I was working as a machinist and I had a broken file on my bench. I thought, ‘I could make a knife out of that.’ It was terrible.” But he persevered and was soon making knives full-time. “I mostly make 7-11” blades. I made a couple of swords but someone else had to do the heat treating for me. I chose not to make switchblades because of federal laws about shipping them. I’m semi-retired now from making knives.”

Pens seem like they are some distance away from these art forms. About twenty five years ago, his then wife decided she wanted to sell component pens, and he thought he could do that. Almost right away he could see beyond their limitations. “I thought, I’m a machinist, why would I use kits? I can make all the parts. I needed to do something more complicated.” His first pen, which still can be seen on his website, was “really ambitious. Sheaffer acrylic I got from Bexley, Mokume gane clip, cap top, cap band, a metal sleeve.”

Broadwell’s pens are in fact rooted in his knife making background. “All the things I do can be traced back to my knives. I use a belt grinder. I like making things different from what anyone else does.” His first pen model was the Trinity, a three sided pen. “I hand grind it freehand on the belt grinder.” His signature pen, the Eléf (from the Greek eleftheros meaning free), is free-form with a bend in it, and is also hand ground. He still uses a lathe to turn metal bands.

Broadwell cites a few makers whom he mentored as they began to work with metal, including Tim Cullen of Hooligan Georgia and Jason Olson of WriteTurnz. He was also happy to see that Jon Tello of Hello Tello has embarked on engraving, and he likes the engraving John Albert did on his pens. “Tim (Cullen) would call me and ask lots of questions. I told him there are no secrets, but if you’re not going to do it I won’t waste your time. He’s taken everything I told him and put it into practice and developed his own style.”

He’s not tempted to make his own materials, having found his ideal material partner in Tim Crowe of Turnt Pen Co. “He’s my guy. I’ve sent photos to him and he’s always done great with them. I sent him photos of my Harley to make a blank, and I’ll put design elements on it to match.” He held up an orange blank into which he’s carved a grooved channel, and he’s sending it back to Crowe to do a second pour of black into that channel. There is also a knife and pen set in the works for the LA pen show with a material from Turnt. In 2025, Broadwell was approached by the author John Maxwell to create pens to match the cover of each of his books, and Turnt produced the materials. (Pen World magazine wrote a story about the project for the December 2025 issue, and that story is available to read in a post on the Broadwell Studios Facebook page.)

Show attendance has slowed down a little for Broadwell. “I don’t make inexpensive pens, I make unique luxury pens – I don’t want to make plain inexpensive pens. So I don’t have large sales at shows.” He’s tried a lot of shows, but he’s even given up going to Dallas, his nearest thing to a home show. His favorite show is the new California show. “I have friends and customers in that area. I’m donating a pen for next year as a show sponsor.” The most important reason to go to shows is people. “I go to shows to meet people. I’ve met some nibmeisters and I’m going to get a nib for a pen I want to make for myself.”

What pens does an artist like Broadwell have for himself? “I collect 1930s-1940s Parker Vacumatics. They have some of the best design elements of any pen, and I like art deco style.” He also has a few Bexleys – “Howard Levy is one of my mentors in basic pen design and manufacturing processes.” He did keep an early Eléf for himself for a while, out of a vintage tortoiseshell material, but he’s since sold it.

Broadwell gives a lot of credit to his wife, Nita, for pushing him to do new things. “She is always tossing out challenges. ‘Couldn’t you carve that on a clip? I think your next pen should be a Trinity Eléf.’ I’ll say, ‘Aw, I can’t do that!’ but then I think, ‘Maybe I could….’”

David Broadwell’s work can be seen at his website Broadwell Studios, his Facebook, his Instagram (the Facebook account is more active), and at the California Pen Show.

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Meet Your Maker: Darrell Davis, D Squared Arts

(Caroline Foty's first fountain pen was a 1970s Sheaffer No Nonsense that still writes perfectly. Since she discovered pens by independent makers, she wants "one of each, please" and wants to meet all the makers. Maybe you do, too. She lives in Baltimore with pens, cats, and all kinds of fiber arts supplies.)

College friends can influence our lives even long after graduation. Darrell Davis was teaching high school when his mother passed away, and his father’s health deteriorated to the point that he needed an in home care giver. Davis quit his teaching job to fill that role.

At the time, his college friend Shawn Newton was well into a pen making career, and asked him to make some blanks. Having a degree in art, it seemed like a possibility, so Davis made a few blanks as a filler job. Newton liked those, and asked if he could imitate the striated look of Arco blanks. “I tried to mimic it, it worked. I made several iterations – there are still some kinks in the process so I test them all, to be sure they don’t separate.”

His dad ultimately also passed away, but he was underway as a blank maker, and after a year he did the Arkansas pen show as a seller of blanks. The striated blanks have become almost a signature for him.

Striped acrylic from D Squared Arts, used for a Hatch special project.

Newton was still egging Davis on to do more. “He talked me into making pens. I said, I’m going to do something completely different from you!” And he did. Unlike almost every pen maker you will encounter, Davis does not use a lathe. “I use Shawn’s CNC to do the drilling and threading so I have a good solid fit, then I hand shape with scrapers, rasps, and sandpaper.” He hand sands, so that the detailed shaping and the textures from the tools will not be lost, then he can buff and polish with a lathe. “I demo the hand shaping process of nib holders at pen shows, because it can be difficult to get people to understand that I don’t use a lathe. It’s a good way to interact with people. I need a wall table, though, so I won’t get in anybody’s way.”

Davis’s first hand made pen was carved in the shape of a lily. “The amount of time and effort it took, I knew it wasn’t viable in the market.” Someone has commissioned something similar, though, and his processes are more mature now, so he’s giving it a go. Most of his pen models (he has a total of eighteen although not all are available on hand to be photographed) have evolved over time, since each one is hand shaped. “If you laid them all out you would see the connections.”

His degree in sculpture and ceramics has fed inspiration into his pen making. “I’ve always disliked that you can’t touch sculptures in museums. They were meant to be touched. That’s one thing I like about making pens - someone will like to use and touch them.” Like his pens, his longtime work in ceramics seeks to combine the functional and the interesting and the personal. “I make boxes that I’m trying to make more emotional – the outside is jagged and rough but the inside is fuzzy and warm – like someone presenting as goth but carrying a pink puffy keychain. Whatever our perception of someone is, we assign it to that person until we know more of what’s inside.” At present, he’s experimenting with adding resin work as additional textural interest on his ceramic boxes.

Being visually oriented, Davis takes inspiration from all kinds of places. “The theories in my head are Leonardo da Vinci and Frank Lloyd Wright – Leonardo did everything, Wright designed every thing in his buildings – my thought process is that everything is related.” The Tour model has a foot like a chess rook (tour is French for tower); the newest model, the Boo-boo, takes elements from perfume and cosmetic bottles; the Cône has grooves in the ends for thumb fidgeting; the Tordré appears to be twisted. “Sometimes it is just – Do I have the ability to make the idea that I have in my head?”

Having worked with many students with disabilities, Davis is interested in making his pens accessible and inclusive, to help with dexterity. “Grips will be shaped to allow more people to write with them.” He does take commissions, which allows him to do something he particularly values: “I try to make a pen that matches one person, that’s ideal for them.” He is currently running about six months out on commissions, because he is a college volleyball coach, and volleyball season is ramping up right now. And because his work is done by hand and not machine, there are just times that it won’t come. “Right now I haven’t touched a pen in two weeks, because my brain won’t let me – I’ll sit down and start and think, This isn’t going to work. I’ll mess it up.”

So does someone whose work is so much like art have a favorite pen? “When Shawn started making pens, I said, Make me one. At the time he was working with polyester resin – it had janky threads – and some student took it. I pestered Shawn for seven months until he made me what he called The Bug Pen – it’s ridged with scales, like a bug. He says it was the worst pen he’s ever made, but everyone loves it. That’s my daily use pen.” He also has a 2024 Arkansas show exclusive pen Newton made from D Squared resin. And he recently bought back one of his own. “I had donated it to a fundraiser, but I ended up buying it myself.”

Davis is still working on the best way to make videos to show the unique shaping elements of his pens. In the meantime, his show experiences are fueling his craft. “I know enough about pens to make myself look silly in a conversation. But I’m always learning about other people’s journeys in the pen world. It’s nice to see people be so enthusiastic about how my pens look and how they write.”

Darrell Davis’s work can be seen on his Instagram @d_squared_arts (“I’m far behind on updating the website at dsquaredarts.com, I have thirty pens I need to put up there”) and at shows in Arkansas, Chicago, St Louis, and Dallas.

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Meet Your Maker: James White, Bonecrusher 7 Studios

(Caroline Foty's first fountain pen was a 1970s Sheaffer No Nonsense that still writes perfectly. Since she discovered pens by independent makers, she wants "one of each, please" and wants to meet all the makers. Maybe you do, too. She lives in Baltimore with pens, cats, and all kinds of fiber arts supplies.)

Imagine yourself wandering a pen show. You walk up to a table displaying the sign “Bonecrusher 7.” Serious stuff… When you look a little more closely, you see that the pens have women’s names… come to think of it, they are named after cartoon characters! Now you’re really interested.

This imaginative exercise is not fiction. James White’s last assignment before retiring from the Army was in the demilitarized zone in South Korea. “The medic call sign was Bonecrusher, and the number indicated status. I was the highest ranking non-commissioned officer, the supervisor of medics, so I was Bonecrusher 7.” When a new officer changed all the call signs, White decided to keep Bonecrusher 7 for his own.

White has made things as long as he can remember. “My dad taught me to work with steel, to grind metal for homemade knives.” When he was stationed in Iraq in 2007-8 he taught knife making classes in the base’s aid station. Later, at Fort Campbell, there was a wood shop, and in a what-the-heck moment he signed up for a pen making class and made a mechanical pencil. His interest was piqued.

He spent about ten years making kit/component pens. “For the first couple of years you give away a lot of stuff you make that you aren’t happy with.” In 2017 he attended his first pen show, in Denver, and met and talked to many pen makers. “I got to see another side of pen making.” He started making prototypes of fountain pens in between turning out kit pens, and got a table at the Colorado show the following year. “I had a spread of kit pens on the table, and on the side a little box of fountain pens I was working on. Show organizer Ed Capizzi said, ‘THESE are the ones people want.’”

From that point, the bespoke style fountain pen was the focus. “I went through a couple of model iterations. It took a couple of years to get the Velma where we wanted it.” Yes, THAT Velma…

“A lot of pen makers name their pens after something they are interested in. I enjoy the simplicity of some cartoons. I started with Velma from Scooby Doo, it was one of my brother’s favorite cartoons growing up.” (April Mathews, White’s partner and admin/QC assistant, holds up a little plastic statue of Velma that they were given by a customer.) “We try to think of a female cartoon character that fits each new model. For our thinnest pen, it’s Olive Oyl. For our smallest pen forthcoming it’s going to be Agnes from Despicable Me. Wilma is our biggest model – a strong sturdy but appealing cave woman. Betty was shorter than Wilma and had a bow in her hair, so Betty has a clip.” His personal favorite character was Alice in Wonderland. Really, the possibilities are almost endless.

For their first show outside Colorado, Bonecrusher decided to go big and go to DC in 2025. “We were going to go as attendees, then got picked off the table waitlist six weeks ahead and had to hurry up and make some inventory.” Their slate of eight shows in 2026 has felt like too much, though, so next year they are going to reorganize their show calendar a little. (Mathews’s son, Talon, will occasionally staff their table, as he did at BWIPS in 2026, to lighten their travel load.) Colorado will always be on the list, though, Mathews says. “It’s our home show. The Colorado pen posse supported James and watched him come into his own style.”

White and Mathews have begun learning to make blanks, although they are clear that they don’t see themselves ever selling them. “As someone who likes to create stuff, you see a picture and you think, ‘That would make a beautiful pen,’ but it’s hard to get another maker to see it the way you see it.” That doesn’t mean they don’t try; White says that Tim Crowe (Turnt Pen Co), Mark Koster (Hobble Creek), and Tim Mckenzie (Diamondcast) have been particularly patient in trying to achieve what they’ve imagined in blanks. “Different makers also have different things they are particularly good at. Bob Dupras has a way of feathering in the mica; Cocoon has transparency; Tim Crowe does great color mixing; Mark does this spiraling.” Sometimes they will make a blank whose recipe they don’t think to write down, and then they begin the quest to try to make it again. One of their most popular resins, Penny Dreadful, came out of the process of trying to recreate a blank whose specifications were not recorded.

One thing White particularly enjoys doing is segmenting stone into wood pens, and he’s acquired a metal lathe from Jim Hinze to allow him to work safely with harder materials. It’s no surprise, then, that one of his favorite pens is a Ryan Krusac L-16 in black ash wood; a pen from Brian Weaver’s Ironfeather Creative, with a handmade Damascus steel clip, also comes to mind. But, he says, “I don’t use a lot of fountain pens! I use a tester that I made, but usually I’m using a mechanical pencil to draw an idea, and I can erase it.” Mathews, it turns out, is the pen collector. One of her favorites is a Jason Neil Penworks pen from an As The Pen Turns podcast Secret Santa exchange. “James enters, and I get the pen. At shows we try to support our fellow makers, and I buy a pen or a bunch of blanks. We’ll also send people to other makers if they want something that we know is someone’s specialty.”

Bonecrusher is in the process of relocating from Colorado to Alabama, and they are building out a larger shop there. “We need more space,” White says. “We want to add a laser engraver for logos, we want to make clips and do metal work. Blank casting needs more space.”

Honing his craft is a constant priority for White. “We asked Ed Capizzi and his wife, ‘What do you NOT like about pens?’ Ed said that he didn’t like how if you dropped a pen, it would often break at the section threads, so I added an extra millimeter there to make them stronger. His wife said she didn’t like the feel of sharp threads when you hold a pen, so we started tapering the threads to the section so it’s softer to hold. We want our pens to be pretty, but also the most comfortable for long writing sessions. We take reports from customers – they’re what make us, us – our BC7 family.”

This continuing improvement is White’s favorite thing about what he does. “As we keep making pens we find things we can do better. It’s craftsmanship – taking a raw material and turning it into something that is beautiful and useful at the same time.”

James White’s work can be seen at his website Bonecrusher 7 Studios, his Instagram @bonecrusher7studios, and at pen shows in Colorado, Baltimore, DC, Arkansas, Pacific Northwest, Orlando, and possibly next year Atlanta and Raleigh.

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Enjoy reading The Pen Addict? Then consider becoming a member to receive additional weekly content, giveaways, and discounts in The Pen Addict shop. Plus, you support me and the site directly, for which I am very grateful.

Membership starts at just $5/month, with a discounted annual option available. To find out more about membership click here and join us!