I have a gold coloured Platinum converter I’m not a particular huge fan of. Not that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the converter, it just doesn’t match my Platinum Cool demonstrator very well. Brian Goulet at The Goulet Pen Company came up with a handy little hack that sands down the gold finish on the converter to reveal the silver layer beneath.
While that’s all fine and dandy, I’ve been dragging my feet on trying it for myself because I couldn’t think of a really easy way to do the bottom ring of the converter. I’ve been procrastinating on trying this since Platinum now makes a silver coloured converter. Today I finally reasoned with myself and decided having two converters for two pens I never use at the same time is utterly pointless, so it was time to try the hack for myself.
I decided my goal for this project was to try to create a mirror finish on my converter with the tools I have at hand. I used wet/dry 2000 grit sandpaper and a few sheets of mylar lapping paper for my attempt.
Step 1: Disassembly
First step for disassembling the unit is to unscrew the top metal piece from the converter. You can then pull out the plastic knob and the mechanism from the converter.
The bottom metal piece can be pulled off, too. I found the easiest way was to use a twisting motion to get it to come loose. The plastic piece underneath feels like it could be removed, but I couldn’t get it off even with some rubber sheeting and a good amount of force, so I gave up.
Step 2: Sanding
I started off with the 2000 grit sand paper. Sanding the larger piece wasn’t any trouble at all as I grabbed half of the tube and then wrapped the sandpaper around the other half of the tube. I found wetting the sand paper with liberal amounts of water made things a lot easier. The bottom piece was much trickier. I tried using a variety of ways to mount the piece so I could evenly sand it quickly. In the end, I found the easiest way was to mount it to a simple pencil eraser. There are two ends of the metal ring, with one end being slightly smaller than the other. I slightly tapered the end of the eraser a bit with a knife. Then, I jammed that side into the pencil eraser, allowing the ring to shave off any excess eraser bits as it went down. Then I could twist the pencil with the metal ring wrapped in the sandpaper.
Step 3: Polishing
Once all the gold plating was polished off with the sandpaper, I figure I could make it shinier with the lapping paper. I started off with my coarsest then worked my way down to the finest. The end result wasn’t anywhere near what I was hoping to be. It only looked a little better than what I started with. I do wonder if I could get a better result with a little bit of metal polish. I think it might be a new experiment for the future! 
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