The Unkindest Cut Of All

The other night I was in the shop working on what was going to be a Walnut coffee mug.  I got everything almost ready to sand, then decided it needed "just one more cut".   Well...

If you look closely at the top of the small piece you can see the catch that ruined a night's work.  If you ever decide to turn wood,  just remember that the next-to-last cut is usually the one that you want to be your last.  :)   

Creating A Pen

I thought it would be fun to document the process of creating a pen.  The first step is to select a blank.    Our choices for this project, left to right are Black Palm, Mahogany and an acrylic blank that I poured.  The blanks start at roughly .75" square and 5" long.  All of the kits follow a similar process.  The differences are mostly in the finishing and that is based on what material you are using for the pen body.  For this pen, I picked the acrylic blank.  It will get fitted to a Mesa Gold/Black Titanium twist pen.  

After the blank is cut to length, the next step is drilling for the tube.  Here  is the blank ready to drill.    The different pen kits use different size drill bits.

After the blank is drilled, the tube for the kit is glued in.  Once the glue is dry, then the ends of the blank must be squared to the tube to make sure the parts fit correctly.  Here is a nice square end.  

After both ends of the blank are squared, the blank is ready to turn.   The blank gets mounted on a mandrel on the lathe with bushings that are the same size as the parts for the finished pen.  Here is the rough blank ready to turn. 

After the initial turning.  The blank is now round, but it is very rough.  Finial shaping and polishing still need to be done. This is one of my favorite steps because it reveals what the finished pen is going to look like.  When we started, the blank was mostly gold and burgundy, but you can now see some white mixed in also.

The final shaping and polishing is done.  At this point, the pen is ready to assemble.This looks much better than the rough-turned blank.  

The last step is to assemble the pen.  The parts are pressed into the tube and the ink

cartridge is installed.  Once that is done, we have a pen that looks like this: