Well, after my night of carelessness, I made a trip to Lee Valley yesterday and bought some more pen blanks so that I could make these pens for our friends Ray and Becky. I had seen Honduras Rosewood and heard the warnings about the hardness, but it looked like a nice colour with good grain. When I got it home, I was surprised just how hard it was to work. When I drilled the blank it seemed that there was more burning of the wood than cutting. I had to go very slowly and clear the drill bit and let it cool quite often. I don’t have a pen mill big enough for the Baron tubes and so I squared the blank ends with my belt sander. The sander generated so much heat I had to wear gloves and again, it took quite some time to square them enough to get them on the mandrel. Once on the mandrel I rounded the blanks with my big roughing gouge and then went to my bowl gouge. I had to sharpen the gouge every 5 minutes or so. Because of my troubles the night before, I avoided the skew chisel. I did try to use a scraper but it cut ridges into the blank that I had to rasp out.
To finish these I sanded to 400 grit sandpaper and then used my micromesh to about 3200 grit. Then I applied EEE Ultra-Shine to the blank. This is a wax with some Tripoli grit embedded and further refines the sanding of the blank with friction heat. It leaves a lovely satiny shine. The final application was conservator’s wax to seal in the EEE. What I like about the EEE compared with the CA finish is, with CA, it makes the wood look like plastic (in fact it becomes a layer of plastic over the wood). With the EEE it still looks and feels like wood… just well finished wood. I was very pleased with how these turned out. Both of the pens are Barons. One is a fountain pen (for Becky) and the other is a rollerball (for Ray). Also, as Ray is a wood carver I thought that he should have a sketch pencil for his shop, so I used Honduras Rosewood for that as well.
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