I need to make another Artist sketch pencil for the father of one of the staff at work for Christmas. We had decided on one made of Mun Ebony and yesterday was going to be the day. I found a blank and when I started looking at it, I realized that it was quite a bit larger than a normal pen blank and so I changed my mind and decided to try my hand at a knot in the blank. This entails me cutting the blank at a 45 degree angle and glueing a strip of (in this case) bird’s eye maple between the cut. When dry, you rotate the blank 90 degrees and do the same thing. In total there are 4 strips of maple glued into the blank. Next time I do this I will take pictures of the blank as I progress in the glueup. I used CA glue for the segmenting and so between glue and cutting I only had to wait for about a half hour. This meant that I could easily get the blank ready in a day.
This morning I was going to continue with the pencil, but I realized that I had some alignment problems with the blank and, instead of wasting a pen tube on this experiment, I decided to chuck it between spur centres and turn it to see if I figured the geometry correctly. As you can see, it turned out very well, even though not every “string” of the knot lines up correctly. I was pretty impressed because I did all the cutting with a handsaw.
Here is the finished piece. It is kind of like a Latin Clave although it is smaller than it should be. You can’t really tell the size from the picture. this finished rod is about 4 inches in length and less than 1 inch in diameter.
The alignment problems are most evident in the second photograph. Before I do this again, I will have to design a tablesaw sled, so that the cutting can be more uniform. One of the happy accidents is shown in the third picture. When turned a branch knot appeared in the ebony, right in the middle of the maple knot. This is one of the reasons that wood turning is so engaging. You can’t really plan for things like this and you never know what will happen when you start into a piece of wood.
To Everything, Turn...Turn...Turn 