To Everything, Turn…Turn…Turn

I have been planning to use my last Baron fountain pen kit to replace the first fountain pen that I made in my class.  The lid keeps coming off that one and so I need a new one for the office.  I had planned to make it with an acrylic called stonewash denim, but I got carried away when turning and reduced the acrylic right down to the brass tube.  This morning I decided to use a purpleheart blank and experiment some more with Cyanoacrylate glue (superglue) as a finish.  My last experiments didn’t work out very well.

I am pleased by the finish, but would like it to be more even and with fewer blemishes.  This took most of the day.

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.

I started a couple of pens last night for a couple of friends visiting from BC.  The first was a Fountain pen in a “Cinnamon Swirl” acrylic.  Unfortunately just as I was closing in on drilling through the blank, it blew out the bottom.  Because it was my last Cinnamon Swirl blank, I had to re-think my plan.  My friend Ray is a wood carver and so I knew that his pen was going to be a wooden pen.  I decided that I would make both of these pens out of Padauk.  Well, I started drilling the first blank and the whole blank split beyond repair.  I was able to get another blank (padauk) on the lathe but then it blew out just as I was nearing the end of the turning.  Having run out of pen blanks and tubes I had to stop for the night.  It is the most trouble I have ever had turning pens.

One of the reasons that the last blank blew is that I was trying to do this pen using a skew chisel.  Turners seem to either love skews or hate them.  I am trying to become one who loves my skew chisels.  Unfortunately I am not there yet.  I will keep trying though.  Perhaps though I won’t try a pen till I am more proficient.  I will stick to cheaper stock though until I can hone my skill.

Last weekend, in the same session as my experiment with the segmented pencil, I made a “bullet” pen for a colleague.  I purchased the kit in one of my first orders from Penn State Industries this spring but couldn’t decide what blank to use for the tube.  I had thought deer antler or camouflage, because my friend is an avid hunter, and like me, is in the Army, but I couldn’t really find any antler and all the camouflage blanks on the market were really “cheesy”.  I have it in the back of my mind that I could make a segmented blank in the Canadian Disruptive Pattern (CADPAT) camouflage, but I don’t have all of the tools to get this involved right now.

At any rate, after I turned the Mun Ebony pencil and saw how gorgeous the ebony turned out, I realized that it (the ebony) would make a nice rifle stock and so I decided to use another of these blanks.

As I mentioned in the last post, the blank turned beautifully and this time I took greater care in finish sanding.  I had wanted to do a CA finish on this blank, but it didn’t work out and so I stripped it down and finished to 400 grit and a polyurethane finish, topped with Conservator’s wax.  One of the nicest blanks to finish yet.  I really must practice a bit with CA so that I can come up with a consistent finish.  It’s not as easy as the YouTube videos like to show.

My friend is a Leather craftsman and I would like him to make a new sheath for an old knife that my Uncle George used on his homestead.  Hopefully this will be a reasonable trade.

Some time ago, William Wood-Write had a sale on Mun Ebony pen blanks ($1 each).  I had never heard of Mun Ebony, so I thought I would give it a try.  When they came, they were coated in plastic and they looked and smelled absolutely awful.  I held off doing anything with them till today when I decided to make a segmented pen with one of these blanks.

This is my first attempt at making a segmented pen with different woods and am reasonably happy with the way this one turned out.  I cut a slice of red oak and glued it in the middle of the ebony blank, then drilled and turned the blank normally.  The finished product is not overly smooth despite using my micromesh, and I will have to work on that in future.

The oak also got a bit stained with the oils in the ebony, but I like it anyway.  I finished this with Turners finish and Conservator Wax.

Here is the second piece to the Razor Project.  Once again, I have had the stand for some time and finally decided to make it.  This is also in the Acrylic “Caribbean Sea”.  I also have a badger brush to make a shaving brush to hang on the other side of the stand, but am not sure where to get a blank.  I wonder if I can just glue some Caribbean Sea blanks together to make a larger blank for the brush?  I will have to check that out.  In the mean time, my existing brush works on the stand.

I had intended on making these pieces from Bubinga wood and had all the blanks.  I was thinking though that making it out of wood would require a waterproof finish and I’m not confident with my CA finishing yet.  Perhaps down the road I will try again.

I have had this razor kit for a few months now, and never gotten around to picking out a blank.  Well, today with my new acrylic blanks from William Wood-Write, I decided to move ahead with this project.  This is one of the new acrylics called “Caribbean Sea” and again, it is fabulous.  Nice to turn and finishes beautifully.