When I first set up my lathe, I thought I was on the verge of being creative. I thought that, once I set it up, I could put a block of wood on there and I would just be able to start making stuff out of it. My wife had also, in addition to the tools, gotten me a pen mandrel for the lathe, which is needed for pens, ornaments, and such. I was so clueless that I was not even sure how to put the mandrel on the lathe.
Once the mandrel was on the lathe, I had a bit of a dilemma (not my last, by any means, but close to my first where this whole project was concerned): What is the best way to get the holes drilled into the wood so that I could put the wood on the mandrel and start turning?
A hand drill was my first thought. But, I had to try to rig something up to hold the wood in place, or else the hole would not drill straight. Remember, I started this process not being very good with tools. I managed to drill a hole in a block of wood, after a few attempts, and I put the wood on the mandrel, and I started the lathe...and I was turning! Sort of. The lathe was much too high for me on the work area that it was on, and I had no real idea of what I was doing.
The first thing I needed was a work area. The garage did not have much of that, since it had been customized for work on cars and such. We went to Home Depot (We can do it - they can help!) and bought two put-em-together-yourself workbenches. Once we put them together, I had a place to put my lathe. Which was great, but it was gradually becoming more apparent that I needed more power tools. The hand drill was just not going to work...I needed a drill press. I did not want to buy a drill press yet, until we learned how to make pens, so we took a pen class from the same guy who taught the ornament class that I had taken last December.
The pen class
The pen class was a lot of fun, which reinforced the idea that this was going to be a hobby that I would really enjoy. The process started at the point that we put the blanks onto the lathe, though. The holes were already drilled and the tubes were glued into the blanks and dry. Once again, I had no idea what to do in order to successfully bring a pen blank to the lathe, but once it was on the lathe, I was pretty sure I would enjoy the woodturning and assembling the finished pen.
The drill press
We have all heard the phrase "You get what you pay for". Sometimes it really is true! We were advised by the folks at WoodCraft to get the Rikon drill press that they sold there, because it would drill a deep enough hole to go through a pen blank without having to move it. It also had other features that seemed cool but did not seem too useful to me, and a pricetag that was a bit more than I was wanting to pay when I had not even made anything on the lathe yet.
So, we bought a cheaper drill press, and quickly found that, well, you know the drill (so to speak). It did not do what I needed, despite the fact that one of the reviewers of the press online stated that he was using it for pen blanks. So, we returned it and decided to get the drill press from WoodCraft.
After getting the right drill press, I got a pen vise (for holding the blanks on the press table) and a pen press (for assembling pens once the wood was finished). It was now time for...
Next: Trial and error (and error, and error)...
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