The many ways to go wrong...

Well, just because I could drill straight holes (or were they? More on that later) does not mean that all of my pen blanks were making it to the lathe. There is still the evil step of gluing the tubes into the blanks, and then there is the part where the ends of the blanks need to be squared up so that they will fit on the lathe with the bushings correctly. Both of these steps are rife with pitfalls.

Gluing the blanks

When the holes have been drilled into the blanks, the next step is to glue the tubes from the pen kit into the holes, and then let them dry. The generally accepted way to do this is to put the glue onto one half of the tube, slide the tube in and out of one end of the blank (coating the inside of the blank with glue), and then take the tube out, put more glue on it, and slide the tube into the other end of the blank until the tube is all the way inside the hole.

How many ways are there to go wrong here? Well...here are a few that I have personally experienced:

1. The tube gets stuck halfway into the blank. The glue hardens so quickly, and/or the hole is so tight, that the tube is stuck fast when it is not yet all the way inside the blank. When this happens, if you think really quickly, you can take a hammer and try to hammer the tube into the blank while the glue is not completely set. This has worked for me exactly once. All other times, the blank has had to be sacrificed (sometimes along with the tube, if the hammer "trick" does not work - there is a good reason why they sell extra tubes by themselves as well as with the kits).



2. The "pen insertion tool" gets stuck to the tube, which is in turn stuck inside the blank. The "pen insertion tool" is a tool that is sold to help people avoid getting the glue on their hands. The glue instead gets on the tool, which is used to push the tube into the end of the blank. If the glue then hardens, well...this one will only happen once, because once it happens, the pen insertion tool is pretty much toast.



3. The glue gets on your hands. This has happened countless times, and so far, I have been able to just live with it. Not happily, mind you, but it is not fatal to either the project or the turner.

Trimming the blanks

Trimming the blanks involves using a pen mill, or "barrel trimmer", attached to a screwdriver. Basically, when cutting the blanks, you leave a tiny bit (1/8") on either side of the tube so that the ends can be "squared up" and will sit correctly with the bushings on the lathe.

Do NOT cut into the brass tube with the barrel trimmer during this step.

Let me repeat that:

Do NOT cut into the brass tube with the barrel trimmer during this step.

This is unbelievably important, and took me forever to catch on to. Unfortunately, unless you have an idea that something went wrong, and you re-measure the length of the blank after trimming, you will not catch this error until you put together a pen that will not close up all the way. The instructor at WoodCraft calls these "desk pens", because they cannot be put into a pocket.

I never realized (well, not until it was told to me) that the barrel trimmer will chew through the brass tube without stopping. I had thought that I could feel it when the trimmer got to the tube, so I would stop at that point. As I found out later, I was stopping way too late, and the tube was now too short.