Trying new materials - acrylics are evil!

Some of the pen blanks that you can get for turning on a lathe are not made of wood. There are some very cool-looking blanks that are made of other materials, like corian or acrylics. With these materials, you can get kind of a space-age look and a very shiny pen. As part of my attempt to try different things, I decided to try working with acrylics.

I chose a shiny purple acrylic pen blank with black lines running through it. Knowing that my family likes purple (the discussion of purpleheart woodturning will be addressed later), I figured that the finished product would probably make a good gift.

The cutting of the acrylic pen blank was very similar to the experience of cutting wood. Before getting started with the process, I called Woodcraft to see if I should be using any different materials or different tools when dealing with acrylics. They said that the only difference would be that acrylics are harder on the tools than wood, and that I should leave more room for sanding the blank down. Oh, and I should not sand too much in the same place, as there can be a heat buildup which can create bubbles and holes in the finished product.

Drilling the acrylics was a bit of a strange experience. The hole went straight through the blank - better than wood because there is no grain to throw off the drill bit - but instead of wood shavings flying off, these long curly pieces of plastic worked their way up the drill bit and had to be removed by hand. These plastic pieces were harsh to the touch, and were a harbinger of the struggle to come.

Gluing the tubes into the blanks was not a hardship. I just needed to make sure that there was enough glue on the tube.

Trimming the blanks with the barrel trimmer was a lot like drilling the holes in the first place. Again, instead of wood shavings flying off, the ropes of plastic climbed up the barrel trimmer and had to be removed. All the while, there was kind of a nasty plastic smell. I had to make sure to keep the garage door open while I worked with this material.

Turning the blanks on the lathe was not very enjoyable. The tools had to be VERY sharp, and the nasty smell was everywhere, and the little pieces of plastic flew off around the woodshop. I kept telling myself that I was just doing this to try something new, and that the finished product might make it all worthwhile.

As was recommended, I left a bit more than usual on the blank when I started sanding it down. I thought that I needed to do this because it would sand faster or something, but the opposite was actually the case. It took a LOT of sandpaper to sand the blank down to the bushings, and it took a LONG time. Unfortunately, I must have sanded too much in one area, because there was a "rip" in one part of the pen when I was through. It is true that, aside from the rip, the finished pen was pretty cool (my mom wanted the pen even with the rip, as it was purple and, well, she IS my mom), but I did not have a good time making it at all.

I even have another set of acrylic pen blanks drilled and glued (I had bought two originally, and prepared them both), but I have resisted actually making a pen out of them. Maybe someday I will - it would be a bit of a waste not to - but not until I have tried several other experiments and have forgotten (at least a little bit) what the acrylic turning was like.