Assembly Line Pen turning

The kits for the large group of broker pens came on Monday. Last night, I cut the blanks for all of the pens. Four of Lignum Vitae (green on the outside, but a strange yellowish colour on the inside), four of Orangeheart, three of bloodwood, two of cocobolo, and one of bocote. I do not know if I will use all of the Lignum Vitae or the Orangeheart, but the blocks I had cut easily into four blanks each.

Tonight I drilled the blanks, and a couple of them I will probably not use. Orangeheart is very difficult to drill. It seems like a very soft wood, and it kept getting stuck to the drill bit.

This is my first attempt at this kind of "assembly-line" pen turning. Usually, I will take a pen or two up to the point where the tubes are glued in, then turn them the next time. With this group, I am cutting all of the blanks one night, then drilling them the next, then tomorrow (or soon) I will glue all of the tubes in. I may even turn them all before assembling any of them. I guess, if I am to do many pens on a regular basis, I will have to do it this way, as it is too time-consuming otherwise.

I am very interested to see how the orangeheart and the lignum vitae look after they have been turned.

Just as I thought to try something other than pens...

Last week I decided to spend my gift certificate and use the "$15 off of $50" coupon, so I went to Woodcraft with the idea of getting the starter kit for winestoppers. Winestoppers start as a cube of wood, and are used to close up wine bottles that have been opened but not finished. They do not use a mandrel, and are not therefore done by spindle turning, so I thought that they might provide a bridge between the world of pens and the world of more "freehand" work such as bowls.

And lamps. Not mentioned thus far in this space is the fact that we are redecorating some of the rooms of our house (slowly). While we were discussing lighting, my wife asked me if I could turn a lamp. I had never thought about doing it, but it seemed like something that would be doable. We spoke to one of the woodturning wizards (Chris, the one who taught us in the bowl class), and he said that he had turned several lamps and that it was (relatively) simple to do.

So, I picked up a couple of practice pieces to try to make into lamps. One of the main issues is how to drill the hole for the cord through the lamp when you do not have a drill press that goes all the way through. I have been reading up on ways to do this, and it is a bit daunting, but very interesting too.

So, I came back with the starter kit for the winestoppers, and some wood to use for winestopper blanks, and some wood to use for practicing the whole lamp thing...and suddenly my sister says to me that she wants me to make several Broker-style pens for members of her team at work. This would involve 10 or 11 pens, so I ordered 15 kits (ever the optimist, I assume that 3-4 of my attempts will be wrecked somehow) from Craft Supplies USA, and they should get here in a few days. After they get here, I will concentrate mainly on the pens until they are done.

THEN I might be able to start on the winestoppers and/or lamps. At which point we'll see some more pictures here, I am pretty sure.

I did finally make a good Classic American pen out of Tulipwood, so I feel a bit better.

Budgetary considerations: Woodcraft - $63.27 ($138.78 total), of which $23.27 ($78.78 total) was out of pocket.
Online ordering of kits: $116.35
Now, I will get back $10 for each pen that I attempt for my sister's team, so that will not be all out of pocket either. So, I will not count that among the Woodcraft expenses. I'll just make a note of it.

Still learning...

Tonight I tried another Tulipwood click pen, and while the wood turned out very well, the pen itself did not. I think that I did not pay enough attention to the instructions which tell you to "make a press block" with a hole in it so that the top of the pen can be pressed without damaging the click mechanism. Tonight (unfortunately, after the click mechanism had already been damaged beyond repair) I built a press block. So, the next click pen should go better.

It is really a drag to get the wood sanded and polished, and figure that you are "almost home" with a new pen, only to have the assembly piece not work out. Three pens in a row have done that. Here's hoping the next one works fine.

It was on the way home!

I went to my regional office today, and of course Woodcraft is on the way home from there. :-) So, I stopped in to return the plastic hose fitting that did not work. That was $3.99 credit, so I bought a Pink Ivory pen blank and an interesting green sparkly acrylic blank, which came to $3.98. However, since I did not count the hose fitting as being out of pocket before, I must count the blanks as being extra. Total out-of-pocket is now $55.51, with $75.51 being the total spent.

Another trip to Woodcraft

As we were headed that way anyway, and I had something to return (the plastic fitting that was supposed to connect the bandsaw to the ShopVac, but was not the right size), I decided to bring my Classic American bushings in to compare them to a new set, to see if there was any validity to the theory that mine had gotten sanded down.

Turns out I was right! The bushings do get sanded down (I guess you could TRY to avoid sanding the bushings when you sand the wood, but it would be very difficult). I was told that the bushings are good for about 20 pens or so, then they need to be replaced with a new set.

I bought a new set of bushings for $5.99, and traded my plastic hose fitting for another one that they said should work (a $1 difference), AND they had a special on where you could buy a $25 gift certificate for $12.50. I could not refuse that deal, so I bought one. I hope to use it in association with my "Get $15 off if you spend over $50" coupon that is good until the end of August. In essence, I would be able to get $50 worth of stuff for $22.50.

Since the NEW plastic fitting did not work either, I will have to return it, so if I count the actual out-of-pocket expenses today, it was the gift certificate plus the bushings, which comes to $18.49. This brings the out-of-pocket expenses so far to $51.53 (total is $71.53), but of course I now have the $25 gift certificate to use for future purchases.

Learning, always learning...

Well, last night was a very mixed bag. For everything that went right, I had to learn something from something that went wrong. It started with working on a Tulipwood Classic American pen. The pen itself came out pretty well, but even though I paid particular attention to getting the wood flush with the bushings, the end result was not flush with the kit on the upper barrel. I think (I will have to confirm this later) that the bushings themselves have gotten sanded down a bit, so making the wood flush with the bushings will make it slightly below where it should be for the finished product. I have no problem getting a new set of bushings if that is the case. If that is NOT the case, I have no clue what is going on.

While putting together the CA pen, I learned how (for the first time) to use the file that I bought recently. The fit between the upper and lower barrels was very tight (and it is supposed to be fairly loose). The recommended way to handle this is to file down the inside of the upper barrel. I had never done this before, but it worked pretty well when I did it for the first time.

Then I went to work on a Tulipwood click pen. This one was one that I was trying to resurrect, as the tube had gotten stuck in the blank during the gluing process. So, I cut off the tube part that was outside the blank, and glued it into the other side. This seemed to work fine, until the part where I was assembling the pen. I made the bad decision to use the "short tube" part as the part of the upper barrel that was nearest the center. When I pressed a part of the kit into this end of the tube, the short piece of tube came unglued. So, I tried to reglue the tube into the upper barrel, and then press the pen together, and the wood split. So, 1 for 2 so far, for those counting at home.

The tiebreaker would be a cocobolo slimline pen. This pen worked fine all the way to the last part of putting the pen together. At that point (as had happened with an olivewood slimline pen a while back), the glue holding the upper tube inside the upper barrel came loose, and the tube came out. I decided to use the thin fast-acting glue to put the tube back into the barrel, and the tube got stuck halfway in. So, I have a ridiculous-looking approximation of a slimline pen.

1 for 3 on the night, and even the 1 had issues. Hopefully I will be able to come up with some quality work soon.

Working with Tulipwood

Tonight (and last night) I have been gluing and trimming the pens that I have going, i.e. 2 tulipwood click pens, 2 tulipwood CA pens, and one cocobolo slimline pen. Tulipwood seems to be a very hard wood - the barrel trimmer has a tough time with it. At the same time, it seems to act like cocobolo when I try to glue a tube into it, i.e. getting the tube stuck. One of the tubes got stuck, and I used the band saw to cut the tube and re-glue it into the other end, but I am not convinced that it will come out correctly, since I think it will make the resulting blank too long. Maybe, if I am careful, I can salvage it.

I still have not turned the tulipwood on the lathe, but it looks like it COULD come out very nicely. I will probably make one or more of the pens this weekend.

Getting a sense of responsibility?

This evening, on the way home, we stopped by Woodcraft so that I could talk to the folks there about connecting my ShopVac hose to the band saw. Well, okay, it was really so that I could break in my new Woodcraft card (it arrived last week, finally) and use my new $20 coupon. It just so happens that they recently received a shipment of new and different exotic woods, so in addition to the pen kits I was going to buy anyway (and a plastic connector to help with the ShopVac/band saw issue), I bought some pieces of the exotic woods to see what pens would look like when made from them. I bought smallish (about 4 pens' worth each) pieces of:
Lignum Vitae (a dark green, almost mossy-looking wood)
Redheart (the piece varies from light to dark red within a short span)
Tulipwood (Just a funky, reddish-orange wood with neat grain)
Osage orange (even more orange than Padauk)
Blackwood (a pen blank's worth, to see how it turns)

Where does the responsibility kick in? Well, I have decided to keep track, starting August '07, of how much I spend on woodturning. Today's total, which SHOULD keep me from having to buy too much more for a while (I always say that), is $53.04. Only $33.04 out of pocket because of the coupon.

We'll see how much posting about the amounts will pressure me to keep those amounts down. :-)