The true start of Shakey le Tree Designs!

Well, yesterday my sister took the 10 broker pens (well, okay, 9, since there was a really nice one that I gave just to her) to give to her colleagues, and they went over really well. For the first time, the pens were accompanied by small cards with the Shakey le Tree Designs logo and an explanation of the wood that was used for the pen. The cards also contained a new email address that I created just for correspondence related to the pens and such: woodturner@swordmoon.com. Now I need to update the Swordmoon site to include a link to some sort of page showing the pens I have made and what I can do.

OK, well, it is a blurry picture, but I had to put in the logo. The logo itself was beautifully created by my wife.

Shakey le Tree exists! While I have not incorporated, or even copyrighted the name (I am not even sure how to do so), I have cards that go with each of the pens that I have made. Today we gave one to our chiropractor, Dr. Mike. Yesterday, I gave the combination pen/pencil to a co-worker who might be ordering pens for the holidays.

Combined with the fact that I made another really cool pen out of the piece of cocobolo that I recently bought, I am getting really excited about this. While I know that it will never actually MAKE money, it might be something which, down the line, could pay for itself. At least in terms of the materials used to make the pens.

The latest pen:

Broker Pens, Purpleheart, Cocobolo and other stories

I feel like Rudyard Kipling, with a post title like that, but I cannot write like him, so I will stick to my own style :-)

The broker pens are done! The holly one will probably not be part of the set, but I have ten others that are completed. I learned a lot during the process. In particular, the sanding technique that I learned from the web site I mentioned in an earlier post has worked out REALLY well. I have also learned, through trial and error, how to better use the skew chisel so that I do not get tearout. For posterity, the full cast of characters:



Final tally: 3 cocobolo (1 very striking, 2 pretty cool), 2 Lignum Vitae (1 with the new sanding technique), and one each of: Bloodwood, Osage Orange (mistakenly called Orangeheart in an earlier post), Bubinga, Pink Ivory, and Bocote.

This morning there was an 'event' at Woodcraft, and there was 10% off of everything in the store (20% off of wood!). So, we went down there (we had also gotten a coupon for a free bag of odds and ends from the store) and, well, spent money again. Most of the money was spent on wood (a BEAUTIFUL piece of Cocobolo, two nice pieces of Bloodwood, and a large piece of Honey Mesquite - something that looks like Mahogany and has a cool grain to it.). Some of the money was spent on a chuck for the lathe. It turns out that the wine stopper starter kit does not include a chuck and a Morse Taper (I'll explain what that is as soon as I have used it successfully), but both are needed for working on the wine stoppers (and can be used for other projects like pepper mills and such).

All told, I spent $92.50 on materials which would normally cost $111.63:

Totals:
Out of pocket $242.47, Total: $341.56

All is not lost, though, as I really think that my pen-making skills are improving. I finally made the Olivewood Slimline pen that I cut and drilled ages ago, and it came out pretty well:



I also finally turned the wood from the Purpleheart Click pen that I cut and drilled a while back. Like other efforts with purpleheart, however, the wood is kind of gray-brown after being turned. This time, instead of going forward with the pen, I am going to let the turned pieces sit for a while and see if oxidation helps to restore the purple colour. If not, I am going to return all of my purpleheart blanks, including a large piece that I was hoping to use for a lamp at some point. It just does not seem worth the effort to turn purpleheart, unless I figure something out that is currently eluding me.

After coming back from Woodcraft and turning the Olivewood pen, I cut and drilled four blanks for click pens from the cocobolo that I bought this morning. I have quite a bit of cocobolo already, but this piece is especially cool, both in its reddish colour and its grain. Two people came up to me in the store and said that they had each seen someone different almost buy the piece that I was buying, and one person said that they were thinking of buying it themselves. When you see a piece like this, you just have to get it.

One of the blanks did not make it past the drilling stage, but I drilled and glued the other three, and this afternoon I turned and sanded and polished it, and I think it is one of my best ever:



I could not decide which picture did it justice (neither one does, really), so I included both. It took a lot of effort to line up the grain, since the bottom of the click pen screws into the top half. With a Classic American pen, you can just line up the grain and push the two halves together, but with a click pen you have to screw it in just right if you are making a pen where there is visible grain. A cool part of this too was that the black parts of the pen were not visible until I had turned it. The outside of the wood looked completely different!

As a last picture, here are two Cocobolo bullet-tip pens. One of them I have had for a while, but the other one I finally finished gluing together recently:



The red hue of the Cocobolo is set off nicely by the silver of the bullet-tip kit.

Adventures in Burlington

Yesterday was my biweekly visit to the regional company office, and as usual I brought my pen collection with me. There was quite a bit of interest in the pens - several people "discovered" them who I guess had not seen them before. I gave a pen to my ex-manager, who has moved on to another position within the company, and he seemed to really appreciate it. He even raised the question of whether we could put the company name/logo on pens to give away at the User Conference! Given that this year's User Conference is in about a month, I said that maybe NEXT year we could do something with that.

Several people mentioned that the pens would make good holiday presents. They asked if I would make some for them, and I said that as long as I had the request in enough time we could work something out.

I brought my co-worker the slimline pencil (bloodwood with a satin pearl kit - it came out really well) that I made for him, and he insisted on paying me $20 for it. So, I get to subtract from the totals for the first time!

Interesting thing about the mechanism for the pencil - the one I got with the kit did not work, so I went down to Woodcraft (I was going there anyway to see a demo on how to turn a pepper mill, which was interesting but involved tools and parts that I do not yet have) and tried a different mechanism from another kit. That one ALSO did not work. It took a couple of tries to find one that did, and then the pencil was complete. I wish I had taken a picture of it before selling it, though.

I have started to use a more thorough process of sanding and polishing, at a lower lathe speed. I got the idea (and most of the instructions) from www.woodturnerruss.com. It is a great site for learning how to get great finishes on woodturning projects.

Meanwhile, the broker pen project is moving along. I have two Lignum Vitae, one Bloodwood, one Cocobolo, one Bocote, one Orangeheart, one Pink Ivory, one Bubinga (that I made a while back), and one Holly (that will probably be sold/given away separately).

Sold: $20
Totals:
Out of pocket $149.93, Total: $229.93