Diary of a Woodpusher

Another interesting drill

2012-01-14T11:31:00.001-05:00

Recently, while looking up some web sites that discuss the CTE aiming method that I have been using, I found myself at billiards.colstate.edu. This site is a great resource for any pool player that wants to improve.

I went looking through the instructional drills that they have on the site, and found another one that I like: http://billiards.colostate.edu/PBReview/HopkinsQSkill.htm.

This is a drill that has built-in scoring and a predetermined length (10 racks), so it is great for when you know you just have an hour or two. The maximum score is 20 per rack, or 200 for the session. I started out with an 18-point rack, which gave me a LOT of false confidence ;-). I found that the 10 racks provide a wide range of individual results, but the overall score is pretty indicative. I finished with a 78, which puts me in the "Advanced" range. Of course, even 10 racks is too small of a sample to really show me where I am at, but it is a pretty good start. The web site recommends using 50 racks (five sessions) as an indicator of your current skill level.

There are lots of drills and other great resources on the billiards.colstate.edu site. I highly recommend it.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Practice,practice,practice

2011-12-22T21:41:00.001-05:00

Things are starting to come together a bit. Though I have not played in any more tournaments yet, I recently had a practice session where I broke and ran a nine-ball rack for the first time in a LONG time. I have a lot more confidence in my shot, which has allowed me to experiment a bit with moving the cue ball around, as I do not have to worry as much about getting straight in on my shots. In fact, the best strategy is to always have an angle on every shot except the last one (in a game of 8-ball or 9-ball, for instance), as that allows for the most flexibility when trying to get position on the next shot.

Still have not been able to run more than ten or eleven when practicing straight pool, but hopefully that will come. I have developed a practice game that is kind of a hybrid of a couple that I have read about. I start with ten balls racked in a triangle - does not matter which ball is at the head. Break them from behind the head string, and after the break try to run as many as I can. If I sink any on the break, then I have to start from wherever the cue ball ends up if I want to keep them off the table. I can move the cue ball to start the run, but then all balls sunk on the break come out and get spotted. A scratch on the break means that all balls sunk get spotted and the run starts with the cue ball behind the head string.

One point for each ball sunk on the initial run. If I sink nine in a row, I can use the tenth as a "break ball" like in straight pool and re-rack the other nine. If I sink the tenth ball and break the rack, then I can keep shooting until I miss.

If I miss before the ninth ball is sunk, I can sink the rest of the first rack of ten for an additional point. So, if I sink six and then miss, I can get a seventh point by running out the other four balls without missing again.

Most racks so far (today was the first day I tried this game) were racks where I made eight balls and then missed the ninth while trying to get position on the potential "break ball", then made the last two balls for an extra point. One rack was an eleven point rack, which was my highest.

I find that practicing with a ten-ball rack, instead of the usual 15, allows for more open space and fewer clusters, which helps to hone the skill of going from one shot to the next. Occasionally you still need to break up a couple of balls that end up very close to each other. This practice game also helps me to learn how to break while leaving the cue ball in a good spot on the table (so that any balls sunk on the break get to stay down).

Went looking for a longer shaft for my McDermott cue online today, but I didn't find any. I had heard that they are available. I may have to call McDermott and see.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

My first 8-ball tournament at Buster's

2011-10-13T16:27:00.000-04:00

On the last Monday in September, I decided to try the 8-ball tournament at Buster's Billiards. It is a handicapped tournament, and since I did not have an 8-ball handicap, I was asked to play a couple of games against an established player so that Frank (the man who runs Buster's, and the tournaments there) could figure out what my handicap was supposed to be.

I lost the first game against John, the established player, but then won the second game. I was given a handicap of 12 (0 being the best).

A slight tangent to explain the scoring system (which I was not familiar with before that night): In this tournament, you get 1 point for each of your balls (solids or stripes) that is potted during the game (whether you put them in or not), and 3 points for the 8-ball. So, the winner of each game gets 10 points and the loser gets a score equal to however many balls have been sunk belonging to that player (usually 7 minus whatever balls are left on the table). A game where all of the balls are sunk is therefore scored 10-7 for the winner.

Each match in the tournament is three games, with the third game only being played if it is needed. You start the match with the number of points equal to your handicap. So, I started all matches with 12 points.
In my first tournament match, I played someone with the same handicap as me. I won the first game, but lost the next two (and therefore the match). Luckily, the tournament was double-elimination, so I got to keep playing until I lost one more time.

My second match was against the player that I played my "exhibition match" against. His handicap was 8, so it was theoretically possible for me to lose two of three and still win the match (e.g. 10-7,7-10,7-10 would still give me a 36-35 win on points). I was in good form, though, and won both of the first two games to take the match!

My third match was against another 8-handicap player. We split the first two games, and then I broke to start the deciding game (in each game, the loser of the game before breaks the rack - the starting break of the match is determined by coin toss). After the break, which sunk a ball, I looked to see which side (stripes or solids) would be best to have. I saw a way to run the stripes, even though I would at one point have to separate the 8-ball and the 9-ball. Optimistically, I decided to see if I could run out. Usually, this is not a great strategy, because if you do not succeed, your opponent has many ways to make life difficult for you.

The game proceeded like a dream. Every shot went exactly the way I envisioned it, and when I used a shot to separate the 8 and the 9, they both ended up makeable. For the first time in many years, I actually broke and ran an eight-ball rack, and I did it in a tournament! This was the highlight of the night for me.

The next match was against a player with a handicap of 1 (!!), which meant that I could lose all three games 10-7 and still win the match. Unfortunately, he beat me worse than that, as my mojo from the previous round did not continue.

So, two wins, two losses, and a break-and-run...not a bad night for my first tournament in years. Only cost me the $10 entry fee, too. I hope to be able to play another tournament soon.

Evolution of an Aiming Style - Part 2: Theory and Practice

2011-09-27T16:36:00.000-04:00

While getting used to the 15-30-45 degree angle aiming, I kept reading about the CTE method. It intrigued me, partly because it was based a bit on feel instead of calculation. I am not used to figuring things out that way, and I wanted to see if I could get it to work. I found a couple of articles about it, and one of them discussed where the center of the pivot needed to be. Suddenly, it all started to click. I started practicing, and like magic, most of my shots were going in. Not all of them, but I was gaining confidence.

Over the last several weeks, I have found that the best system for me is a mix of CTE and the degree-aiming. If I know that a shot is a 30-degree shot, for instance, I do not worry about CTE, and I just aim for the 30-degree spot on the object ball. Same with 45 degrees. As long as I have confidence about where to aim the shot, I am happy. When there is a short distance between the cue ball and the object ball, the degree-aiming system sometimes works even better than CTE.

There are two drills/games that I play whenever I go to the pool hall to practice.

First drill: I rack ten balls (basically a full rack without the last row) and break them apart. After the break, I either start with the cue ball where it ends up or I take ball in hand behind the head string. Then, I try to run the 10 balls without missing. If I do not miss, I get ten points. Each miss takes a point off. Most of my racks are between six and nine points. Very rarely do I run the whole thing out. I usually play five racks at a time, and try to get as high a score as I can. Right now, my top score is 40, meaning that I averaged two misses per rack. I have had a hard time trying to break that mark.

Second drill: I rack the 6,7,8, and 9 in a diamond formation, with the 6 on the spot. I break them apart, spotting any balls that sink on the break, and then I get to put the cue ball anywhere I want on the table. The object is to run the balls in order, as you would at the end of a game of 9-ball. If I run out without missing, it is a "win". If not, it is a "loss". I try to get 5 wins before I get 5 losses, but I have not yet been able to do that. I don't know if it is lack of concentration or what, but it is really difficult for me. Most times I can only get two wins before I get five losses.

Evolution of an Aiming Style - Part 1

2011-08-16T10:29:00.000-04:00

Ken Tewksbury taught me a lot of things that helped, but he also tried to teach me how to aim, and in the process messed me up for a good long while. Everyone has their own way of deciding where the cue ball should hit the object ball in order to make a shot, and some (like me, before I took the lessons with Ken) rely on "feel", using experience as a guide. Unfortunately, between the lack of practice and my new stance and grip (see the last post), experience was not really helping me much. As I was learning ways to move the cue ball around the table to set up the next shot, I was losing the ability to make the initial shot, and it was very frustrating.

When I voiced my frustrations to Ken, he told me that he "only ever aims at three points - the base of the object ball (where the ball hits the table), the left edge, and the right edge". I could not believe that aiming could be this simple, but I was willing to grasp at anything, so I practiced with these three points in mind. It soon became evident that there were many shots that would not go in based on these three points alone, and when I voiced this to Ken at our next lesson, he admitted that he had simplified quite a bit in an effort to reassure me. THAT did not work...now I was as unsure as ever.

During one of my practice sessions at Buster's, I met a guy named Andy and played some nineball with him. I noticed that he seemed to have some sort of aiming system, as he was lining up all of his shots using the same pre-shot routine, and most of his shots were going in. After our match, which he won handily (I still had no confidence on my shots), I asked him about his aiming system and he was nice enough to try to explain it to me. He said it was called CTE and I could look it up online. I could not understand his explanations, but the good result from all this was that I went online to look up various aiming systems to try and find one that DID make sense to me.

The aiming system I found that DID make sense to me is one that is based on the angles that appear most on the pool table. Except for thin cuts, almost all shots fall into angles of 15,30, or 45 degrees. The closer the object ball is to the pocket, the larger the margin for error. As it turns out, visualizing the aiming point for each of these three angles is fairly simple: for cuts to the left, the left edge of the cueball hits one of three spots - the base of the object ball (30 degrees), the "left quarter" of the object ball (15 degrees), or the "right quarter" of the object ball (45 degrees). For cuts to the right, match the right edge of the cue ball with the same three points on the object ball. As mentioned, any cuts thinner than about 50 degrees cannot use these three points...though the article that I read mentioned that you should be able to bank the ball somewhere based on these three angles. I have not tested that part much.

The next question, of course, is "How do you determine the angle when you are at the table?". It would be bad form (and likely illegal) to measure with a protractor or compass when you are playing a match, so how do you easily determine the angle of the cut so you know which aiming point to use? It turns out that, for most people, the angle between the index and middle finger when the fingers are splayed out is very close to 30 degrees, 45 degrees can be approximated by bisecting a right angle. 15 degrees is a bit tougher, but I figure that anything that is significantly lower than 30 degrees (using my fingers as the guide) can be made with the 15-degree shot.

I still kept the CTE method that Andy showed me in the back of my mind, as the man who invented the system I was now using (Hal Houle) also invented CTE. I kept reading things about it and tried to understand how it worked...

Revamping my pool game

2011-08-03T13:39:00.000-04:00

Recently, I started playing pool a lot more and realized that I was at a plateau. I could shoot okay, but I was not getting any better with practice. I decided to take some lessons with a pool teacher.

Luckily, there is a very good pool teacher in New Hampshire. Ken Tewksbury has been a pool instructor for many years (trivia note: His son Bob spent many years as a Major League pitcher), and I went to him for three lessons this past Spring. While some of the things he tried to teach me did not take (the aiming system he teaches for shots messed me up for a while until I remembered that aiming shots was not really my problem to begin with), his tips on position play - once I internalized them and figured them out a bit - helped a lot.

One of the tips Ken gave me was something that I never would have figured out on my own. I am a tall person (about 6'6", or 2 meters), and I have two normal-sized pool cues. One of my cues has a nylon (or maybe linen - not really sure) "wrap" around the area where a player's back hand would grip the back of the cue. All my (pool-playing) life I have used the wrap location as a guide for where I should place my hand...and it turns out that, for me, the wrap is in the wrong place!
There are two corrections for this issue. One is to get a longer cue, which they do make - I never knew that either - but the more reasonable correction is to place my back hand in back of the wrapped area on the cue. Basically, the place to put the back hand is where, when the cue hits the cue ball, the arm (from the elbow to the hand on the cue) points straight down at the floor. Obviously on some shots this cannot happen, but on most shots where you can stand the way that you want to, you should put the hand in that location.

By gripping the cue where I HAD been gripping it, I was elevating my cue as it moved forward to hit the cue ball. This drastically increased the error involved in the shot itself, as I was not really hitting the cue ball where I was aiming.

Of course, with practice you can compensate for almost any bad habit. When I was really in practice, in Chicago, I was able to shoot well despite this flaw, but getting rid of it is bound to help me. It does mean, though, that I have to train my body once again to execute a shot correctly, and I spent quite a while on the "one step back" before I started taking the "two steps forward". I have even started using my older cue more often, because it has the wrap on it and it is easier to figure out where to place my hand - right behind the wrap. My newer cue, which I had been using pretty exclusively for years, does not have a wrap on it.

First Tournament on the Seacoast

2011-07-15T10:28:00.001-04:00

When we first moved to the Seacoast area in 2006, I scouted out pool halls but did not go to any. The smoking ban was not yet in effect, so I was not really anxious to go off and spend time there. As a result, my only pool playing from when I moved to NH (1999) to 2006 was the occasional straight-pool game with a friend at the apartment complex where we lived in Nashua. And those stopped in about 2001.

When my wife went to visit family in Canada for a week in the fall of 2006, I decided to go to the pool hall on the Monday night of that week. They were having a nine-ball tournament, and for $10 I could get an hour of practice and at least two matches (the tournament was double-elimination).

I got to the pool hall around 6:00 for my hour of warmup, and ran into the first issue. The tournament was handicapped, meaning that each player is assigned a letter grade, and the lower-grade player is given an advantage in each match. The advantage would be greater if the difference in letter grades between the two players is larger.

They had no idea what my handicap was, of course, since I had never played there before. The guy running the front desk offered to play me during my warmup hour to assign me a handicap. I agreed to that, but I told him up front that this would be my first hour of real practice in almost 10 years, so it would not likely reflect my true ability. However, it was the only measure he had, so we played for the hour. I played horribly, as I would have expected, and was assigned a handicap of a D+. This basically meant that I would get an advantage in just about every match I played.

At the start of the night, I had asked someone at the pool hall how long the tournaments usually last. He told me that the finals might not be over until after midnight. I remember thinking to myself that I would not have to worry about playing that late, but maybe I could win a couple of matches before getting knocked out.

I won my first match, barely, and then lost my second one. This transferred me to the "loser's bracket", consisting of players who had already lost once and would therefore be out of the tourney if they lost again. Using my absurdly low handicap and my gradual improvement as I played more and gained confidence and remembered how to position the cue ball, I worked my way through the bracket. I was texting my wife with my progress throughout the night, and as it got later and later I was still in it.

The finals took place at midnight. I was exhausted, and I was playing someone with a lower handicap than mine, and I had to beat him twice (he had not lost yet).

I managed to do it, and at 1:00 in the morning, I was declared the winner. Reeking of smoke, and barely able to stand up, I got the first prize of $75 and headed home to try to get some sleep before work the next day.

Oh, and my handicap was raised to a C.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Somersworth, NH

Kindred Spirits

2011-07-02T10:50:00.001-04:00

You don't really expect to meet a lifelong friend in a pool hall. When you consider that the interest in billiards is likely the only thing I had in common with the people that I met in pool halls, and there were several things that I did NOT have in common with them (most notably the smoking and gambling habits that were both very prevalent when I began shooting pool in the mid-90s), it is amazing that I made many friends at all. There were several people of all ages that I enjoyed talking to at the pool hall, but I was not that interested in getting together with them outside of that arena.

However, as with most general rules, there proved to be an exception. Christopher was older than most of the crowd at Lee Street (by a few years -- he is three years younger than I am). He was also a smoker, a sometime pool hustler, and a country music fan. And yet...we hit it off. I can't really explain it, except to say that when it comes to the core elements (reliability, trust, sense of humor) we were kindred spirits. While most of our interaction still centered around pool, we would go to other pool halls in the Chicago area and would also get together for meals and other events. Christopher and I talked each other through issues and celebrated milestones together. I introduced him to the NHL, taking him to his first hockey game. He captivated me with stories of his previous days as a pool hustler.

Hustling takes a certain personality and ability. I have never been so confident of my pool ability that I could lose on purpose and have faith that I would play well when it mattered. That is why I like to play tournaments, where everyone is trying their best (at least in theory) rather than playing someone straight-up for money. Christopher seemed (and I saw it in action more than once) to be able to turn it on and off at will. He did not, though, NEED the money to play his best, which is one of the reasons we played so often together.

Our 9-ball marathons were a lot of fun. I would play the percentages, going for the safe shots and trying to run out the table, while Christopher would go for two- and three-rail bank shots and combination shots that I would never think of, and more often than not he would make them and end the game right there. I think, if it came down to it, I was the better pure shot, but he had a breadth of knowledge of different types of shots and angles that I had never tried. We would often meet at Chris' Billiards (where they filmed the pool scenes in The Color Of Money), as it opened at 9 am on weekends and was not too smoky at that time.

One of our most memorable nights of pool happened when I worked at IBM in the late 90s. I was responsible for running some batch jobs in the middle of the night, and I was going to have to go in to work sometime around 3 am on a Sunday morning. Instead of being prudent and getting to bed early, I called Christopher and asked if he wanted to shoot pool at an all-night pool hall that we knew about. The place was famous for money games, and was not my favorite venue, but the tables were okay and it was the only place open at that time of night.

We got there at around midnight or so. For a little while, I practiced on one table while Christopher hustled on another one. After an hour or so, while he and I were talking, we were approached by a couple of guys who wanted to play 8-ball with us for money. It was my kind of money game, because there was no time for either side to hustle the other. I explained to the guys that due to my work commitment, when my pager went off the game was over and I had to leave. We agreed to play for $5/person per game, with the loser paying for the table time as well.

This was the first and only time that Christopher and I played as a team, and we were ON. In the first game, I broke the rack and ran the table. In the second game, they broke and did not sink anything, and Christopher ran the table. In the third game, we each got one turn and won handily. Then my pager went off. I don't think those guys ever knew what hit them. The stakes were low, but the feeling of teamwork and confidence was such that this night has stayed in our memory for years, long past the time when details of weekly tournaments and such have faded.

Christopher was my best friend in Chicago. One memorable day, I had to go in for a dental procedure, and I did not realize when I went in that I would not be able to drive myself home (anesthetic). The dentist asked me if there was someone that they could call to come and pick me up. I gave them Christopher's name, and they called him. Keep in mind that he had no idea I was even AT the dentist that day. Once he figured out what was going on, he dropped everything and came and got me. There were other times when we were there for each other, but that one stands out.

That was also the only day that I ever shot pool while under the effects of Valium. :-)

Even when Christopher moved from Chicago to Columbus, we would still see each other a couple of times a year, when I would stop there overnight on my road trips to see my sister in Virginia. I was the best man at his wedding, too...and even though we have not seen each other in years, we keep in touch. Even now, I know that we can count on each other any time it is needed, and I look forward to seeing him whenever it may happen.

He is still the only one who can get away with calling me Johnny. He has done it since we met, and no one else is allowed. :-)

One of the best friendships I have, and it started in a smoky pool hall. And they say that pool is the mark of a wasted youth...not if you do it right.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Des Plaines, IL

My first pool tournaments

2011-06-27T16:17:00.000-04:00

My first pool tournament entry was born out of frustration. I was in a bar league in Chicago, where you play for a bar's team and the winning team in the league gets a trophy. We were in the playoffs - cannot remember if it was the finals or not - and my match was pivotal. I remember getting to the 8-ball (all of the leagues were 8-ball leagues then; since then I have seen some that are a mix of 8-ball and 9-ball), so all I needed was to make the last shot to win the game. I remember it being a thin cut shot...and I ended up missing the 8-ball entirely with the cue ball. That gave my opponent ball-in-hand (meaning that he could put the cue ball anywhere on the table for his next shot), and he ran out and won the game.

I was disgusted with myself - I had let down my team, and even though someone else on our team (at least) must have lost that night too, my loss was the most visible and came when we needed the win to advance.

I had recently moved from downtown Chicago (where the bar league was based) to out near O'Hare Airport (Northwest of the city center), and really the bar league play was my last link to my life in the Gold Coast area of Chicago (just north of the Loop). Maybe it was the fact that I was "done" with my downtown life (I had moved out to the airport area because my job was no longer downtown; I was now a consultant who often worked north and west of the city, and even the reverse commute was a real pain, especially in the evenings), but when I saw an ad somewhere for a 9-ball tournament the night after I lost the 8-ball match, I decided to give it a try. New pool hall, new area of town, nobody knew me...what was the worst that could happen? I play badly, and decide that 9-ball is not for me.

LEE STREET BILLIARDS

Lee Street Billiards was an interesting place. Unlike every other place that I had shot pool, it was not a bar. As such, it attracted a mostly under-21 crowd. At the age of 25, I did not feel out of place when I first walked in the night of the tournament, but in the ensuing weeks I realized that I was often the oldest player in the room. I did not mind the lack of alcohol, though (unlike a lot of my over-21 peers, I guess), and the folks who played there and ran the place were all very friendly.

Unfortunately, though, you do not have to be over 21 to smoke...and these were the days before smoking was banned in many public places. It took a long time for my love of pool to succumb to my dislike of second-hand smoke, but from the start I really hated that aspect of going to a pool hall. Even when I would go to a mostly-empty pool hall, I would still find the lingering stench of cigarette smoke in the air.

I never really understood the connection between smoking and pool, anyway. You cannot actively do both at the same time, unless you wanted to get ash on the table, so what ends up happening is that everyone else breathes in the smoke from one player's cigarette while it rests on the edge of the table or on a nearby surface. The smoker does not even actively smoke during most of the life of the cigarette, if he/she is serious at all about pool.

Those first few weeks
Somehow, even though my bar league career ended in disappointment, the regular practice must have done me some good. I actually won the entire tournament that first night at Lee Street. I have no idea how my interest in pool would have fared had I not done well, but I somehow played well enough to keep winning my matches, and at the end of the night I had won first place! I did not feel like a favorite in any of the matches - I just assumed that those who were used to shooting 9-ball regularly were better players than I was - but I just kept plugging away.

A couple of months later, I found out that while I was feeling like an interloper in the 9-ball world, the regulars at Lee Street were viewing me as the new gunslinger in town...the one that no one wants to see coming.

The week after that first tournament, I decided to see if I could defend my title, not really thinking that I could do it. Luck was with me again, though, and once again I came in first place. Inside I was laughing - if they only knew what I really shot like. I kept thinking that someday my life as the Wizard would be revealed as a sham once someone dared to look behind the curtain.

Life got even weirder when I won the tournament the third week as well. This was ridiculous. I was not even practicing much in the interim...I just went and warmed up for an hour or so before the tournament, and then played my matches. Admittedly, these were mostly teenagers...but still. Three tournament wins in a row?

The fourth week I was exhausted from work, and I should never have gone to the pool hall, but I felt that it was expected of me (I am not sure who else expected it of me, but I DID have a bit of celebrity at that point). That week, I lost in the first round. That was when I realized the difference between what *I* thought of my play and what the *others* thought about it. To me, a loss in the first round that night was about right - I was really tired, and I was not making the shots I needed to make. Because of the previous three weeks, though, the people in the tournament reacted as if a mighty champion had somehow been toppled. I was human? Really?

It is true that once people figure out that you can be beaten, they somehow have an easier time of it than they did before. I still played in the tournament most weeks, but it was several months before I won it again, and it was a tough climb back to the top.

Other ways of pushing wood

2011-06-24T22:22:00.002-04:00

Two years have flown by since my last post...and, sad to say, the workshop has still not been set up for use. I have an old full-size lathe now, and some great other tools, and someday I am going to set up everything the way that I want it and start turning stuff again - at least pens, maybe larger stuff.

While this blog was set up to document the trials and tribulations of a beginning woodturner, I actually have two other hobbies to which the word "woodpusher" could apply.

CHESS

I have been a chess player for 30 years. With the exception of a two-year break while living in Chicago (more on that in a minute), chess has been a part of my life since I learned the moves at the (relatively late) age of nine.

There are several blogs out there about chess, and many people are documenting the learning process and even the teaching process. I do not have a lot to add to what exists already. I have reached a plateau in the chess world that I am happy with, and though there is a lot of online play and the very occasional OTB (over the board) game with friends, I am no longer actively attempting to learn how to improve my chess game. Continuing to play at the level I have achieved is fine with me.

POOL (BILLIARDS)

One day in 1994, I awoke in my one-room apartment in downtown Chicago and, for the first time since learning the moves, I did not feel like playing or studying chess. It felt very strange, but my brain must have felt like it had found a surrogate source to feed its strategy and planning needs - I had recently begun to take up pool. Several bars in the area of my apartment had pool tables, and I would become the strange regular patron who did not drink or smoke but would go into all of the bars regularly to shoot pool. I am sure that the wait staff did not appreciate the lack of alcohol in my drinking habits, but I was not going to learn much about how to improve at pool while drunk.

I played pool in bar leagues for a couple of years, and later when I moved out to the outskirts of the city I became a regular at a couple of pool halls there. The main difference that I had to get used to was that the pool halls had 9-foot tables (regulation size) while the bars that I was used to playing in had 7-foot bar tables. Learning to play well on the larger tables took a bit of doing, but I gradually got used to it.

I love playing pool, and even when I started up with chess again (one day, about two years later, I woke up and felt like playing again) I decided to keep playing pool. I played for about four years pretty regularly, and even did well in several tournaments. I also got to play pool in the pool hall used in the Color of Money (place called Chris's in Chicago - one of the few pool halls I played in that opened at 9 am).

What finally put a (temporary) end to my pool career was cigarette smoke. For some reason, people used to feel that they could not shoot pool without smoking cigarettes, and the air in the pool halls got really smoky at times. I tried for a while to patronize the only non-smoking pool hall that I could find, but it was 45 minutes' drive away and I was not able to go that often. Soon it closed, as smokers had too many alternatives. The only way that non-smoking pool halls would prosper, it seemed, was if they all went non-smoking at the same time. At the time that I left Chicago, that seemed far-fetched.

In 1999 I moved to New Hampshire, and played occasionally on the pool tables in the rec hall of my apartment complex. There was a guy that I met who loved to play straight pool (one of my favorite games now) and we would play matches once a week or so. The tables were not great, though, which took away from the experience a bit.

Seven years passed, during which time I got married, bought a house, and moved to the seacoast area of New Hampshire. During that time, I did not play more than the occasional game of pool. I still had my two pool cues that I bought when I was in Chicago, and kept them safe in a nice sturdy case, but they very rarely came out of hiding.

I plan to make the next few posts a retrospective of some of my stories from my Chicago years and my first tournament in New Hampshire. After that, I will get into my attempts to actively improve my pool game. I am now taking lessons again, for the first time in about 15 years, and the process has made me build my game once again from the ground up.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Turning Lessons!

2009-06-13T11:12:00.003-04:00

Well, once again, much time has passed since I last posted here. The main event that happened was my birthday present from my wife. She found someone in Maine who does one-on-one woodturning lessons. So, the first weekend in June (about a month after my birthday, but I had to wait until both the teacher and I had availability) we headed for Stonington, Maine - a picturesque (at least in summer) fishing village that is home to a lot of artists.

The teacher's name is Joaz Hill of ShapeShifter Woodturning (http://woodturning.maine-web.com/shapeshifter/index.html), and I had a great time learning from him. He has been teaching turning for about three years, and I am the first student who wanted to just learn boxes and pepper mills. Most of his other students have wanted to learn how to turn bowls and such.

I wanted to get an in-depth understanding of what tools to use to make boxes and pepper mills. I had watched a DVD on making boxes, but the turner on the DVD did not spend much time on the basics (what tools he was using, what speeds he was turning at, that sort of thing). And, of course, I had taken a class in pepper mill making, but that was a while ago and I never really got a sense of what I would need in order to start making them at home.

With Joaz, we used the tools that I already had, to the extent that they could be used in the project at hand. He showed me how to sharpen each tool, and I was able to practice that until I had a bit of confidence with it. Until now, the only tool I felt comfortable sharpening was the roughing gouge (well, and any tool that could just be honed). What I mainly found out was that, while I had a good set of tools, they are (mostly) not hefty enough to handle the end-grain work and hollowing that boxes need. I now have a list of tools to get, which is not really a bad thing :-)

We made a small box on the first day (Friday) and then started on a larger one. That one we finished on Saturday morning, and we spent the rest of Saturday making a pepper mill.

One aspect of turning the boxes and such caught me by surprise. The lathe we were using was a nice full-size Powermatic lathe that had variable speed. That means that you could run it at any speed from 0 to about (guessing here - we always stayed on the low end) 4000 RPM just by adjusting a knob. We spent just about all of our time in the 150-350 RPM range, and that seemed to be the right speed for what we were doing.

Here is the problem (issue?): My Rikon mini-lathe, while it is big enough to handle the size of the boxes and pepper mills that I would be making, has 5 speeds - the lowest of which is 430 RPM. So, I would have to do all of the box-making and such at a speed that is higher than what I was comfortable working with. I am willing to try to do this, but I have also been looking into getting a mini lathe that does variable speed and starts at a low enough speed to be useful.

I posted a question on www.woodcentral.com (recommended by Joaz - it seems like the people there are very friendly and very helpful) about variable-speed mini lathes, and got two recommendations. The first (and slightly more recommended, though not by much) is a Delta 46-460, which from all accounts seems like a pretty cool machine. The problem is that it is so new that it is not available in a lot of areas. I do not really want to buy something like that without at least getting a firsthand look at it. The second lathe is a Jet 1220VS, which gets high marks from those who use it.

Of course, just as I was figuring out how best to get one of these and sell my existing lathe, someone posted that they have no problem drilling holes and turning at the speeds that my Rikon uses. So, I guess the best thing to do would be to try the Rikon out first, and see if it is feasible now that I (sort of) know what I am doing.

If I am going to turn boxes, I need certain tools though. The next decision to make is where to get those tools from. Joaz recommends Packard Woodworks, and also has used Craft Supplies USA (which I have also used for pen-related stuff). I would have to know exactly what to get, but you can often get free shipping if you buy several tools at once, or at least a discount. I could also go to Woodcraft, especially if I have a discount there. I would have to make sure that they are not marking things up, though.

Next Up: Thursday Night's All Right For Turning

Where to even begin?

2009-04-28T17:44:00.002-04:00

It has been an absolutely crazy few months. The woodturning class was cool for a while, but when health issues and then work interfered with two classes in a row, I gave it up. I did produce a cool-looking egg cup and the beginnings of a bowl, and I learned a lot, but I was getting the feeling that the stuff I would want to do would take much more time and expense than I am willing (now, anyway) to throw at it.

I made a pen and pencil set for my high school's auction, and it came out really well. the high bid at the auction was $130, and the person who got it said that it was the only thing he wanted out of all of the items there. That was a great thing to hear, and it made me feel proud to have made it.

What I really want to work on next is how to do a pepper mill correctly without being in a class at the time, and how to do lidded boxes. Unfortunately, I have not been on the best of terms with the folks at the local Woodcraft (their pen kits and advice, on two occasions, left me wanting), and a search for similar stores in the area has turned up nothing. I am really looking for books that show in detail how to do the boxes and the pepper mills, and then I want to start making some.

Second class, and other thoughts

2009-02-12T22:26:00.003-05:00

So we had the second class last week, and practiced more spherical, or at least rounded, spindle work. Same tools, just a different technique. We also learned a lot about sharpening, though I do not know if I will be very confident until I have sharpened all of my tools with the instructor watching. I hope to do that next class, which is a week from tonight.

I have set up some of the beautiful burl pen blanks that my brother sent to me to be made into pens. They have been cut and drilled and glued...only the barrel trimming and the lathe-work is left. Then, of course, putting the pen together, which is always a bit nerve-wracking.

I have signed up for the Woodturning Symposium in NH on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. It is looking like it should be a great time - lots of woodturners demonstrating, and lots of vendors. No hands-on work, but there will be a lot to see. It was recommended by the teacher of the class I am taking. The last one was three years ago - coincidentally, the weekend that we moved into our house. I knew nothing about woodturning then.

I have been debating about what to make for my high school's auction. I think I will do a pen and pencil set. Maybe even two of them. I will leave out the letter openers for now.

I have been looking into making lidded boxes. I have a blank (from when I attempted a pepper mill at home) that would be perfect, but I need to get more tools. I do not have the tools that I think I need to hollow out the box.

Catching up...

2009-01-30T14:10:00.003-05:00

Well, due to many events involving felines and family members, I have not been able to do much turning over the last couple of months. However, recently I have made a couple of Wall Street II style pens. This style is efficient because you can make two of them from a single 5 1/2 inch pen blank. I made two out of Tamboti, and gave one to the vet who took care of our cat Carmen during her last couple of months. Now we have introduced our new cats, Herbie and Domino, to her, and she will be their vet too.

I have started another class! There is a woodturning class at the Homestead School in Newmarket, taught by the same guy that taught the pepper mill class. This class covers all of the aspects of basic turning, and meets every other Thursday for eight sessions. I have only had one session so far, but it is a lot of fun and I think I will learn a lot too. I got the class tuition as a holiday present this year.

Surprising bonus at the end of the year - four of my pens at Nuance sold! Apparently people thought that my pens would make a good holiday gift. I had no idea that they had sold until I got a check from the owner of the store. What a great surprise that was!

My old high school is having an auction in April - I went to the last one a couple of years ago and it was a lot of fun. This year I might donate a pen/pencil set or something similar to be auctioned off.

My in-laws got me a dust collection system for the holidays that can be hooked up to my Shop-Vac. I have not set it up yet, but I plan to do so this weekend so I can see if it fits the tools that I have in my shop.

That is all for now - next class is on the 5th of February. The first class we practiced doing coves and beads on spindle work. We turned pieces of wood that were still wet - they came from local trees, and they had not dried out completely yet. It was an interesting experience - the shavings that come off of a wet or "green" piece of wood are much different from those that come off of a kiln-dried piece like a pen blank or exotic wood blank.

Varied pen-related stories

2008-12-17T17:44:00.002-05:00

Recently, my mom bought a couple of my pens to give to friends and relatives as birthday presents. One of the recipients liked his so much that he commissioned three more! An unexpected bonus this holiday season.

Last night, I went to the monthly Seacoast Woodturners Club meeting. The topic of the evening was "Segmented Pen Turning". There is a guy there who does wonderful work with segmented bowls and such, and he had put together some pen blanks based on the pieces that he used for one of his bowls. I mentioned that I had been turning some pens this week (see paragraph above), and when no one else volunteered I was asked to turn the pen for the demo, in front of the club!

Now, I have taken part in the turning at the club before, but usually we are turning a bowl, and I am learning much more than I am teaching. Last night, though, I was able to show some of the tips that I had picked up over the last couple of years. I even decided to be daring and start using the skew chisel, which many experienced turners shy away from because of the tearout that can result. The other members seemed impressed that I was able to use the skew without any mistakes. For the first time, I really felt like I was contributing to the meetings of the group. It was a great feeling.

Of course, I have had my setbacks recently too. While making a pen last week, I put the first two parts of the kit together backwards. This made the entire kit unusable, and was something I had never done before. I just wasn't thinking. I have put together dozens of pens, and had never made that mistake. I also put together a beautiful cocobolo Classic American pen, only to find that when it was assembled, the top would not turn. I had a nice-looking non-functional pen-like sculpture. Luckily, THAT one got rescued by Don at Woodcraft and is usable now.

The pen I made at the meeting of the club is a slimline style pen that is tapered at the top, bottom, and middle, and fat otherwise. I have never made a pen with that style - all of the slimline pens I have done have been thin all the way across - and it was very interesting to make. I do not like the finished style as much, but I was given the pen when I finished turning it, and I use it in my home office as a nice reminder of the evening at the club.

Due to other issues around the house this fall, I have not progressed with the ornaments or pepper mills (I had wanted to do another one right after the class) at all, but starting in January I have signed up for another woodturning class, which meets every other week on Thursday nights from January to April. I am really looking forward to it. We will be doing spindle and bowl turning. The class is my holiday present.

At long last, a pepper mill!

2008-11-27T10:59:00.003-05:00

Well, it finally happened. I took my class at the Homestead Woodworking School in Newmarket, and I learned a lot that can be applied to the making of more than just pepper mills. I worked on a full lathe, too - not the mini lathe that I have at home - and that led me to think that someday I may want one. Not yet, though - there is nothing that I would be working on for a while that would require something that large.

I also learned that my knowledge of my own woodturning tools has been a bit deficient. Even after two years, I apparently had been using a bowl gouge as a spindle gouge, and had never really used the spindle gouge at all. I never even realized I HAD a bowl gouge! I felt really ignorant when I found this out, but at least I know.

During the all day course, I also learned how to make a "jam chuck", turning a piece of scrap wood so that one end of it can be held by a chuck in the headstock while the piece (in this case, the main part of the pepper mill, with the holes already drilled) could be "jammed" onto the other end. In essence, it allows a piece that would not fit onto the regular chuck to be turned on the lathe with support.

The skills learned in the class can, I think, be easily applied to turning boxes and ornaments and such. I used the spindle gouge (now that I know what it is - I still cannot believe my ignorance on that one) to do most of the shaping of the mill. I also learned a bit about how to sharpen my roughing gouge (some of which I knew, but sharpening tips are always good) and my parting tool (which I had never really sharpened on the grinder - I have been using a diamond stone). My bowl gouge will need to be re-sharpened professionally before I use it on any bowls.

I have not sold any more pens through consignment, which is no real surprise given the economy, but I did sell a couple to my mom, who gave them to friends as presents, and they were well received. Supposedly, I will be getting other commissions for pens this holiday season, but I have not gotten them yet, and time is getting short.

So...the pepper mill. I really enjoyed making it. My wife tells me that it has the look of a chess pawn, which was not at all intentional. I was trying to emulate a photograph that they had in the classroom of a particular style, but I deviated from that style and made it my own. If I had somehow been working vertically instead of horizontally on the pepper mill, I could see how I would have intentionally made it into a chess piece, but I had no idea of the resemblance until I brought it home.

I have been told that I should put a layer of beeswax on it, but I am not sure exactly how to do that. I may do it, and I may not.

Woodturner's Club meeting

2008-10-22T22:38:00.003-04:00

Last night I went to the local Woodturner's Club meeting, and once again marveled at the various ways that people use their woodturning skills. I met someone who decided to START woodturning by making billiard cues. I love to shoot pool, but I cannot even fathom starting at that point. Of course, he has a full-size lathe, but still...

For the first time, I helped to turn a piece of "found wood" (complete with bark, at least at the start) into something that could, with luck, become a bowl or at least a hollow form. I realized how far behind I am (at least in relation to those who were there last night) when I was given the creation to finish, and I had to ask what I should do with it. At this point, I do not even have bowl tools - no bowl gouge, no scrapers...the good thing is that the holidays are coming up kind of soon. I don't even have any wax to seal the piece with until I decide to do something with it. At the advice of some of the folks at Woodcraft, I am sealing it inside of a ziplock bag. That is supposed to work until I can seal it with something like wax.

Tonight I went back to the cylinder - the one that could possibly become a pepper mill - but things did not go so well. I did find two pens to give to my mom for the commission she gave me, though.

More on the pepper mill stuff later - time for bed for now.

On the road to a pepper mill, hopefully

2008-10-20T17:30:00.003-04:00

I have been travelling quite a bit over the last few weeks, so I have not been doing much with the woodturning. The main project has been an attempt at a pepper mill, which (as stated in my last post) was not really going all that well. Since that post, I have watched a really good video on how to turn boxes, and some of the techniques in that DVD can probably be used in the pepper mill project.

I have also enlisted the help of my friend Kurt at Woodcraft. He is a great guy who attacks projects fearlessly and is always happy to help me and answer questions. When I explained to him my issues with the pepper mill project, Kurt first showed me the different qualities of different types of Forstner bits. The ones that I had bought were fairly cheap ($5-10 each), and unfortunately it seems that with these (as with most things) you get what you pay for. Kurt showed me some carbide-tipped Forstner bits that drilled like a dream. Of course, they are each over $25, and I have to see if I will be making enough pepper mills to justify purchasing them.

Being the adventurous type, Kurt decided to see if he could make a pepper mill using the instruction sheet from Woodcraft. He soon found that there were issues with the sheet! So, he has been working on a modified set of instructions for me. I hope to pick them up soon.

In the meantime, when at the Portsmouth Farmer's Market on Saturday, I got to talk with a guy who had his own booth there. He had all sorts of woodcraft on display - carving, turning, chainsaw-carving...all of it was beautiful. While we were talking, he told me about a place nearby that does woodworking courses. They have a Pepper Mill course on November 15th. I really want to do it...I think that once I do one, I should be okay with doing more. Unlike a lot of classes, which start about halfway through the project, this one seems to be a "beginning to end" course. Should be perfect.

He also told me about a place to get some wood - I found where the place is, but I have not been able to visit it yet. It might be a way to get some local wood for less money than I have been paying for the exotics from Woodcraft. The exotics are beautiful, but the local stuff can be gorgeous too, and finding less expensive materials is a good thing.

I have been commissioned to make a couple of pens, so I may go back to that for a week or two, and concentrate on making the pepper mill and maybe a box after the middle of November, assuming I take the course.

I have received some wonderful feedback from someone who just happened to find this blog online. I am very glad that I can have a positive effect on people whom I have never met. Although I was never sure it would happen, it was (and still is) one of the intended goals of this blog.

Tales of pepper mills and such

2008-09-22T09:21:00.004-04:00

I realize that it has been a while since I have posted (Amazingly, there is someone out there reading this who cared enough to email me and tell me to post more! :-)), but the truth is that I have not done much turning in the last couple of months. I have made a couple of pens that came out okay but not great, and learned how NOT to remove glue from the black parts of a pen kit, and I have also attempted a pepper mill for the first time.

First, the pen related issue: When assembling a pen that I made recently, I got some glue on the outside of the black cap that was part of the pen kit. The cap seemed to be made of some sort of plastic, and I was not sure how to remove the glue from it. I thought of using a glue solvent, but I was not sure what that would do to the wood, or to the glue that I MEANT to use on the cap of the pen.

So, I hit on the idea of sanding the glue off. Using a bit of 150 grit sandpaper, I rubbed lightly on the spot...thereby rubbing off the black and revealing the copper-coloured piece underneath! The black on the cap was only on the surface, and now the pen looked horrible. (black cap with a streak of copper scratched into it) I decided to sand the entire cap, to see if maybe the look could be improved by having a pen with a copper cap, but the result was not anything I could sell. I will have to use the solvent after all in order to remove the cap and put on another one if I want to try and sell it. A true bummer, as the wood came out amazingly well.

So, on to the pepper mills. I bought a Nova chuck to hold larger items (winestoppers, pepper mills, bowls when/if I get to them). At first, I was a bit perplexed, because the chuck can only hold items with a diameter of 2 inches or so, and the piece of wood that I was starting with (a standard piece available at Woodcraft) was 3" by 3". The chuck could not even hold it. I knew I was missing a piece of the puzzle, but I was not sure what it was.

it turns out that, in order to use the chuck on large pieces, you need to turn a tenon at one end of the piece that is smaller than the chuck jaws. Then the jaws grab on to the tenon, and you can work the rest of the piece. So, I needed to turn the whole piece between centers to get it rounded, and then turn a tenon at one end. I did this, and it seemed to go okay, at least to start. I got a rounded piece that fit in the tenon and was being held by the chuck.

Next up....drilling into endgrain, using Forstner bits.

Deficit spending

2008-07-28T21:56:00.003-04:00

As I deposited the check from my latest sale yesterday, I was in a dangerous mood going into Woodcraft tonight. I knew that I did not need any wood (did not keep me from looking, though), and I thought I would buy some more opener and magnifier kits. The irony of the evening was evident in the fact that I did not want to pay more for the kits (they seem to have gone up about $2 each!), and so I ended up in a conversation with one of the many friendly salesfolk about buying a chuck for the lathe. The chuck would be my first step away from just doing spindle/mandrel work (like pens, ornaments, and such) towards things like pepper mills and (eventually) bowls. The pepper mill was my stated reason for wanting the chuck, as my wife has been wanting a pepper mill and I said a while back that I would make one for her. I think, though, once I start working with the chuck, I may find all kinds of projects for it.

The salesman (he is more of a woodturner that happens to work at the store - calling him a salesman does not do him justice, though he is quite good at selling) helped me to put together the chuck, too, which means that I would not be sitting at home thinking that I was putting it together incorrectly to start with. Why is this relevant?

Well, one of the reasons I went to Woodcraft tonight was to exchange my adjustable mandrel. It got stuck easily, and I could not get it to adjust at all. It turns out that they ship the adjustable mandrel with a small (but important!) part placed on the mandrel BACKWARDS. There is no documentation accompanying the mandrel, so unless you KNOW that it is backwards, you adjust and tighten the mandrel in such a way that it never becomes unstuck. Yet another time when I was thinking that I must have been doing some beginner idiot thing, when all along it was an easy mistake to make. Luckily, I was able to exchange it out for a new one, and Chris (the salesman) showed me how to put it together correctly.

Why they put it together backwards in the box, without any docs, just baffles me.

Chris also showed me how to keep from having pieces of wood fly off when using the parting tool (which is what happened with the dyed orange pen I tried to make recently). He suggested using the point of the skew to dig into the point where the parting would take place, as a guide for the parting tool and to keep the parting from tearing along the grain when you do not want it to. I also found out tonight that I have been sharpening my parting tool a bit incorrectly, but it can be corrected with diligence.

Started three pens and a magnifier and a letter opener last night. Tigre Caspi for one of the pens, and the magnifier and opener. Pink ivory on chrome for one pen, and a reddish cocobolo on chrome for the last one.

Not much to show, so much to tell!

2008-07-19T20:39:00.005-04:00

Where to begin? There is so much going on. I guess I will just reflect in the order that things occur to me:

1. I now have the domain shakeyletree.com registered! When several of my email addresses stopped working due to the interruption of swordmoon.com, I decided to take the plunge and register shakeyletree.com as a site to host my emails and pictures of my finished products from the lathe (and maybe some links too). If you would like to send me an email related to woodturning, you can send it to woodturner at shakeyletree dot com.

2. Partly because I have not been getting email for a while, and partly because I just think it is a cool store, I stopped in to Nuance today, to find out that the pen-and-letter-opener set that I made out of Tigre Caspi sold ten days ago! This is now my second sale through the store...and was such a wonderful, unexpected surprise!

3. Work on the lathe has been uneven - I was recently working on a dyed (orange) Classic American pen that I think could have come out pretty well, but a chunk of it sheared off just before the sanding step. I also noticed that the dyed woods smell a bit like acrylic, which means that I should probably wait for a cool day when I can open the garage door before I work on them again. However, I did make a beautiful magnifier using cocobolo:

Not only did the grain and colour of the wood come out really nicely (due to the wood, really, not to anything I did), but I tried something new. It is kind of hard to tell in these pictures, but I added lines near each end of the wood, as a bit of decoration. They came out even better than I had hoped.

Here is another picture, just concentrating on the stem:

Again, kind of hard to tell, but you can see them a bit. I actually made the lines using a beading tool...I have not yet made any beads with the tool, but as I was playing around with it, I found that it made nice parallel lines in the wood, much like I have heard that wire burning would do.

After it cools off, weatherwise, I hope to work more on pens and such and maybe get a chuck to make some stoppers or a pepper mill or something.

Word of mouth

2008-06-09T22:58:00.002-04:00

Interesting thing happened today! We were meeting with our financial adviser, and he mentioned that he has been getting a LOT of comments (good ones :-) about the pen that I gave him a while back - a Classic American made with cocobolo. As a result, he is thinking of commissioning me to make some pens. I am not sure whether they will be going to family members, or co-workers, or someone else entirely, but it is a good day when you can

a) Get compliments about something you have made, and
b) possibly get a commission to make more!

Just thought I needed to make a note of a day like this. I do not want to take these types of events for granted.

Red Letter Day!

2008-05-19T21:20:00.001-04:00

After a phenomenal trip through Canada (Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, Jasper, and back to Toronto and Ottawa and home), I have been trying to get back into the routine of things. Our summer of events is by no means over, but for a bit the weeks will assume something close to normalcy.

Today I received an email from Evelyn, whose store (Nuance) has my pens for sale. For the first time since she started stocking them, she sold one! I have actually sold a pen in a retail environment! It was a Double Twist Bloodwood pen, with a chrome kit. I will actually get a check for my pen at the end of this month!

I have been talking with Evelyn about perhaps putting together matching pen and letter opener kits. Inspired by today's events, I turned two letter openers and a pen tonight. I already had a bloodwood pen made, so I now have matching sets of bloodwood and Tigre Caspi wood to show to Evelyn, once we make cards for them.

I also have a piece of cocobolo that could become a magnifying glass. That will be good to show to Evelyn too, in case she wants that instead of the opener. To be truthful, the letter opener kits do not strike me as being great, but when matched with a pen they look pretty cool.

There was another cool thing tonight...I mentioned last post that there was a pen that had tubes sticking out of both halves. Well, by gluing in an extra piece of tube, and cutting the blank a certain way, I was able to save the pen. It is the Tigre Caspi pen in the set I spoke of earlier.

Some good, some bad...the usual.

2008-04-15T07:55:00.004-04:00

Last night I started turning again, for the first time in a while. First, the "not so good":

I am still getting tubes stuck in the blanks when I prepare pens. Not often, but occasionally. This time it happened with a Tigre Caspi pen that I am trying to make. Getting the tube stuck in one blank of the two is okay, since some of the wood needs to be parted off anyway. However, I got it stuck in both ends...which means that I either have to use solvent to dissolve the glue and start over, or glue a piece of tube in the other end of the blank and try to salvage it. Not sure which way I will go with it.

Also, cleaning the headstock and the morse taper, while helpful, did not solve the issue. The chuck still comes off of the morse taper when I try to turn, and it is getting very annoying. I may bring the taper and the chuck to the Woodturner's Club meeting tonight. Maybe it is defective...if I do not solve it tonight, I will bring it Thursday or Saturday to Woodcraft and ask Kurt to take a look.

Now, the good:

The new Spindlemaster tool that I bought last week is fantastic. It basically acts like a skew chisel, in terms of getting close, smooth cuts, but it does not have the same risk of tearout! I am not entirely sure of the best way to sharpen it. I used my diamondstone, since it is a flat tool, but I am not sure if it should be done on the grinder instead.

I also made a good bloodwood Classic American pen, as part of pen/magnifier and pen/letter opener sets I am making. This offsets the cocobolo pen that I tried to make, where a chunk of the wood sheared off when I was using the parting tool. I had to basically lose the wood on that one, and I kept the tubes for future use.

Wow...no posts for March?!?

2008-04-13T10:28:00.003-04:00

You'd think that I did no woodturning for the entire month...while it was not a HEAVY month for woodturning, I did verify that the drill press was now working much better, and I set up my sharpening system and jigs the way that I wanted them (finally). The sharpening system had not really been set up correctly before. The grinder was not bolted down, so it sometimes would move while I was sharpening the tools, which is bad. Also, the spacing between the grinder and the jigs on either side was not optimal either, so I really could only use one side of the grinder at a time.

New wood: I picked up some great cocobolo (not that I needed more, but they got a new shipment at Woodcraft and it was too good to pass up). I also picked up some cheap bird's-eye maple and some burl that looked cool. Yesterday Woodcraft had a 15% off sale, and I took advantage of it. I got some new kits (magnifying glass, letter opener, key ring) and even got a new Spindlemaster tool and a couple of neat books.

A couple of weeks ago I stopped in to Nuance to talk to the owner there. I mentioned possibly doing letter openers and magnifying glasses and such, and she seemed very interested. So, I may do a couple of Classic American sets - either pen and magnifier or pen and letter opener. One set in bloodwood or maple, and one set in cocobolo.

I also got some dyed blanks yesterday. They seem to come out pretty well. I think I am set for wood for a good long while now (yeah, right).

Something I also learned yesterday, that gave me hope for doing wine stoppers and such: The reason why the chuck may be slipping out of the headstock is that the headstock may be dirty. If I clean out the headstock, and clean the taper on the chuck, then it may fit together correctly. It is worth a shot, and gives me hope, as I said. Maybe I can start doing eggs and winestoppers soon.

I've learned enough to teach!

2008-02-26T19:22:00.003-05:00

Sunday evening, I taught my friend Nelson how to make a pen. We went through all of the steps together, and he did some of the turning and sanding and polishing. We ended up with a really nice Classic American click pen that he took back to Newfoundland with him.

While at Woodcraft on Sunday, though, Nelson and I noticed something about the drill press at the store. It was the same model as the one that I bought, but the one at the store seemed to have a LOT more room vertically between the chuck and the table. It turns out (though it still needs verification) that the drill press that I have might be put together incorrectly. Normally, this would be my fault, but I actually bought the floor (i.e. demonstration) model from Woodcraft when I bought my drill press, so THEY were the ones who put it together.

I am not sure what to do about this if it is true. I am going to take pictures of my drill press, and bring the pictures down to Woodcraft. HOPEfully, they will let me trade in mine for the one they have out on the floor right now, but I am not sure if they will. I mean, I know they like me and all, but they might tell me to take mine apart and put it together correctly. I will not be happy if that happens.

One of my next pens might be one of holly...maybe a slimline. I learned a tip or two when dealing with holly - clean sandpaper, and sand away from the wood towards the bushings. All of this serves to keep the dust from other wood from getting onto the holly. We'll see what happens.

Another trip to Woodcraft

2008-02-24T08:46:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I went with my friend Nelson to Woodcraft. I am going to teach him how to make his own pen today (hopefully), so we went to choose a kit and look at what is available in the store. I bought 5 Classic American click pen kits, and 5 Classic American twist pen kits, and a piece of Olivewood that I just could not resist. The Olivewood could be made into 8 pens, or a few winestoppers. It has a really cool black line running through it.

This is the first time that I will be trying to teach someone else how to do the pens. I guess we will make two of them - one for me to show him how to do it, and one for him to do himself (with probably a bit of help from me).

I used the rest of my Woodcraft gift card (from the holidays), so the out-of-pocket on this visit was only $20.

Shakey Le Tree on display

2008-02-19T19:54:00.005-05:00

This morning, I visited Nuance, the store where Shakey Le Tree pens are now on sale. The display looks great - the pens are nicely laid out behind a glass case:

Close-up of the card at the top of the display:

Close-up of one of the pens on display:

I was really happy with the display...if they do not sell, it will not be because of a lack of effort.

I made another nice one tonight - a Cocobolo Classic American pen. I think I will be working with Cocobolo for a while...I have some great pieces that are only really good for pens (and maybe jewelry, if I can figure out how to make it), and it would be a shame not to use them. Cocobolo also always comes out unique.

I also made a mistake on a pen tonight...I was making an Olivewood Broker pen, and I got some tearout and had to start over. I lost the wood, but kept the tube, so I should be able to make another Broker pen with another piece of Olivewood.

I got back my sharpened roughing gouge on Sunday, and used it tonight for the first time. What a difference! I learned a bit about sharpening, too. The angle of the sharpening wheel changes as the tool gets sharpened multiple times, as the sharpener actually shortens the tool. So, even though I had set up the right angle for the sharpening wheel when I first set it up, I needed to change it occasionally, and I had not done that. Also, I was told that I needed to sharpen longer on the sides of the tool than I had been. I will see if I can do that successfully.

Shakey Le Tree goes on consignment!

2008-02-16T23:58:00.002-05:00

Today I signed my first-ever consignment agreement, and eight of the Shakey Le Tree pens will be on sale and on display at Nuance on Central Avenue in Dover, NH. It is a great feeling, and even if none of them sell, it is pretty neat that I have reached this point.

My lovely wife contributed much of the artwork on the cards accompanying the pens, and also helped to make a "Shakey Le Tree" card that will stand next to the pens in the store.

Tomorrow, I get my roughing gouge back, freshly sharpened and ready to work on more pens.

Another milestone...

2008-02-14T18:43:00.003-05:00

This is just a quick post, because I have to make a note of what happened today. On Monday, I received an email from someone who went into the downtown Dover store where I might soon be selling my pens. He told me that he spoke with Evelyn, and he was looking for a pen as a gift to a friend, and she gave him my contact info.

Well, this morning he showed up and bought one of the pens, a maple burl Classic American pen. It is the first pen I have ever sold to someone whom I did not know! Shakey Le Tree Designs lives and breathes, apparently.

In other news, I have severely messed up the sharpening of my roughing gouge, so I took it in to Woodcraft on the way back from Burlington on Tuesday. Don is taking it home to sharpen it, and I will get it back from him at Woodcraft on Saturday, as that is the next day that he is working there. So, no pen making until the weekend.

In the meantime, my lovely wife is helping me to create a web site for Shakey Le Tree that will just showcase the current stock and other items that I have made. It will not give the back story that I give here, about the mistakes that I make along the way. :-)

Speaking of which, I still do make mistakes - I just tend to catch them earlier. For instance, I recently attempted a pink ivory twist pen, but I did not sand it enough before polishing, and the pink ivory had lots of little pock marks (they were smooth, but visible). So, I am going to start over with that instead of making a pen from it. That way, I save the tubes and the kit, and only the wood is lost.

Income: $40

Shakey Le Tree...at a store near you?

2008-02-10T13:30:00.000-05:00

Big news! I went to a store downtown, a store that sells very cool crafty type items, and spoke with the owner (Evelyn) about possibly selling pens there on consignment. She seemed very much into the idea, and has been thinking of having more stock around that could be aimed towards "gifts for men". She thinks that the Classic American (and maybe Wall Street) pens would fit the bill for that. She also seemed to think that the slimline and broker pens would be good for "gifts for women", which gives me a bit of a reason for making more slimline pens.

She seemed to think that my getting $35+ per pen was not unreasonable (I told her $35-40 and up, based on the price of materials used to make the pen), as it would allow her a markup of 30% and would still keep the price point where she wants it.

One thing she mentioned was that I would need boxes, so I looked up boxes on the net and found some nice metal boxes that should work. I had to order them in a block of 24, so I hope that this whole thing really works!

I am nervous and excited about the prospect of actually selling the pens...it could allow this hobby to start paying for itself in terms of materials. This could allow me to start doing wine stoppers and pepper mills and such without being that much out of pocket. And what is the worst that could happen? They do not sell, and I have that much more stock to sell elsewhere. I am researching what kind of legal agreement I should put together to sign so that both parties know what is expected of them.

In other news...yesterday I received the kit for a pen I am making for my uncle. Along with the kit, I ordered an extra set of tubes, so that I can try to turn a couple of different types of wood and see what looks best. The kit costs $40, so I want to make sure that the turning comes out great before I assemble the pen.

Last night we went to Woodcraft, and I found a neat piece of Maple Burl that I could use for ornaments or winestoppers or...pen blanks. I am going to turn a piece of the maple burl AND a piece of cocobolo for the emperor pen, and see which comes out best.

So...a bit of financial outlay this week:
$70.95 for the Emperor Pen Kit
$17 for the Maple Burl
$11 for a kit to make a pepper mill at some point
$48 for the boxes
Total: $146.95

A trip to Wall Street to see a broker

2008-01-25T20:22:00.000-05:00

My goodness, I seem to be making a lot of financial-related pen types! I made my first two Wall Street pens a couple of days ago, one of cocobolo and one of pink ivory. I think they came out pretty well, even though they seem small to me. I do have large hands, though, and others have said that they like them:

The strange thing about these type of pens is that they are mostly the kit. For most of the other pens I have made, the wood (or acrylic) takes up the large majority of the length of the pen. With the Wall Street pens, the kit takes up about half of the length, which makes for a much different look.

I also made a cocobolo broker pen, which came out okay, and a maple burl (undyed, this time) Classic American pen. I was also making a Bocote twist pen, but the wood split on me, so I will make a chrome twist pen with bloodwood instead.

Here is the maple burl pen:

Another meeting of the Seacoast Woodturners

2008-01-20T23:28:00.000-05:00

Last Tuesday night I went back to Woodcraft for the monthly meeting of the Seacoast Woodturners' Club. I went for the first time last November, but I missed the December meeting due to my trip out to LA. This time there were ten members there, and we discussed various tips and such for turning. I thought I could share some of my issues with drilling burl blanks and not being able to glue the tubes in, but it seems that no one else had ever run into that. All of their suggestions were things that I tried, which surprised me a bit. My use of the file to enlarge the holes did not seem to be something that anyone else had ever tried to do.

We made a bowl in the meeting, which was cool. Aside from one class, I have had no experience with that, so it was neat to take part. The next meeting might cover sharpening tools or making something else. I would like to do a winestopper, but I am not sure how interested the rest of the group would be.

I got my discount card, too...I think that it entitles me to a 10% discount on the nights of the meetings, but I will have to clarify that.

It is a cool group - mostly folks older (and a lot more experienced) than I, which is okay from my perspective. It means that, even though occasionally I get exposed as a newbie, I learn a lot.

First Adventures with Dyed Burl Pens

2008-01-20T23:00:00.001-05:00

Well, I finally got the wood shop set up the way I want it, I think. We put together the new lathe stand, and arranged the shop so that the machines are standing in roughly the order in which they are used. I have my kits and blanks on a table, and on the other side of the shop I have the band saw and the drill press and the lathe, in that order. I do the gluing on the table that has the blanks on it, and I press the pens together on that table as well.

With the help of my wife, I found a nifty way to keep track of all of my pen kits. Originally, I was going to use empty soup cans to hold the kits and bushings and such, but she found a shoe bag that works perfectly. It has 24 pockets (normally for holding 12 pairs of shoes), which gives me a chance to put 24 different types of kits in there. I don't have that many, but perhaps someday I will.

Now that I can see all of the blanks that I have, and can keep track of my kits, I am starting to make some nifty pens. I decided to start using some of the cool blanks that I bought last year, now that I have some confidence that the pens will come out well. I started the new year by working with two blanks of dyed burl that I bought in Canada.

I have never worked with burl before, and until now, I had no idea that it was that different from working with other types of wood. However, I quickly found that burl has a few quirks - some of which are good. It drills VERY straight - a hole drilled from the center of one side of the blank has a good chance of coming out in the center of the other side. However, it does this because it is extremely hard wood. So, when it is being drilled, the heat builds up very quickly. I had to spray the drill bit quite a few times to cool it down.

The dyed burls apparently (note - I have now worked with two of them, which I know is a very small sample size, but I can only go from my own experience) are difficult to get the tubes into even though the holes are straight. There seem to be catches on the inside of the blank (not sure how the dye plays into that, but the undyed burl that I worked with tonight did not have this problem), and I actually had to file down the inside of the blank and enlarge the holes a bit to get the tubes to glue into them.

I decided to do two Classic American style pens with the dyed burl (the dye in this case is a blue-green, which contrasts interestingly with the natural brown of the burl) - one with a gold kit (from Woodcraft) and one with a chrome kit (from Lee Valley, in Ottawa). Interestingly, though the kits look pretty much the same, there are some differences in the assembly and turning instructions. For instance, with the Lee Valley kits, you part off 3/16" instead of 1/8". I actually parted off 3/16" for both pens, and there is no real problem, but the gold pen does look slightly different from the other Woodcraft CA pens that I have made.

When turning the chrome pen, I got some tearout in the bottom barrel - I could see the brass tube through a hole in the wood. In the past, I would have parted off the rest of the wood and called it a lost cause - maybe using the top barrel as part of a hybrid pen later. However, I decided to see if I could fix it. I put a mixture of medium CA glue and the shavings from the burl (which were all over the lathe) into the hole, and let the glue set. Then, I sanded it down to the level of the rest of the barrel. For some wood, this would not work because you would be able to see where the grain was messed up, but because of the varied nature of the burl, this technique worked like a charm. The pen was saved, and there is no way to tell where the patch was placed unless you know to look for it - and even then it is tough.

Here is the chrome pen - the gold pen looks very similar, but of course the fittings and trim are gold where this one is silver:

This has GOT to be one of the coolest-looking pens I have made out of wood. One interesting thing about working with the dyed burl that was NOT so great: When I was turning it, it was almost like working with acrylic. Instead of smelling wood, like when I work with cocobolo or bloodwood, I was smelling the dye. It was not quite as bad as acrylic, but it reminded me that if I am going to work with acrylics again (and I do have quite a few neat acrylic blanks), I should probably wait until the weather gets warmer and I can work with the garage door open.

Tonight I cut and glued the start of six pens - Classic American Maple Burl (undyed), Slimline Maple Burl (undyed), Classic American Bocote (Chrome kit), Pink Ivory Wall Street II (A style that uses one short piece of wood, which is good for a lot of the pieces I have left over from other pens. I have not made any of these before), Cocobolo Wall Street II, Cocobolo Broker Pen. Lots of different bushings and drill bits involved with these. On one of them, I messed up the gluing, and had to cut the tube in half and put the cut half into the other side of the blank. It should still work okay.

I do eventually want to start in on winestoppers and the egg kaleidascope, but I am really enjoying seeing how the more interesting blanks come out when they are turned.

Wrapping up the year, and unwrapping new presents

2008-01-06T17:35:00.000-05:00

Wow! I did not realize that it had been so long since I posted here. December was a very active month, though not so active regarding my turning after the first couple of weeks.

I finished the pens that I made for co-workers, and they came out pretty well! I think that I am finally gaining SOME expertise in this area:

It is kind of hard to tell from these photos, but the finish on all of these was really nice, and the cocobolo ones especially had some really nice grain!

I actually kept my Woodcraft trips down, but that was mainly because I was out of town for the second half of the month. I think December was actually a PLUS month for the finances, which is a nice way to end the year. I had income from the pens that I sold. More on that at the end of the post.

While out in LA during the third week of December, I had occasion to see my uncle for the first time in over 2 years. I showed him some of my pens (my stock was somewhat depleted) and he was pretty impressed. I had actually planned to make him a pen before heading out, but weather issues (a snowstorm changed my flight plans) made it so that I did not have the time. I sent him some links, though, and I will make him a pen soon.

I also have to send out my first fountain pen to a friend in Chicago. Just because I have not sent it yet does not mean that it will go to anyone else. :-)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the fact that I have this hobby seems to make me easier to shop for during the holiday season. I received some very nice gifts, including: a book on pen turning, some pen blanks of nice burl, a piece of tulipwood that can be used for wine stoppers or eggs (more on the egg thing in a moment), and some small turning tools.

I also received a gift card for Woodcraft, which I am going to use to buy a stand for my lathe. By doing this, I will open up bench space that I can use to lay out my kits and my wood. This will let me better organize my projects. I will also rearrange the placement of the benches and tools and storage within the garage/woodshop. The lathe stand is supposed to be in stock next week sometime, so I am taking a bit of a break from turning until I get the stand. I do not want to be in the middle of a project when I start to move everything around.

Now, what is all of this talk about eggs? Well, one of the books I got for the holidays describes how to turn ornaments and eggs. Wooden eggs actually look pretty cool. Also, you can make kaleidescopes that are egg shaped. I bought myself one of the kits to do just that.
You can turn the eggs on the mandrel that is used for the pens and pencils.

My goals for 2008 include turning pens that I can sell at a shop or something, and also turning a successful winestopper and a successful egg. If I can do an ornament, so much the better. :-)

To tally up as best I can for 2007, in terms of cost:

Previously: Out of pocket $242.47, Total: $341.56
Expenses: 43.67 on kits, 2.50 on wood
Income (!): $135 for the five pens I made for co-workers

End 2007:
Out of pocket $153.64, Total: $252.73

I also bought myself $60 in gift certificates for $50, but when I use them I will just count it all as out of pocket. There were some kits and blanks I got at Lee Valley in Ottawa, but as those are being paid for out of a different account, I am leaving that alone.

So far in 2008: Out of pocket: $14.59, Total: $14.59

Winestoppers, more pen commissions, and ornaments

2007-11-28T19:02:00.000-05:00

Well, I have started to attempt winestoppers, and I am quickly realizing that it is going to be like the pens all over again - I need to obtain the relevant knowledge, and to learn all of the tricks.

First, I learned that in addition to the "starter's kit" for the winestoppers, I needed a Morse taper and a chuck. The taper goes into the headstock of the lathe (where the pen mandrel went), and the chuck is supposed to go over the taper, and stay there. The problem is that the chuck won't do that - it keeps coming off. I need to figure that out.

Meanwhile, I am back to pens for a bit. I have been commissioned for several pens by some co-workers. I am making a bloodwood click pencil, a cocobolo fountain pen, a cocobolo Classic American pen, and a bloodwood fountain pen. I also need to order some combination pen/pencils, as I have been asked to make one of those as well. I will hopefully have them all done by the time I next go into the office. I turned and sanded and polished the first three pens yesterday, but just in case the assembly of the pens does not turn out well, I wanted to enjoy how the pieces came out on the lathe. :-)

Yesterday (Saturday) was the day when I went to see a demo of the ornament making process that got me into woodturning in the first place. Of course, at the time I took that original class, I knew nothing about woodturning at all, and was not really able to remember all that much of it by the time I had the tools to do it. So, I had been waiting for this demo for a long time. This time, I took some notes and also was able to retain a lot more of what I saw and heard. I also was able to apply some of the principles that I learned to my pen-making later that day.

In addition to the bloodwood fountain pen, I am also making a couple of olivewood click pens that, if they turn out well, could be part of a holiday present.

Last night, while I was making my pens here, my wife was at a chorus event and was then at a potluck dinner with a Yankee Swap. Her gift was the cocobolo Classic American pen that I made a while ago, that came out almost orangeish. It was well received.

My wife and I have been making our holiday wish lists, and there is going to be a lot of woodturning related stuff on mine. It is a win-win situation: I might get some useful stuff to use in woodturning, and for once, I am going to be pretty easy to shop for. :-)

More places to get pen materials, and more people to receive the pens

2007-11-15T18:13:00.000-05:00

Let's see...a lot has happened since I wrote here last. Apparently my sister's colleagues really liked the broker pens. We went to Ottawa, specifically to a place called Lee Valley, which would be the store that I would be going to if I lived up there. I spent a bit of money there on some kits and some acrylic and dyed burl blanks that I had not seen at Woodcraft.

I also received a very nice gift from my (let's see, how would this go...) sister-in-law's father-in-law. Otherwise known as my wife's sister's husband's father. He lives in Newfoundland, and I have spoken with him about woodturning in the past. He gave us a few nicely turned lidded boxes a while back. He sent me a package of four large cylinders of dry birch that were cut about 5 years ago. He has already turned them down to cylindrical, which will make things much easier for me when I decide to turn them further.

Two of the click pens that I made from the beautiful piece of cocobolo have now become gifts. Friends of our family are going to get them. Their mother wanted to pay me for them, but these are people I grew up with. No charge for them - it would not be right.

Recent Woodcraft visits have included:
1) a donation of 4 pens that I have turned. This was supposed to be participation in the Turn-a-Thon for the Troops for Veterans' Day, but I was never told (despite asking) what time it was going to happen. It turns out that it was from noon to 2 p.m. only, and we got to the store at about 4:30. So, I donated pens I had already turned, and in return I got 4 kits and 4 blanks, so it was a great deal all around.
2) Getting a new chuck to use for winestoppers. I tried using the chuck and taper combination that I had bought at Woodcraft the last time I had been there, and they did not really fit together well. So, I brought them back and got a chuck that was a better fit. I still have not figured out the whole winestopper thing, but I made my first attempt at it last night, and I may try tonight as well.
3) Returning the large block of purpleheart that I bought a while back to (possibly) make into a lamp. Although I am figuring out, slowly, what to do with purpleheart to perhaps keep it purple, I have not had enough success with it to feel that I should be working with large blocks of it. So, I returned it and got a couple of kits for Wall Street pens (along with the bushings and the drill bit for the Wall Street style). Wall Street pens are interesting - they do not use much wood, but if you get the right wood, they can look really nice. Also, two pens can be made with one normal-sized pen blank.

I will total up the budgetary stuff later. Time to go give the winestopper another shot. At least with these, you do not have to worry about gluing tubes and such.

The true start of Shakey le Tree Designs!

2007-10-30T22:54:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-27T18:12:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-06T09:09:00.000-04:00

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

Budgetary Concerns

2007-09-26T19:45:00.000-04:00

As one may expect, I have not exactly stayed away from Woodcraft just because I have not been blogging. :-)

Recent purchases fall into two categories: upgrades to the workshop environment, and pen materials. I bought a sturdy wooden stand for my drill press, since the existing bench top was not really working. I also bought an assortment of clamps that I had my eye on, since they were $5 off. I bought a woodturning book, and a Pink Ivory pen blank, and two pen kits. The pen kits were a titanium Classic American kit, which is more expensive but may look really nice with bloodwood or acrylic; and a satin pearl slimline pencil kit, which was commissioned by a co-worker who liked the pen that I made a while back and wanted a pencil like it. I also bought a new pen mandrel, since I noticed that the old one was acting a bit warped (more on that later).

Expenses: $91.15
Totals:
Out-of-pocket: $169.93, Total: $229.93

Broker Pen Progress

2007-09-25T21:38:00.001-04:00

Much has happened since the last post - I have not really been keeping up. Unrelated to pens, I have golfed for the first time and blown the shofar at Rosh Hashanah services (not for the first time, but every time is different). I was struck, as I am every year, at how much the Jewish services revolve around the idea of peace. If only all religions did that (I know that Jews are not the ONLY ones, by any means), can you just imagine what the world could be like?

The broker pen commission has continued, with mixed but mostly positive results. I finally made one from the beautiful piece of cocobolo that I was working from (unsuccessfully up until now). I also made one from holly, which came out fine but was a bit disappointing as to colour (kind of a dull white, and it had a knot which does not really add). My latest attempt was with pink ivory, trying to recapture the magic shade of deep pink that my Classic American pen achieved. Alas, this piece of pink ivory came out well but was not as bright.

I showed the group of existing broker pens to my sister, who liked them all except for the holly and the lignum vitae. I was not too surprised about the holly, but I thought that she would have liked the lignum vitae. So, the list of "commissioned" pens is as follows: Orangeheart, Pink Ivory, Cocobolo, Bocote, Bubinga (one that I made a while back). I am looking to make a bloodwood one and then make a couple more of cocobolo. I *may* try one of purpleheart or padauk. Somehow I need to come up with 10 pens that are different from one another.

Next up: What's going on with the budget? We KNOW there have been other visits to Woodcraft...

Hughie, Dewey, and Gluey

2007-09-04T20:00:00.000-04:00

Well, the first two broker pens are done, and they came out really well! I turned an orangeheart pen first, to see what it would look like, and it looks pretty cool.

Then I turned a lignum vitae pen, and that came out well too.
All this after turning a pink ivory CA pen that is one of the best I have done in a long time.

I was on a roll!

Then...I started trying to turn the other broker pens. Four in a row have either had the wood split or had the glue come undone between the tube and the blank. I would turn the blanks down, and start to sand them, and would feel that the tube was turning without the wood spinning with it. In a couple of cases, I got to the point where I was about to put the pen together, and the tube would slide a bit.

Luckily, I have noticed, in all cases, BEFORE using the pen kits. The pen kits are the most expensive parts of the process, and it is important to not waste one if it is avoidable. In all of the cases mentioned above, I just cut the wood off of the tube, and sanded most of the glue off of the tube so that it could be re-glued into another blank.

Tonight, I added some glue to the glued-in blanks that I already had made, and I also cut and drilled and glued a few more (one bloodwood, one holly, and three cocobolo that could come out really sharp). THIS time, I used a lot more glue. I am used to having to be very careful about using too much glue because the tube would get stuck in the blanks. This does not seem to be an issue with the broker pens. The tubes are just a bit smaller in relation to the holes that get drilled.

Side note: I canNOT see the appeal in sniffing glue. My eyes get very irritated just having the glue open and nearby for more than a minute or two, even when the garage door is open.

Assembly Line Pen turning

2007-08-29T22:39:00.000-04:00

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...

2007-08-23T21:49:00.000-04:00

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...

2007-08-14T22:47:00.001-04:00

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!

2007-08-13T20:17:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-11T22:50:00.000-04:00

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...

2007-08-11T09:40:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-09T22:48:00.001-04:00

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?

2007-08-05T18:12:00.000-04:00

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. :-)

Sometimes, even with the best intentions...

2007-07-30T19:32:00.001-04:00

Well, today was the day. We were away for a week, and I wanted to try to turn the combo broker pen that I have been preparing. Last night, I poured glue on all of the pen so that the wood would have more strength (a tip I got from one of my woodturning books), and today I trimmed the ends of the blank (no problem) and turned and sanded. One thing I noticed while sanding was that the surface, while smooth, was not turning smoothly on the lathe. I could not figure out why, and only when I sanded and polished the blank, and pressed the tip into the tube (unfortunately, once you have pressed one part of the pen together, you have reached the point of no return in terms of reusing the kit), did I notice that the holly wood had come apart from the rest of the pen. So...I pretty much had to give it up. It was an interesting idea, and one that I may come back to at some point, but the first try was a failure.

Another visit to the office, another pen sold...

2007-07-21T10:27:00.000-04:00

I went to my company's office yesterday (as I do every 2-3 weeks), and my one paying customer came through again! I have given away quite a few pens to co-workers, but I have also sold several pens to this one woman who buys them as presents for her family members (mainly). Yesterday, she bought the cocobolo click pen (which came out nicely - I will have to make more of those) and the olivewood click pencil, both as presents for her daughter. If nothing else, she helps me to figure out which styles of pens might be popular.

This afternoon, I also started work on another combination pen. I decided to try a pen with two different woods stacked vertically in the pen blank, rather than horizontally (the way the padauk and purpleheart were glued together). I have no idea if it will work, but I am trying a combination of bloodwood and holly (red and white) in a striped formation. I have cut the pieces, and I have glued them together, and they are currently clamped together while the glue sets. If it works, I should be able to drill the hole in the blank this evening. The final pen, if it comes out, will either celebrate Canada Day or the barber shop. :-)

The combo pen finished

2007-07-20T06:44:00.000-04:00

The first truly SLT designed pen has made it through to fruition! It is not easy to capture in a photograph, but you can see where the purpleheart is joined to the padauk at each end:

Now that we have finally finished one of these types of pens, it will be easier to design others. There is a noticeable thinning of the pen in the lower half - this happened, I think, because the padauk is a softer wood than the purpleheart, so the chisel cut deeper into the padauk. As I work more with different woods on the same pen, I will get used to this and the pens should turn out better.

I also made a bloodwood pen last night, to go with the letter opener. That one came out fine:

One issue that I have been running into lately is that the top of the pen is not as flush with the kit (at the middle, where the center band is). I think that this is because I part off the 1/8 inch of wood before sanding down to the bushing. Then, when I do the sanding, I am not as accurate in terms of leaving the wood level with the bushing. I think, next time, I will do the rough sanding before I part off the wood, and see if this makes a difference.

Progress of the combination pen

2007-07-18T23:48:00.000-04:00

So far, so good...the combination padauk/purpleheart pen made it through the next stage. I was able to trim the barrels without any splitting of the wood. The next stop is the lathe.

Something intriguing in the ongoing mystery of the colour change of purpleheart: Trimming the ends of the blank introduces a lot of heat (via friction) to the wood. It seems that the introduction of that heat deepens the colour of the purple in the wood. It is possible that introducing heat to the blank after it is turned on the lathe (and after sanding, I guess) would deepen the colour on the finished pen.

To test the theory, I may turn a purpleheart-only blank to where it is brownish, and then put it in the microwave or oven to see if I can induce a change.

Sharp tools make all the difference

2007-07-17T23:38:00.000-04:00

Tonight, before turning the cocobolo ballpoint twist pen (which came out very well), I sharpened the roughing gouge on the wheel and then sharpened my skew chisel on the diamond stone for the first time. What a difference! Using the skew chisel on the cocobolo was amazing. It cut so easily and so smoothly...I think it is more than ever my favourite tool.

Here is the pen I made tonight:

Another first-time experience: I had heard that when you drill out a pen blank, you should put a block of wood under the blank so that the blank does not split as the drill bit comes out the bottom. I had never run into this issue, so I did not think much of it...until tonight. I was drilling out the bloodwood blank that I had cut earlier in the evening, and the blank split because I drilled it too fast and there was no piece of wood under the blank.

Of course, now that I have a band saw, it was a matter of about 5 minutes before I had another bloodwood blank to drill. This one I drilled much more slowly, and it worked a lot better. I still (full disclosure) did not put a piece of wood under the blank, but I think that the slow drilling helped a lot. If there is a need to drill quickly, I should put the block of wood under the blank, I guess.

I decided to try the bullet tip pen again. I have tried two of them, and they both came out well in their own way. Hopefully the third one will come out VERY well. I will be using cocobolo for it.

Another shot at the designed pens

2007-07-17T19:02:00.000-04:00

In addition to cutting a pen blank out of bloodwood, for a Classic American pen that will complement the letter opener that I made a while back, I am making another attempt at a pen that my wife designed. This will be a Classic American pen too, but it will have purpleheart at the top and bottom and padauk in the middle. If all goes well (the last such attempt did not make it past the drilling stage), it will be a neat orange and purple pen. Well, orange and brown until we find out exactly how purpleheart actually turns purple again.

[Edited later at 8:33 p.m.]
Well, the padauk/purpleheart pen passed the next stage. The glue held, and I was able to drill through the components of the blanks without any splits or tearout. I also drilled and glued the tubes, so the next step is to see if I can trim the barrels and turn the pen.

Three successes!

2007-07-17T08:05:00.001-04:00

Last night I made my first fountain pen! Made from padauk, it came out really well (I am using the picture of the open pen as the background to my title at the top of the blog):

I also made an Olivewood click pencil. This one looks a lot like the Olivewood click pen that I made a while back, but unlike that one, this one actually works. Some nice grain in this one, even though my photography does not do it justice:

Here is the Classic American click pen that I made over the weekend. It looks a lot like the other Classic American pens (the ones that twist), but on this one you press the top to get the point of the pen out:

The interesting thing about that one is that I used the new reddish piece of cocobolo for it, and yet it came out brown (with interesting grain, but still...). Just goes to show that you can never really tell what the inside of a piece of wood is going to be like, in terms of colour. You can tell what the grain will be like, but that is it.

Catching up on the week

2007-07-15T18:49:00.000-04:00

I was in Toronto last Tuesday and Wednesday, and not feeling well on Thursday, so I did not really get to do anything related to pen turning until the weekend.

Friday I sharpened the barrel trimmer on the diamond stone, and that worked pretty well. No more tearout (so far) from the barrel trimming.

Saturday, I went to a demo on dust collection at the Woodcraft store. Most of the discussion revolved around how to do dust collection efficiently in woodshops that are considerably larger than mine, but it was interesting nonetheless. I DID learn that what I am doing in my shop (wearing a respirator, using the shopvac to clean up) is basically what I should be doing, based on the machines I am using and the layout of the shop. That was a relief - I want to stay safe (no wood dust in the lungs and such), but I did not want to shell out for a dust collection system at this point.

After the demo, I hung around the store for a bit, and bought some reddish Cocobolo wood. I found out that you can get smaller pieces of the various wood types, instead of having to buy the entire piece that the store has along the wall. As long as you leave them at least 4 feet of wood, you can take a smaller piece. This is great - it will enable me to try different woods for my pens without making major purchases.

On the way out, I got into a discussion (not the first time) about purpleheart with the people on the staff. They seem to think that once purpleheart turns brown, it cannot turn back to purple. This is contrary to my own experience, so basically I am convinced that no one knows what to do to make sure that the finished product comes out purple.

I worked on a few different pens yesterday and today:
1. A cocobolo Classic American click pen - I cut and drilled and glued this one yesterday, and made it this morning. It looks like the other Classic American style pens, but drilling and turning it is a lot different because the tubes for the two halves of the blanks are actually different sizes. Instead of twisting, the pen clicks. It came out pretty well, and my wife says that she may prefer this style to the Classic American twist pen.
2. A padauk Classic American fountain pen - I cut and drilled and glued this one yesterday, and trimmed the barrel today. I will probably make the pen tomorrow night when my wife is at her choral group practice. This was made from a blank that my wife said looks almost like a sunset (padauk is basically orange).
3. An olivewood click pencil - the counterpart to the olivewood click pen that I made (the one that looked fine but was inoperable because I messed with it). This one had already been drilled and glued. I just trimmed the barrel, and I may work on making that one tomorrow night too.
4. A cocobolo click pen - This one I cut and drilled, but I am not going to glue it yet. I was advised by my guru at Woodcraft to drill cocbolo twice if the tube is a tight fit the first time. Let the wood dry out and shrink, and then drill it again. So, I will drill it again tomorrow night, and then glue it to work on later.

My brother told me that his co-workers really like the pens, and that they may want some for themselves. Not holding my breath, but that would be pretty cool. I gave him the two online sites that I use for kits, and figure that they can pick one out if they want, as long as they understand that the price goes up a bit if it is not a kit that I have already or can get in bulk.

Two more pen kits, please...

2007-07-08T23:00:00.000-04:00

So today I went to Woodcraft (big surprise there) and got the bushings and a kit for the Classic American Fountain Pen. I also got another kit for the regular click pen, so I can try it out with cocobolo or bloodwood.

I also asked how to sharpen the pen mill (barrel trimmer). It seems that I can do that on the diamond stone sharpener that I bought for the skew chisel, so I am going to give that a try.

Another giveaway, and another commission

2007-07-07T22:33:00.000-04:00

It is a good thing I saved a picture of the latest acrylic pen for posterity, because we got together with a friend of mine from Chicago today (she was in New Hampshire) and she really liked it, so I gave it to her. I have no problem with doing that if the person is likely to use the pen themselves.

My friend also gave me a commission - her husband (also a good friend of mine) collects fountain pens. I have never turned a fountain pen, but now I have a reason to. Since he reads this blog occasionally (or so I have heard), I will post my attempts at fountain pens here, and he can see if there are any that he might like.

A bit of a bummer regarding the first team-designed pen: The gluing went fine, as did the cutting of the blank, but the drilling resulted in a split of the cocobolo wood at one end. While the resulting cocobolo/ash combo blank is viable, I think I will waste the wood rather than waste a kit seeing if I can make the pen. Back to the drawing board for us. My wife had some other ideas for combination-wood pens, though, so it should not be too long before we try another one.

A visit to the office, two visits to Woodcraft, some success, some failure

2007-07-07T00:16:00.000-04:00

Last night I went to Woodcraft and bought the bushings and a kit for a Classic American "click" pen, which is different from the twist pens that I have been making. Unfortunately, I did not realize that the "click" pen requires a different drill bit as well (11 mm), and I had to go back tonight on my way home to get that. I also applied for a Woodcraft Visa card (about time - I should have done that ages ago!) and picked up the kits and bushings for a regular ball-point click pen - not Classic American style.

Last night, after getting home, I made a Bocote Classic American pen that came out pretty well. It is the same wood that I used for my brother's pen and pencil set.

Today, I went to my company's office in Burlington and brought my pens with me (as I always do). I ended up giving away a pen that I thought no one would want - a pen/pencil combo that was made from two woods (Redheart on top and Cocobolo on the bottom). I always kind of liked that one, but I never thought that anyone else would. One of my co-workers really liked it, so I gave it to him. He wanted to pay me, but I stuck to my "free to friends, sold to friends who want to give it as a gift to someone else" policy. He wanted to use it himself, so it was free.

Tonight I tried to make two pens. I used Olivewood to try to make the regular click ballpoint pen, and it did not come out quite right, so I tried to fix it and ended up breaking the mechanism. So, it looks good but does not operate. The look of it is such that I may make more in that style, though, and I can show it to people as a prototype as long as they do not try to write with it:

The second pen was an acrylic that was the most expensive pen (in terms of materials) that I have made so far. The kit was platinum instead of gold (my wife picked out the acrylic and the kit to go together), and went nicely with the black, white, and red of the acrylic. The sanding was not a perfect job. It falls just short of my last attempt with acrylics in terms of the look and feel of it. I could probably sell it, but we'll have to see:

The first "team-designed" pen was glued together tonight as well. My wife designed a pen that is part cocobolo and part ash. We cut the pieces and glued them together, and tomorrow we will (hopefully) cut and drill the resulting blanks, and then glue the tubes. If THAT goes well, we will later make the pen. The first combo experiment! I am excited, but a bit nervous about the process, as it is the first time.

My first commission, and a design partner

2007-07-04T22:47:00.000-04:00

Today, at our July 4th gathering, I received my first commission for a particular type of pen. A friend of our family, seeing the different types of pens that I can create, requested a click-pen made out of cocobolo. I have not yet done any pens made from kits for click pens (as opposed to the slimline and CA pens, which twist to open and close), so I will have to look when I next go to Woodcraft to see what kits they may have. My wife may pick out the acrylic blank for her requested pen, as well. I will also be on the lookout for the blue wood or acrylic, as stated earlier. I am still feeling patriotic, and I still think that a red, white, and blue segmented pen could be fun.

On the way back home tonight, my wife commented that it might be fun to design some pens together, which I think is a very cool idea. I have many different types of pens to attempt, and I think it would be great to have her come up with some design ideas for combination (more than one type of wood/acrylic/colour) pens of various styles. That way, the finished product could be the result of teamwork.

With the latest success with acrylic, and the way it was received, I may attempt to do more with them. We will have to see.

The secret is out

2007-07-04T08:46:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, we had a great visit from my brother and his girlfriend, and at long last my brother was made aware of what I have been doing these last several months. It was kind of fun to wait until I had some real successes to show him, and to keep him in the dark until now. He seemed to like the Bocote pen/pencil set, and also seemed kinda surprised that his little brother could be doing all of this stuff with machine tools. His girlfriend seemed to like her pen too (the Olivewood pen with the organic citrus wood polish). All in all, a good time was had.

Today I will present the acrylic pen to the hostess of our July 4th gathering. That should be fun too. This weekend, I will make more of the olivewood pens and maybe a bloodwood Classic American. I need to think of what kind of pens I will make next. Maybe more slimlines and regular CA pens...or maybe I will try a segmented pen of some kind. If I can find a blue wood (or even a blue acrylic, though it would be harder to work with), I could combine it with bloodwood and holly to make a red, white and blue pen. That might be cool.

Fixing the inoperable pen, and some thoughts on cleaning the lathe

2007-07-03T11:49:00.001-04:00

At my wife's suggestion, I tried re-gluing the tube into the top of the olivewood pen that had come unglued. It worked, after a fashion. The tube was, strangely, a bit long for the blank anyway, so while the pen now works, it does not QUITE fit together at the middle. Not an unqualified success, but better than it was. Another "office pen", I suppose. One that I can use, but maybe not one I can give away...and definitely not one that I can sell.

The wet sanding that I did yesterday left some residue on the lathe. I am not quite sure what the best technique is to clean it. I looked it up online, and people seem to use kerosene or WD40 to clean the lathe, but I think they are more talking about the moving parts and such. I may try WD40 and a rag just to see how well it works.

Acrylics, Part Deux

2007-07-02T22:52:00.000-04:00

So, in need of additional inventory (read: I needed to make at least one more pen, as a gift for a friend on the 4th of July), I decided to finally attack the acrylic pen blank that I long ago cut and drilled. I looked up some tips on how to deal with acrylics, and people seemed to think that wet sanding the acrylics and using light pressure when sanding would make a lot of difference. For one thing, the wet sanding and the lack of pressure would keep heat from building up, and heat is the #1 thing to look out for when working with acrylics, since the plastic can bubble up and rip. This is what happened with my first try with acrylics.

I turned the pen differently this time around. I used much more of the roughing gouge, and a lot less of the skew chisel. With wood, the skew chisel can save a lot of time and effort. With acrylics, the skew chisel creates spinning loops of plastic that then have to be removed from the lathe.

Then came the sanding: I had never done any wet sanding before. I looked up how to do it, and the instructions seemed fairly simple: Fill a small bowl with water, and put a couple of drops of dish detergent in it. Then dip the sandpaper in the water before using it on the acrylic. I wet-sanded for the 150 grit and the 320 grit, and the results seemed to be a lot better than my first try. What was coming off on the sandpaper was a kind of mud (a slurry would be the technical term, I suppose), and the heat was not building up. The wet sanding took a lot longer due to the lighter pressure, but it seemed to be worth it. I even wet-sanded for the first piece of MicroMesh (1500 grit), but after that I figured light dry-sanding would work just as well.

And it did! I finished with the MicroMesh and polish, and put together the pen:

I am using the picture with the flash, since it shows better the shiny aspects of the pen. I think this will be a cool addition to my inventory, if only for a couple of days. Of course, once my wife saw this one, she said that she wanted a red one. So, I guess my days of working with acrylics are not over.

This one seemed less of a pain to do, but I still think I enjoy working with the wood more.

One thing about Olivewood...

2007-07-02T18:55:00.000-04:00

Though it looks really nice, and turns really well...the waxy surface means that it does not adhere very well. On my second try at an Olivewood slimline pen, I created a nice-looking pen that is completely non-functional because the brass tube inside the top of the pen came unglued (as I almost did, when I saw it). So, you can twist the top of the pen all you want, but the pen will not work.

*sigh*

Well, if all of my attempts were perfect, I would have nothing to write about.

More things to solve, and using a different polish

2007-07-02T16:32:00.000-04:00

Well, after a week away, I finally returned to the pen blanks that I had cut and drilled before my trip. I keep forgetting how long it takes to trim the barrels of several pen blanks before getting them to the lathe. As an added wrinkle, today I had some tearout in one of the olivewood blanks when I was trimming it. I am not sure if it was because the blank itself was small (little room for error) or the barrel trimmer was dull (I probably do need to sharpen it) or the wood itself was weak. Following a tip from one of my books, I took the piece that came off, pressed it into place (a wood with grain helps with this, as you can see how the wood aligns), and applied thin CA glue to the whole area. Hopefully, the piece will stay put now, and when the glue dries, the wood will be stronger and I can finish the trimming and make the pen. I like it when I can salvage pens even when something goes wrong. The pencil I made for my wife, which came out REALLY well, was initially an instance where the tube got stuck on its way into the blank. Doubly satisfying.

My brother and his girlfriend are coming to visit tomorrow, so I finally get to show him the present I made. His girlfriend is EXTREMELY chemically sensitive, so when I was at the grocery store today, I picked up some organic citrus wood/furniture polish. I thought that I could make a slimline pen for her, and use that polish in case the other polish would cause problems.

I made the pen without too much of a problem, but one thing I did NOT realize is that the organic polish takes a VERY long time to dry. I am used to the Myland's polish, which dries very quickly. As a result, I was putting the pen together while it was still wet. I think it still came out okay, though. I just need to watch that if I polish other stuff with that same polish.

Speaking of pens and such made for specific people, I finally got to give the magnifying glass to my father-in-law last weekend. That was cool - he really appreciated it. I also gave my mother-in-law a cocobolo pen that I had made a while back, which had come out really well.

Cutting some more blanks, and what to do about Holly?

2007-06-21T16:28:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I cut some more blanks to use with my batch of pen kits. I cut a bloodwood blank to make a Classic American pen with, to go with the letter opener that my wife is giving to her co-worker as a present. My last attempt at this ended up with tearout, so we cannot give it away as a present.

I also cut a piece of Olivewood into three blanks to be used for slimline pens. I made a Classic American pen out of Olivewood that came out very well a while back (ended up as a gift to a co-worker of mine), so I decided to make some more pens with it. The piece of Olivewood that I am using for the pens is a large piece that was on the $1 discount table at WoodCraft. I should be able to make at least 8 pens with it, so I am way ahead on the deal (pen blanks that you buy are usually $1 per blank and up), assuming that the pens come out well.

I also cut some Bocote for use as Classic American pens. I did not cut any Cocobolo yesterday, though I may do so soon. I kind of want to see what happens when I make a Classic American pen and a slimline pen out of the same wood (Bocote or Cocobolo or Olivewood or Bloodwood), just to get an idea about which woods work better with which sized pens.

I only drilled and glued the bloodwood yesterday, but Saturday I will turn the Bloodwood and maybe (if I get inspired) the purple Acrylic pen that has been drilled and glued ever since that fateful day when I first tried to make an acrylic pen. I will also drill and glue the other blanks, and maybe (depending on how long I am at it) I will get to turn some of those as well. We will be away for much of the next week, and I think I will miss the turning, so I want to get a bunch of it in before we go. My wife is singing with her choral group at a wedding on Saturday, so I should have some time if I want it.

I picked up a large piece of holly wood at Woodcraft, with the idea of perhaps using the holly as the wood for the white pieces of a chess set. I want to turn a couple of pens with it, but the wood is REALLY white with no grain lines to speak of. This may work well for the chess set, but a pen would probably look really boring. So, I need to find another use (maybe a magnifier, or maybe as accents in a composite pen?), or keep it on the shelf until I actually decide to make the chess set. I still need to decide on a dark wood for the black pieces of the chess set, too.

I have seen online that you can clean MicroMesh with a brush that has bristles on it. I think I might recycle my old grill-cleaning brush as a sandpaper-cleaning brush if it works. I'll give it a shot on Saturday.

Sharpening changes, and a trip to the office

2007-06-18T22:48:00.001-04:00

Today I went in to my office in Burlington, MA. One of the (many) things I did while I was there was to show my new pens to the co-workers who visited the office where I was sitting. I also gave my old boss the pen that I made for him (as thanks for the tip he gave me about the plumbing issue I was having), and gave my office-mate the cocobolo slimline pencil that I made.

On the way home from work, I stopped in at Woodcraft (big surprise there). I brought the skew jig that I had recently bought from there, and the skew chisel that I tried to sharpen it with (with VERY limited success). I intended to ask one of the people there to show me how to correctly use the skew jig with the sharpening system so that I could correctly sharpen the skew chisel at home. The person I asked to do this was Chris, the 18-year-old who taught the bowl-turning class that my wife and I took last month. He sharpened the chisel for me, taking a lot of his time to do it (for which I was very grateful), but instead of my trying to sharpen it myself using the skew jig, I traded in the skew jig for a diamond stone. A diamond stone allows for hand sharpening of the skew chisel, and also allows for more of a margin of error. Chris showed me how to use it, and also told me that he and his father ALWAYS use the diamond stone to sharpen the skew chisels because of the difficulty of doing it on the sharpening system.

I also got to show the folks at Woodcraft the PenPal 1000, a creation of my wife's that allows me to carry my pens (and magnifiers and such) around with me in style:

When closed, it looks like this:

When wrapped up as a carrying case, it is very easy to bring around with me:

It's an excellent present, and I am very grateful for it. Now that I have a sharp skew chisel, I can start making new things for it. I think the next thing will be the bloodwood pen to match the letter opener, but I have some ideas for projects after that one.

The tears that come from tearout...and some sharpening tips

2007-06-13T22:26:00.000-04:00

Though I had heard quite a bit about the dangers of tearout when using a skew chisel (tearout happens when you do not get a clean cut when turning, and a chunk of the wood comes out instead of shavings), I had not personally experienced it in a way that was detrimental to my craft...until today. I made a Bullet Tip Pen (which, aside from the tearout, actually came out quite well) and a Classic American Pencil (ditto) out of bloodwood. In both cases, the item was nice and smooth and had a great finish...except for small tears in the wood that were too deep to sand out. So, I have a pen and pencil that I can use, but cannot really give away or sell.

My next step is to sharpen my tools again. In order to do this, I need to set up the other side of the jig that is on my sharpening system. The sharpening system has two wheels - one rough, one fine. The rough one is for setting the edge on a tool, but it removes a lot of steel if you use it all the time for sharpening (which I have, up to now). The fine one is to keep tools sharp. I need to set up the jig on the fine side, so that I can sharpen the skew chisel and the roughing gouge, and avoid tearout in the future.

I also need to buy another Classic American kit (or 10), as I promised my wife that I would make her friend a letter opener (already made) with a matching CA style pen or pencil. The pencil today would have been perfect...except for the tearout. I will try to get a good picture of the tearout, but it may be tough to get on camera. Unfortunately, that does not mean that the tearout cannot be noticed with the naked eye.

Luckily, I have a lot more bloodwood to work with, once my tools are sharp again.

Working with bloodwood again

2007-06-12T20:14:00.000-04:00

Today I made the magnifier and letter opener from the bloodwood blanks and tubes that I drilled and glued yesterday. I did have to trim down the tubes that were sticking out of the blanks, but as I noted in my last post, this just made the whole thing a bit shorter - it did not keep parts from fitting together, as it would if it happened with a pen kit that had two pieces.

The items came out pretty well:

For some reason, the letter opener would not lay flat when I was taking its picture, which is why we get the knife-edge kind of photo.

Tomorrow, or later in the week, I will tackle the bullet tip pen. It may be easier to make the tenon with bloodwood than it was with cocobolo, as bloodwood is a harder wood, but I am not sure.

As I am making more gifts (and things to potentially sell), I am spending more time gluing pieces. For instance, the pieces of the kits that are pressed on to either end of the handles of the magnifier and opener are fairly loose. When I first started this process, I would not care so much, but now I am gluing the pieces on so that they stay put. All part of the learning curve, and of having pride in the work, I suppose. :-)

A small tip about drilling

2007-06-11T22:41:00.000-04:00

Today I cut some bloodwood on the band saw, and I will try to make a magnifying glass, a letter opener, a Classic American pencil and a Bullet Tip Americana pen out of the blanks. I still ran into a bit of trouble with the magnifier and letter opener blanks. The tubes got stuck a bit. However, this is less of a problem than it would be with a pen blank, as I can shave off the ends of the tube and just end up with a shorter handle on the magnifier or opener. I might not even have to do that - if the kits call for parting off some of the wood, I can just make it so that the part that is already out of the blank is the part that has been parted off. We'll have to see.

I did figure out that, with bloodwood at least, drilling quickly is the answer to some of the drilling issues. When I drilled through the blank quickly, the tubes fit more easily into the holes. We'll have to see if that holds with other woods as well. If that could be the answer to the cocobolo drilling nightmare, I would be very happy.

Of course, even with drilling quickly, I got a tube stuck in one of the blanks, as stated earlier (one of them I drilled slowly, so that does not count), so there may be a bit more of a learning curve.

Another tip I learned a little while ago, that I made use of again today: Thin latex gloves help with the gluing process. I do not get glue all over my hands any more.

Hopefully soon there will be pictures of bloodwood crafts to post. I am a bit scared of the bullet tip pen. The turning process includes parting a tenon in one of the halves of the pen, and also the top part of the pen does not get evenly turned. The very top of the pen is thinner than the part near the middle, so there is a gradual thickening. I messed this up the first time I put one of these together.

Yesterday I bought 10 slimline kits, like the one that I made with cocobolo. If you buy them in packs of 10 you get a discount. So, I may be making a lot more slimlines. Not a big deal now that I can cut the blanks myself, so I do not lose as much wood in the turning process.

Making slimlines again...

2007-06-08T20:58:00.001-04:00

Though my very first pen was a slimline (they are easiest to make, as the halves are interchangeable), I have been avoiding making them because it seems that you lose a lot of wood in the process. If you start with a store-bought pen blank, what you are left with when the slimline pen is made (percentagewise) is not a lot. Most of the blank ends up as shavings on the floor of the woodshop.

However, now that I am cutting my OWN blanks, I can cut them smaller if I know that I am making a slimline pen from them. Conversely, if I cut the blanks badly for a bigger style of pen, I can use the badly-cut blanks for slimline pens.

Cases in point are the two slimlines (one pen, one pencil) I made tonight. The kits were ones that I bought at Woodcraft back when I thought I would be making a lot of slimline pens. The first is made from Bocote, and the kit is a Satin Pearl slimline kit. The wood and the kit do not go together very well:

The second was an American Slimline Pencil kit that I made with cocobolo wood. This one came out very well. I may get more of these type of kit:

The lesson, as always: Don't throw anything away. Most things that are not useful for one project will come in handy for another one.

My own pen blanks!

2007-06-06T22:25:00.000-04:00

The whole process is coming together. With the band saw, I can now take large pieces of wood and create my own pen blanks. There was a bit of trial and error here, too. Strangely enough, I learned that using the miter gauge on the band saw was not the way to go. Drawing lines on the wood and using those as a guide worked MUCH better than trusting that the wood was being cut straight just because I was using a miter gauge. The miter gauge helped when I cut a large piece off of an even larger piece of wood, but did not help so much when needing precision.

I also might have solved one of my gluing issues, though it may be too early to tell. I think I was putting too much glue on the tube before inserting it into the blank. I had forgotten that the process of putting the tube into the blank involves twisting the tube in order to spread the glue around, so I did not need to put glue all over the tube before inserting it. On the set of pen blanks that I just drilled and glued, I used a lot less glue and the tubes went nicely into the blanks. Of course, the real test is to see if the tubes stay glued when I do the barrel trimming and the turning. Stay tuned...

My last two Classic American pens, made from the large piece of cocobolo wood that I bought at Woodcraft, came out really well. I think I might be getting the hang of this!

I used the picture with the flash to show the grain of the wood and the polish of the pens.

I made some Bocote pen blanks last night, and drilled and glued them for a matching pen/pencil set that I hope to turn over the next couple of days. I also set up to turn a couple of slimlines - one pen, one pencil - which I have not done since the very first pen that I turned in my own woodshop.

Cooking cocobolo, or: Still a couple of bugs in the system

2007-06-03T10:45:00.001-04:00

As mentioned earlier, there is a type of wood that seems to be VERY difficult to drill and glue correctly. Cocobolo is a fantastic-looking wood, and it is very easy to turn, but it is also a wet wood (a lot of moisture in it), and for that reason, drilling it is a pain in the neck. The moistness of the wood means that when it is drilled, the drill bit heats up the interior of the wood (around the hole being drilled), and the hole shrinks after it is drilled. So, even though the drill bit can go through the wood with no problem, the brass tubes do not fit into the resulting holes. It is almost a paradox, and is very frustrating. None of the tips mentioned earlier work well to fix this problem.

My guru at Woodcraft suggested microwaving the pen blanks for 30 seconds at a time, multiple times (letting them cool in between). I have tried this, with no success. I have also tried drilling slightly larger-than-usual holes, and using the gap-filling glue. This sometimes works, and sometimes results in the tube coming out of the blank during the barrel-trimming process (since the tube did not really bond to the inside of the blank). Again, somewhat frustrating.

The latest piece of advice that I have received, which I have not yet tried, is to drill the holes and then let the blanks dry in the woodshop for a week, and then redrill the holes. I suppose that this COULD work, but I am not holding out high hopes for it. Luckily, I have the Bocote and the bloodwood to work on while the cocobolo dries.

The band saw - last piece of the puzzle?

2007-06-03T09:36:00.000-04:00

As I have become more comfortable with power tools, I have gradually accumulated a tool that will help with each part of the process. There is the lathe, of course, which started this whole hobby going. Then there is the grinder for sharpening my tools, and the drill press for drilling out the holes.

For cutting my wood, though, I was relying on a pretty cheap miter saw kit that I bought at the Woodcraft store. The kit consisted of a small miter saw and a small miter box. The box I glued to a piece of wood that I could clamp to the workbench. This setup was barely adequate for cutting pen blanks, and even then the box was so cheap that the saw cut into it, widening the miter slots and making them less useful. As a result, my cuts were not right angles - not a HUGE deal when cutting pen blanks, but not great either.

This solution also meant that I was restricted to starting the pen making process with pre-cut pen blanks and other small pieces of wood, as I could not put any large pieces of wood into the small miter box. In order to take advantage of the savings that could be had by purchasing larger pieces of wood and cutting them myself, I would need a solution that could make more accurate cuts and cut larger pieces of wood.

Enter the band saw. The band saw can cut larger pieces of wood into pen-blank size pieces, and can also cut some of the scrap wood that I have collected to practice spindle turning with. It can also cut smaller bowl blanks when I start to do bowls (if that ever happens).

So, while I still need to extend the miter fence with a piece of scrap wood, I can (and indeed have) cut a larger piece of cocobolo wood into pen blanks. I also have a large piece of bocote and a large piece of bloodwood to use. Once I extend the miter fence, the only thing that is stopping me from churning out nifty-looking pens is my supply of pen kits. I have quite a few, but I will start ordering them in bulk to save money, since I have everything else in place.

Woodturning bowls...similar, yet different

2007-06-01T19:54:00.000-04:00

For my birthday, my wife got me a gift certificate to Woodcraft (see "Easier to shop for", an earlier post...it is already reaping dividends!). I decided to use some of the money to take a "bowl-turning" class. Bowl-turning is still woodturning on a lathe, but the similarity between it and spindle turning pretty much ends there. Spindle turning (which is a broader category that encompasses pen turning and other woodturning that is "between centers") results in long, thin, cylindrical crafts. Bowl turning uses different gouges and scrapers (not used for pens at all), and is done by taking a basically square bowl blank, rounding the outside with the inside piece screwed into a chuck on the headstock of the lathe, and then hollowing out the inside while the bottom is attached to the headstock. If you are confused, don't worry. You are not alone.

It was a pretty cool class, and we learned a lot, but because the bowl turning is SO different from the pen turning, I have decided to try and master the spindle turning basics (at least) before attempting to do another bowl class, or attempting to do a bowl in my woodshop. I have already spent so much money on this hobby that I do not want to shell out for MORE tools, and there are several that I would need to start bowl turning at home.

For those of you that are curious...here are the first Meltzer-turned bowls. My wife's is the larger one on the right - I shaved off too much wood before I started shaping the bowl:

The cool thing is that these are made from a relatively cheap wood - poplar - and yet, because of the grain, they look pretty good. As I have seen with the pens, cheap wood (money-wise) can result in a good piece of work.

Trying new materials - acrylics are evil!

2007-05-27T09:43:00.000-04:00

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.

Another small tip, and more interesting woodwork

2007-05-26T11:39:00.000-04:00

Another tip that I picked up from my woodturning book is to cut the pen blanks as close to the length of the tubes before drilling and gluing. Not only does it keep the woodshop from filling up with useless shavings, it allows me to keep small squares of wood for use in more intricate pens. This does not necessarily increase the quality of the pens, just the possibilities. :-)

I have made attempts at creating a couple of other types of pens. One is the "broker pen", which my father and sister liked so much that I do not have one handy to take a picture of. An example of the broker pen can be found here.

Another type of pen, that I have tried once and am about to try again soon, is a combination pen/pencil. If you twist it to the right, it is a pen, and if you twist to the left it is a pencil. This one was made out of ash:

Another kit that you can get is for a magnifying glass or a letter opener. There are several styles for these, but the one that I have tried (and it came out pretty well) is the Classic American style. This one is a gift for my father-in-law for his birthday. My wife gave him the pen that she made in the pen turning class that we took, and it is of the same wood (Cocobolo):

I have not tried any letter openers yet, but I recently got a kit for one, so it will not be long before I try it.

Figuring out the drill press, and other tips

2007-05-22T23:01:00.000-04:00

While I have been getting better at the entire process, my unfamiliarity with power tools (and tools in general) rears its ugly head sometimes. For the longest time, I could not figure out why the drill press seemed to drill straight holes (as advertised) that went diagonally through the pen blank instead of straight down the center (a feature not shown in any ads that *I* had ever seen). I even called the manufacturer of the drill press and spoke to their technical support. They had me make sure that the chuck (the part holding the drill bit) was on straight, and that it came down straight onto the table. I thought this would help, and it did help a bit, but I was still experiencing the frustration of not knowing when the holes would drill straight.

With large pen blanks (large in diameter), this is not as much of a problem, but if I ever wanted to do work with smaller blanks, I could drill through the side of the blank instead of out the bottom, and that would be bad.

I was pretty much at my wit's end, since I still did not have success after calling the drill press technical support line, so I went back to the gurus at Woodcraft and one of them said, in kind of an offhand manner, "I assume you have already squared the bit with the press table". I just looked at him, trying to figure out what he meant.

"You mean leveled the table against the chuck?", I said, figuring that had to be what he meant, since that is what the drill press tech said to do.

It turns out that the best way to drill holes straight down is to make sure that the drill bit is at a 90 degree angle to the drill press table. It sounded obvious as soon as he explained it, and I bought a small square to help me make sure of the right angle. Once I "squared up" the table and the bit...voila! Suddenly my holes were pretty straight. The bit will always follow the grain of the wood a bit, but the error was a lot smaller and could be dealt with.

Even with straighter holes, though, there was still an issue with not being able to get the pen tubes into the holes once they were drilled. One tip that seems to work most of the time (we'll see an exception later where it does not help as much, though it never hurts): After the hole is drilled, take the pen blank out of the vise and manually move it up and down the drill bit to clear out any bits that prevented the hole from being straight. It is a bit suggestive, but it works. :-)

Another tip which helped with the final product, that (again) I had not thought about, is the application of a second coat of finish. I had thought that one coat of finish was all that was needed, and indeed the pens came out okay, but a second coat of finish made a big difference!

This, I think, is my best work to date. It is the first pencil in the Classic American style that I put together, and all of the tips mentioned above were used. It is not the only good pen I have made, but it is (hopefully) the first of many great ones.

Some success along the way

2007-05-21T20:36:00.001-04:00

During this entire process, it would seem from my posts that nothing I did came out right. That is not quite true. In fact, one of my first attempts came out fairly well. It was a slimline style pen, made with Padauk (pronounced pah-duke) and not really polished, but for a first try, pretty encouraging:

I still had (and, indeed, STILL have) a lot to learn, and I wanted to start making Classic American style pens (like the one I made in class). Many of them, as I stated earlier, came out too short due to the brass tubes being cut down by the barrel trimmer. Eventually, though, with the help of my guru at WoodCraft, I figured that part out. This is a Classic American style pen that I made out of Bird's Eye Maple and Aromatic Red Cedar:

The many ways to go wrong...

2007-05-19T23:42:00.001-04:00

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.

I have a lathe! Now what?

2007-05-18T21:35:00.000-04:00

The previous owner of our house (we moved into our first house just about a year ago) used to work on cars and motorcycles in the garage. So, the garage is very well set up for the use of power tools and related accessories. This made the setup of my woodshop (for such it was going to be) much easier. There is plenty of light in the garage, and it is heated, and it has many electrical outlets.

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)...

Suddenly I am easier to shop for...

2007-05-18T21:20:00.000-04:00

My wife has always said that it is impossible (or at least improbable) to shop for me. I am pretty happy with my lot in life, and there are not many things that I look at and say "Hey, I would like someone to buy that for me". If I can afford it, I would rather get it for myself than burden someone else with the cost, and if I cannot afford it, well, I am not about to ask someone else to try to pay for it!

I married someone who is imbued with the true holiday spirit, however, so every time a gift-giving occasion comes along, she asks if there is anything that I want. Last winter, the answer was suddenly easy: I wanted a mini-lathe, like the one that I worked on in the ornament class. Any gift (or even no gift) would be fine, but if she was asking...

Then came the day (an annual tradition, as I am sure it is with many couples) when we went our own ways in an effort to find things to buy for each other. My wife went off to do this while I was still at work (I work in a home office in our basement). We had agreed that she would have the use of a downstairs closet in which to store things that I was not allowed to see, so I kept my office door closed when she came home so that I would not see what she was bringing in.

Whatever it was, it was pretty big. I heard her fighting with something that she was sliding across the floor of the basement, and I called out to her to see if I could help. She told me to keep my office door closed and not to pay attention to the noises. After a while, I heard the closet door close, and it was safe for me to come out of my office. I had my suspicions, but I had been fooled before, so I was not sure what awaited me as a holiday gift.

It turned out to be the lathe I wanted, and a set of woodturning tools! I was (I thought) ready to set up shop and start turning ornaments! I still basically had no idea what was still needed to get to the point where I could put something meaningful onto the lathe. For one thing, I still did not have a spot to put the lathe...which leads us to:

Next: Setting up the woodshop

Woodturning for the Holidays

2007-05-18T20:46:00.000-04:00

While I have always been partial to woodcraft - I was into woodburning for a while, and still like it, but the business of having to trace the drawings onto the wood first can be kind of boring - I never really knew what woodturning was. Fortunately (perhaps, in terms of my wallet, unfortunately) we have a WoodCraft store nearby. WoodCraft stores are wonderful places. The one near us has very friendly people working in it, and they offer all sorts of classes in different types of woodwork - carving, turning, guitar-making, table-making, etc. It was during the holiday season of 2006, and my wife and I saw a listing for a class where you get to turn a holiday ornament. I thought this would be a pretty cool introduction to the whole woodturning process, and at the end of it I would get (if I did things well) a nice ornament to show off...something of which I could say "Hey, I made this".

Well, the class was a lot of fun. The ornament started as a cube-like block of wood with a hole drilled through it and a brass tube glued into the hole. At the time, I did not even think about the process of getting the hole drilled and the tube glued and such - I was happy that it was done, and we were able to start right in on the lathe.

The process of turning wood on a lathe, especially on a mandrel, is very relaxing. You are creating something that is aesthetically pleasing, as it always comes out symmetrically. You could make something that is very different from what you intended, but it will still come out symmetrical unless you deliberately did not want it to.

In addition to turning the wood on the lathe, I learned about the uses of CA glue, and about the ways to add colour to woodworking. We drilled small holes in the ornament, and filled them with coloured wood shavings and glue. It made for a nice effect.

I was hooked. I could imagine making ornaments for friends and wowing them with my craft. Somehow I forgot about what might be needed to get the wood to even the point that I started at in the class...and it is a good thing that I was naive, because if I thought about it too much I might never have gotten started!

Introduction - Why Woodpusher?

2007-05-18T18:44:00.000-04:00

Until recently, I never had a hobby that I felt was worth discussing in a forum where others could see. In the last several months, however, I have taken up woodturning, and when I realized how much I had learned, and how far I still have to go, I decided to document my experiences on the off chance that someone might want to come along for the ride. I am sure that many of my mistakes would not be made by those who are familiar with power tools (don't worry - all of my limbs and extremities are still attached and in good shape), but maybe there are some people out there who, like me, enjoy working with wood and want to create with it, but (at the start) have no clue what they are doing.

When I think back on the hobbies that I have liked the most through the years, I realize that wood plays a rather large part. The term "woodpusher" is generally a chess term, and I have been playing chess for about 25 years, give or take. I have been fairly successful, in the sense that I generally win more than I lose, and I enjoy teaching chess to others, but to create a blog about chess would have several drawbacks. For example - chess is the second most popular use of the Internet, so there are MANY sites and blogs and discussions and such that can help you get better at the game or find resources about it. A second problem is that, in order to truly relate my chess experiences, I would have a lot to say about the past and not much to say about the present. My last tournament was over 4 years ago, and while I played tournaments for about 20 years, I am pretty much done with that now. I mainly play online for fun, but there is not much to blog about that. I wanted to pick something where I have a little bit of a history, but am mostly posting about things I am doing at the time. That being said, any current chess news of mine may find its way in here from time to time.

My other wood-related hobby is pool. There was a period of about 2 1/2 years in the mid-1990s when I gave up chess - just woke up one day and decided I did not want to play any more. I started to shoot pool instead. I got hooked when I realized that there was strategy and planning in pool - it is not just the ability to make the shots, but the ability to set yourself up for the next shot (or set your opponent up to miss). Again, though, my days of shooting pool regularly are in the past. I will occasionally pick up a cue and play in a tournament - even won a handicapped 9-ball tournament a few months ago - but the cigarette smoking and the price of an hour of pool in most places has discouraged me.

So, we come to woodturning. Moneywise, it dwarfs chess and pool in terms of startup costs, so perhaps the cigarette smoke was more to blame than the cost when I decided not to shoot pool any more. If they vote to ban smoking in bars and restaurants in New Hampshire, then I might get back to the pool table.

Next: Getting hooked