Projects in the queue
- 8-ball tournaments
- Custom Pool Cue
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
