Another milestone...

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?

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

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:

First Adventures with Dyed Burl Pens

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.