It's been a Polaris weekend

Top to bottom, a gold kit on a mica swirl in polyester resin, a chrome kit on a PR green crush in brown and a gunmetal kit on a nice piece of Palo Santo



The topmost mica swirl is actually the topmost pen seen here, but refitted with a gold kit for a colleague who liked the look of it. Here's the original blank.

The crushed material for the middle pen was leftovers from this perfume atomiser project, but cast in brown just to see what it looked like.

The bottom one probably deserves a thread of its own, but in the meantime, here's a photo of the finished barrel and the unassembled kit parts:



and this is a video of it being roughed round and centre drilled:

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It it really hard and turned really smooth. There's a SINGLE layer of CA on it, really just to make the sapwood streak blend in a little better.

That is quite the pen turning lathe you have there!!!:biggrin:

Super fast roughing to round!

The pens look great by the way!!:biggrin:

Andrew

Prazimat DLZ. Complete overkill for pens. It's a 450mm bed with a 180mm max turning diameter. A four tool post takes 12mm heads. I normally use Glanze indexable tools with DCMT inserts, but for turning wood and plastic I have handmade tools.

The video was cut down, but you're right - it is very very fast for roughing round. I tend to round without a pen mandrel and then once the diameter is below 20mm, I centre drill.

The downside is I don't get the same feel for the material the rest of you guys get. I did make myself a tool rest and got some gouges and a skew, but I made a real mess the first time I tried to use them. I'll give it another shot later, but right now, I'm in Christmas present making mode - no time to learn new tricks!

Hmmmm...There's a good chance that what I thought was palo santo is actually padauk. This is the place I got the blanks: http://www.axminster.co.uk/axminster-wooden-pen-blanks-prod809598/. When I bough thte pack of blanks, there was no indication as to which was which. You folk had a good stab at guessing. Now, I'm just onfised.