Dragonscale Pen

[darkdragon]

Last month, after way too much time working on this pen, I completed what I call my Dragonscale pen. It's a combination of a pen kit from PSI, basic pen turning, ornamental pen turning and hand carving.

The wood is snakewood and boy is that hard to work with, but it needs no finish to shine.
The kit is the Dragon Fountain Pen kit from PSI.
The ornamental turning was done with the Beall Pen Wizard.

For this project there was a lot of experimentation, each step was tested and refined before implementation. I used a walnut dowel to test and tried a few different methods for the scale before finally settling on the hand carving. No other method I tried really looked good enough to me.

 

[sorcerertd]

Beautiful! There's a lot going on here without looking too busy. I think it blends perfectly with the hardware. Also, that's very uniform for hand carving. You must have a steady hand. The only thing I would say about the carving on the lower barrel is that it doesn't allow the natural pattern of the Snakewood to show through. I don't really mean that in a negative way as it is quite beautiful even so.

 

[darkdragon]

Beautiful! There's a lot going on here without looking too busy. I think it blends perfectly with the hardware. Also, that's very uniform for hand carving. You must have a steady hand. The only thing I would say about the carving on the lower barrel is that it doesn't allow the natural pattern of the Snakewood to show through. I don't really mean that in a negative way as it is quite beautiful even so.

Thank you. The snakewood pattern shows through on the other side, such a strange wood the pattern was only really on one side. The initial diamonds were cut with the Pen Wizard and then the carving was just to cut down two sides of each one. I have a few more pics here. The last two pics are my test piece testing out the carving

 

[Jim15]

Great work.

 

[PenPal]

Well worth doing with a great result.

Peter.

 

[sorcerertd]

Ah, the Beall would explain the precision of the diamond patterns.
I like the gemstone chips in there, too. Nice touch! Dragons love their gems.