Hi All.
I am an experienced woodworker, not very experienced turner and a complete newbie to penmaking, so the question is probably dumb, but here we go:
What's the best way to make & prep a glued wood-acryllic blank?
Here's the problem description:
For wooden slimline kits I've just bumped a blank square on a disk sander, then drilled in a drill press with a 7mm drill. Off central axis? Yes. No problem, plenty of meet to turn down and potentially better looking grain.
Now, suppose I want to make a sandwich with acrylic block-long wooden block-acrylic block. I can glue them up using 5-min epoxy, but now I need to drill the bore in line with the central axis, or the acrylic-wood joints are going to be slightly tilted off 90 degrees to the bore and look odd. How can I ensure that the joint lines will be perpendicular to the drilled axis?
Drilling on a drill press won't produce a perfectly aligned bore.
Possible solution 1
Round the blank between centers, then drill on a lathe. There will be some off-axis error when mounting between centres and probably some error when drilling on a lathe (it's an old wood lathe, there's quite a bit of run-off and misalignment between headstock & tailstock compared to an engineering lathe). I expect the success chance will be quite low.
Solution 2: Glue the sandwich at 60-70 degrees instead of 90. Off-axis errors are now a feature. Also slightly bigger gluing surface.
Solution 3: Glue at 90, drill with an error, then install contrast bands at the joints. If the segments are all wooden, a wide burn mark will do the trick, but this won't work on plastic.
Swaging a metal ring is not an option I suspect, unless you've got specialist equipment.
I can turn a 1mm-deep, 4mm-wide groove at the joint on the mandrel and use CA to glue in a strip of contrasting veneer, then drown it in CA perhaps? Does anyone use this technique with any degree of success?
Solution 4: Turn the groove at the joint and fill it with contrasting colour celluloid. Unless you're experienced in working with melted celluloid, air bubbles can form in the filler once it's dry, which means it will have to be re-filled, possibly more than once. Also, I'm not sure if celluloid is safe to turn/polish on a lathe, given that it self-combusts at quite low temperatures.
Solution 5: Use high quality wood filler in the said groove. But I expect that to chip with use/if the pen is dropped.
I think option 2 is probably the easiest one, followed by option 4, but I wonder how "real" penturners handle this.
Thank you.
I am an experienced woodworker, not very experienced turner and a complete newbie to penmaking, so the question is probably dumb, but here we go:
What's the best way to make & prep a glued wood-acryllic blank?
Here's the problem description:
For wooden slimline kits I've just bumped a blank square on a disk sander, then drilled in a drill press with a 7mm drill. Off central axis? Yes. No problem, plenty of meet to turn down and potentially better looking grain.
Now, suppose I want to make a sandwich with acrylic block-long wooden block-acrylic block. I can glue them up using 5-min epoxy, but now I need to drill the bore in line with the central axis, or the acrylic-wood joints are going to be slightly tilted off 90 degrees to the bore and look odd. How can I ensure that the joint lines will be perpendicular to the drilled axis?
Drilling on a drill press won't produce a perfectly aligned bore.
Possible solution 1
Round the blank between centers, then drill on a lathe. There will be some off-axis error when mounting between centres and probably some error when drilling on a lathe (it's an old wood lathe, there's quite a bit of run-off and misalignment between headstock & tailstock compared to an engineering lathe). I expect the success chance will be quite low.
Solution 2: Glue the sandwich at 60-70 degrees instead of 90. Off-axis errors are now a feature. Also slightly bigger gluing surface.
Solution 3: Glue at 90, drill with an error, then install contrast bands at the joints. If the segments are all wooden, a wide burn mark will do the trick, but this won't work on plastic.
Swaging a metal ring is not an option I suspect, unless you've got specialist equipment.
I can turn a 1mm-deep, 4mm-wide groove at the joint on the mandrel and use CA to glue in a strip of contrasting veneer, then drown it in CA perhaps? Does anyone use this technique with any degree of success?
Solution 4: Turn the groove at the joint and fill it with contrasting colour celluloid. Unless you're experienced in working with melted celluloid, air bubbles can form in the filler once it's dry, which means it will have to be re-filled, possibly more than once. Also, I'm not sure if celluloid is safe to turn/polish on a lathe, given that it self-combusts at quite low temperatures.
Solution 5: Use high quality wood filler in the said groove. But I expect that to chip with use/if the pen is dropped.
I think option 2 is probably the easiest one, followed by option 4, but I wonder how "real" penturners handle this.
Thank you.
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