Some of my pens (picture heavy)

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daveg

Member
Joined
Sep 9, 2012
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Location
Seattle
Here's a small sampling of the pens & pencils I've made to date:

A Slimline Pro pen & pencil set at the top, and three bolt-action pens at the bottom, all in Snakewood and gun metal:
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Snakewood again in chrome:
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Black Locust Burl at the top, followed by Curly Koa, both in gun metal, Purpleheart next in gold, the requisite Snakewood, followed by another Black Locust Burl, both in gun metal.
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Close ups of the Purpleheart & one of the Black Locust Burl pens from above:
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Close up of the Curly Koa:
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Mpingo (African Blackwood) in chrome:
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Another shot of the Mpingo & chrome plus a .50 BMG also in Mpingo:
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Canarywood & gun metal:
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And Canarywood in gold:
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And finally, Cocobolo in gun metal (it looks like gold in the picture, but it's really gun metal):
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Oh, OK, one more, Padauk in gold:
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Really smooth work. I see what you do with all your spare time.
They are great, I really like the gun metal,
Great varity of wood, they show completely differently with each one.
Thank you for sharing.
 
Dang, David! That's a few pens, And several of them made with two of my favorite woods - Snakewood and Black Locust burl! I love that stuff! Nice looking batch.
 
el_d said:
Nice work. I love the snakewood.

Any problems with the snakewood cracking?
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Oh yes, Snakewood is a pain to deal with until the moment you get it completely rounded, at which point it becomes nothing short of wonderful. If you keep a razor's edge on your skew and use fine peeling cuts, you don't even have to sand because it takes such a fine finish. My hardest point was trimming the barrels:
Exploded Snakewood:
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Mpingo:
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That was a week ago, I blew through three separate Snakewood blanks as well as the Mpingo. i found that my carbide trimmer had dulled from cutting so much tropical hardwood that it was no longer cutting so much as scraping. As soon as it touched the brass of the tubes, it'd catch & blow out the blank. The first one (top picture) actually hurt my fingers so bad that I had to take a break for a few days. Even though it shows it on top of my cross slide, I was using a Jorgensen clamp to hold the blank and it just tore it out of my hands, punching a little hole in the end of my index finger. I tried for a couple of days to get an edge on the two blades and finally gave up on the trimmer. I've since switched to using my 12" sanding disk & some Harbor Freight punches clamped to my square which works pretty well.
 
That is a nice set of pens. You have done a great job on all of them. I'd have to agree that the snakewood is my favorite. I have never done one of those.
 
Dave you ever think about laying the blank on it's side and squaring the end with a sanding disk? Just need to be sure the "T" is square to the disk and that your tube is parallel to the blank.
 
Mickey said:
Dave you ever think about laying the blank on it's side and squaring the end with a sanding disk? Just need to be sure the "T" is square to the disk and that your tube is parallel to the blank.
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Mickey,
That's exactly what I do now, well almost. You can't trust the walls of the brass to be parallel with the edges of the blanks, and they have to be if you want perfect joints on either end. At least I can't, I haven't found a good method to guarantee holes parallel to the blank walls, plus a lot of my blanks will have live edges because I like to get the contrast between sap & heartwood, so they're going to be uneven at best.

What I do is clamp the appropriate Harbor Freight punch into an angle bracket I made for my sander's T-square so that it's tip is about 1/4-1/2" from the sanding disk and the blank is elevated enough to freely to rotate on the punch. Slide the blank onto the punch where it's free to move perpendicularly to the sanding disk and sand away. It's easy to simply pick the whole affair up and look at the end to see how it's going, if a bit more tedious than simply watching it on the drill press. However, I haven't blown out a single blank since I started doing this. I'm still learning to keep my knuckles away though, I've polished the knuckles on a couple of fingers on both hands so far. Should probably wear gloves...

The HF punches are great because they go up in 1/64th" increments, so even if you're using metric tubes, you can still find a pretty good fit. If you're picky about the fit, you can find the next size down & wrap it in tape to improve the fit, but so far I haven't found that necessary.
 
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