So the first of the fancy pens is done. I actually processed all three of the blanks at once this weekend, but I only got to turn and finish one of them. I also have one remaining blank from Feinesholz to use for something else, but that’ll mean buying a new pen kit to evaluate.
So the rightmost and the middle pen blank there are both hybrid pen blanks with stabilised boxelder maple burl with resin, so I picked one of the two to use, and the other is still waiting. And I also cut down the elm burr (thats second from the left) and the blue stabilised boxelder maple burl blank that’s second from the right.
Cut to length, drilled for the brass tubes, scratched up the brass on some sandpaper and epoxied the tubes into the blanks.
And of course, I have a few offcuts. I don’t know if I can actually use these for keyfobs like I hoped, they’re a bit small, but I’ll have a think and see what I can do.
The epoxy went on on Thursday, didn’t get to the shed on Friday, and then on Saturday I dressed the ends and knocked off the edges on the lathe sanding wheel:
And then it was time to mount the first blank.
Some sheer blind luck there – I had missed the bit in the Taylors Mirfield instructions about how there are two size bushings for the part that becomes the pen body (the finial is slightly smaller than the nib) and it was only luck that I got them the right way round.
On Sunday, sharpened the spindle roughing gouge and the skew and got to work.
And now it’s sanding time. 600 dry sanding first, then wet-sanding up through the grits with the micromesh (I use water and dish soap for a liquid for the wetsanding). After every grit, stop the lathe, and sand along the axis of the pen, rotating by hand slowly to break up radial sanding lines. For the last two grits, wipe down with isopropanol between each one.
Then Yorkshire Grit, Yorkshire Grit Microfine, and car resin polish.
And one last coat of Hampshire sheed wax.
And that’s that. Then it was a matter of assembly and the Taylors Mirfield kit came partly assembled for the centerband and finial, which made life a bit easier.
That came out really nice. And two more to go this week, and I must buy a few more pen kits I think.
So, in order to procrastinate before starting the fancy pens (and also because I was on-call this week so I didn’t have much shed time), I wanted to try out a new pen kit. See, brexit (that gift that keeps on taking away) has started driving up prices for UK based vendors and I don’t really see there being a lot of potential for that to stop anytime soon. There are a lot of good UK pen kit vendors and retailers but if I have to pay an extra 20-30% on top of the price tag for customs, duty, handling fees and so on, well, there are a lot of good French and German and Dutch vendors and retailers as well, so I’ve been looking at a few.
The IAP have a nice list of vendors from all over the place, and I basically started going through each of those on the continent and looking at websites for something to jump out. There’s been one ro two but I thought I’d start small so when I saw the Berlin desk pen kit from Gerhard Liebensteiner I thought that’d do nicely (their Berlin Mini pen looks interesting too, but the desk pen has a lot more potential for odd shapes so I’ll start there).
It’s the shape that jumped out and grabbed me here – because it’s a closed-end design, you can turn pretty much any sort of pen shape you’d like, so there’s a lot of potential there.
I liked the taper-away-to-a-point idea, so I thought I’d give that a go to start with. The kit itself is very, very simple:
And by using a brass tube that comes with threads already cut on the inside, this might be one of the simplest closed-end pen kits out there. There are only two real drawbacks to the kit – first, it’s a nonretractable desk pen, so you need some sort of holder for it. But then, if you’re going to go make a 30cm long wand of a pen with this kit, it’s not going into your jacket pocket anyway so maybe that’s not such a big drawback. The other one is that there’s a lot of stickout. More on that in a moment.
Liebensteiner do a nice video on making a pen with this kit, though it is in german, but that’s not really that much of a problem:
So I ordered a kit to test it out and the tooling, which came to around €15 (plus another €15 in shipping, thank you brexit) and it took all of four days to arrive. I had an acrylic pen blank to hand so I used that – this is just a test pen, so it’s not going to be anything special really. I don’t have a pen drill for this kit, but it’s just an 8mm drill bit that you need so I just used one of my completely standard HSS bradpoint drill bits and started drilling.
This is the first problem I came across though – you’re drilling a much longer hols for this pen than normal. Almost 100mm deep and it’s a blind hole at that. So you have to have good alignment and centering or you’ll pay for it later. With the hole drilled, I epoxied in the brass tube after loctite’ing the adjustable plug at the other end of the tube to the right setting for the nib to be exposed by the recommended 2.5.-3.0mm amount.
I mean, technically that’s a pen right there 😀
To mount it on the lathe, your tooling is a small arbor which is threaded on one end; a bushing of the appropriate outside diameter threads onto this thread and you then screw that into the end of the brass tube where the nose cone normally goes and hold the arbor in the chuck. If you have a collet chuck for the lathe, this would be its time to shine. I don’t yet, so out came the stepped jaws which work well for gripping small diameters on my chuck.
You can see the arbor and spacer/bushing there. It’s not fully threaded home here, just for the photo.
And there we’re fully threaded home and seated, and you can see what I meant about the stickout. Granted, here I’m making a much longer pen than the tube, but that’d be par for the course with this pen. I think this might be the only reason this kit isn’t better than the normal kits as a beginner’s kit – if it wasn’t for this, it’d be easier, more fun and less expensive than the slimline pen kits they keep putting into the beginners pen turning kits. So, tail support right up until the end with this one.
Can’t say I’m a fan of this material either. Even on the skew it complained a lot about being cut, in a very high-pitched voice. For the end I wound up cutting it with the skew while supporting it from the far side with my fingers which I’ve seen production woodturners do, but it makes me nervous. A spinning thing and a sharp thing and my fingers. Not a mix I want to try. But, got it done.
And on to sanding, from 400 grit up to 800 dry, then wet micromesh pads to 12000, then Yorkshire grit and Yorkshire grit microfine and resin polish and then a final coat of Hampshire sheen wax.
Not too shabby. Then just unscrew the arbor (I found it easier here to open the chuck and grip the arbor with mole grips because the turning will really jam the pen onto the arbor and I think the forces might get the arbor’s steel thread nicely wedged into the tube’s brass threads and a little effort was needed to break that seal. But no permanent damage done. Just remove the arbor, insert the pen refill and spring and then screw the nosecone down over the lot to secure it, and done.
I think that’s a success. Will have to add Liebensteiner to the list of pen kit retailers. They also do a few other kits, but I might choose another vendor for the next test pen, just to evaluate retailers as well as kits.
So the first of the fancy pens is going to be a pencil 🙂 Not the normal mechanical 0.7mm lead pencil but a clutch pencil (or I’ve heard them called lead holders as well). 5.6mm lead, so a bit beefy, and more intended for sketching than for handwriting. So I can actually use this for the shed sketchbook as well, for sketching out ideas for turning, which don’t seem to get as many dimensions as the woodworking stuff, mainly because most of the time the exact line of a piece is whatever random shape I wound up getting when I stuck the tool into the spinning thing on the lathe what the wood said it should be. 😛
This is the kit I’m using, and that picture is what Feinesholz says it should look like when you’re done, if you didn’t cock it up 🙂 It’s not hugely spendy (I mean, it’s more than the basic slimline 7mm pen kit which is about the cheapest standard kit I know of, but compared to fancy fountain pens, it’s less than half their price tag). But the first one’s always more expensive because of the tooling – special drill bit (11.9mm? Why did nobody just use 12mm for feck’s sakes? How is that harder than this 30/64ths nonsense?) and bushings to let you mount the barrel on the mandrel. Throw in a spendy blank and this is probably the most expensive pencil I’ll own once its done 🙂
Speaking of pen blanks, it’ll be this one on the far left here, the shorter turquoise looking one. It’s from a species of white birch called Karelian birch which grows in a small area between Finland and Russia (called Karelia, obviously). It gets called Masur birch a lot as well, but masur is the actual grain and figure, rather than the species (and of course the species name is different again because botanists are worse than mathematicians for naming things – Betula pendula var. Carelica for anyone who speaks botanist). This particular blank has been stabilised with acrylic (specifically with plexiglass) that was dyed blue, hence the colour. Karelian birch is famous as a decorative wood – it even got used for a Faberge egg – to the point where it was almost clearcut into extinction and now it’s planting and harvesting is very controlled (though oddly, it doesn’t seem to be CITES listed). So, y’know, no pressure…
First job was to cut the blank to just over the size of the single brass tube and then drill through the center with an 11.9mm drill bit. That went okay with the main part. I also wanted to turn the offcut into a matching keyring rather than burn it, and of course I blinked and it tried to climb into the drill body, but I was able to stop it in time. Fun cleanup by the way, there’s blue dust everywhere.
Slightly off-center, but not enough to cause issues. Next up, sandpaper the outside of the brass tubes, mix some epoxy and epoxy the tubes in place.
And that went well enough. There’s almost half the tube left sticking out from the keyring, I’ll save that offcut, it’ll do for tree ornament turning later.
And yes, you can cut brass with ordinary woodworking saws and tools, it’s a lovely material to work with. I don’t have a barrel trimmer in the right size for a 12mm tube (that’s on the list, sometime after the next paycheque) so to get the ends trimmed square to the tube, I resort to sanding:
Now this works, but it’s not perfect – it relies on three things here. First, that the tube is drilled perfectly through the blank, and that almost never happens. It was done with a pillar drill and lots of checking with a good square against the drills table, but you can only count on that getting you within a degree. Barrel trimmers use the inside of the barrel for a reference which is a superior way to do it, but needs must. Second, the two edges of the platform have to be parallel here for the square to be referenced off the back side (that’s done for this platform, the front got jointed and then I ran a marking gauge off it to set the back edge and planed to that line), and third, the front edge has to be parallel to the disk, which you can get within a degree of, but you can get cumulative errors in all of this so if you don’t work carefully, you could get an end that wasn’t square to the barrel and that means that you could get a gap between the pen blank and the fittings of the pen that you couldn’t prevent and that’d be really annoying 🙂 Didn’t happen this time, mind, but I’m still buying that barrel trimmer kit.
I also don’t like that first few minutes of rounding the blank and taking off those corners – it’s the most interrupted the cut ever gets and it’s the most potential for ripping off a chunk through a shock load on the blank, so I thought I’d use an offcut from the padouk pen blank I used the other day and make some miniature V-blocks from it and superglue them to a bit of plywood (that was a pattern for christmas tree carving, but I transcribed it to plasticard a while ago for storage) and jointed that front edge so that I could use that on the sanding platform…
I mean, it’s not rocket surgery, but it’s better than nothing.
Now I’ve not turned this material before so I started on the keyring, because I can use the skew, the spindle gouge, the spindle roughing gouge and some wire for burn lines and very quickly get a rough feel for how it works.
And it works very very nicely indeed. Very forgiving material, cuts clean and easy, scrapes nicely as well. In fact, there’s really only one problem and it’s down to the sabilising acrylic rather than the wood:
It would appear that I have shawarma’d a smurf.
Incidentally, when I say that it’s a forgiving material, all of that pencil body (after the initial roughing to round which was done with the spindle roughing gouge) was done with the skew, and my shed is very tiny so I can cut towards the headstock with the skew without any problem right-handed, but I cannot cut towards the tailstock with the skew while right-handed because I would have to be standing inside my workbench to do that – so my choices are horse the lathe around so it’s at 45 degrees to the wall and I have enough room to move; or cut with the skew left-handed, so I do the latter. On some materials (looking at you, olive ash) that’s a pain in the fundament and I usually just horse the lathe around because I can’t manage it, but on this material it was very straightforward.
And that’s everything cleaned down and all set for finishing. I’m coming off the skew, so I’ll start with 800 grit dry-sanding and then I work up through the micromesh pads to 12000 grit (well, their 12000, whatever that translates to) wet-sanding all the way. I’m using micromesh because of the acrylic – if I used normal sandpaper here, it’d start to melt and smear if the heat built up and heat will build up on blanks like this very very quickly indeed if you’re not careful. 1-2 minutes wetsanding with the lathe running (less time as I go up the grades), then twice that sanding by hand with the lathe stopped along the grain to get rid of radial lines, then dry it off with a clean piece of paper towel with the lathe running and then on to the next grit; and for the last two grits, I clean the blank with isopropanol between pads. Then Yorkshire grit, and then Yorkshire grit microfine. And then two coats of melamine lacquer from a spraycan (the chestnut products one), denibbing with Yorkshire grit microfine after each coat. Then the resin polish (the stuff normally used on cars), and finally a single coat of microcrystalline wax.
And then as I was buffing the wax at high speed, I let the heat build up too much, the melamine lacquer wasn’t fully cured and grabbed the paper out of my hands and basically epoxied it to the blank.
After a bit of cursing, I got the paper off the surface, cursed a bit more, and went back to about 4000 grit on the micromesh pads and did the whole routine over again from there, but with more time on the yorkshire grit this time and with a lot more care on the final buffing pass for the wax 😀
Still though. Pretty.
Next up, assembly. And nearly destroying the thing. See, the photo on the website that I didn’t see was this one:
You see how you have five pieces there? Well, for shipping, they partially assemble the innards so you have four pieces, not five – the chrome endcap and clip go in their own bags, as does the inner brass tube, but the other end piece, the brass inset that the main mechanism screws into, that’s screwed onto the mechanism for shipping. What you should do is unscrew that, press it into the nib end of the pencil on its own, then screw in the mechanism. What I did was try to press in the entire mechanism – which did in fact set the nib endpiece in place, but which also pushed the clutch mechanism right up inside the pencil so it wouldn’t work, so I had to unscrew the mechanism, pull it all apart (in that photo above, that single mechanism bit with the spring is actually six parts all fitted together with interference fits), reassemble it, tweak the clutch slightly because I’d compressed it a bit too much, and refit everything. But luckily I hadn’t mangled it too badly and it fixed up nicely.
Looks nice in the sunshine, even if we didn’t have much of that today. Oddly looks darker in the lightbox, which should have more lumens. I wonder if the colour profile of the lights is just that much different from sunlight.
Feels nice in the hand, sketches well. I like it. I’m enjoying using it for sketching out an idea I’ve had for that padouk offcut Feinesholz threw into the box with the pen blanks as a challenge. I didn’t quite get the perfect mirror finish that Feinesholz’s model photo has, but they’re using a different material anyway (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it). And while the imperfections show up under strong point light sources like in the lightbox or up close to a lamp, you do have to be looking for them and even then they’re more minor things to bug me than they are real flaws that affect using it. I’m starting to think I can make these things well enough that that whole idea of making a piece and selling it to offset the cost of the wood is an actual runner. I might try that later…
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