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Pen Making Illustrated
This page is meant as a general guide to how pens are made.
It is by no means a technical tutorial
Whenever working with power tools, all SAFETY RULES must be followed
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The first step in pen turning is to get our hands on some wood. Fortunately, I just received some Kauri wood pen blanks from the Ancientwood Ltd. company. Ancient Kauri has been featured on the History channel's "Modern Marvels". This wood was found in a peat bog buried under farmland in northern New Zealand. It has been carbon dated to be 50,000 years old, and is in fact, the world's oldest workable wood.
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Now that we have our pen blanks, the first thing to do is to cut them in half. I've clamped a horizontal jig to the miter saw. At this point, the lenght is not important, but if you look closely, you'll see I've drawn a line on one side of the blank. This will be used throughout the process to keep the two halves of our pen blank oriented.
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Next, we move to the drill press. I've clamped a vertical jig to the press and one half of our kauri blank to the jig. We're going to drill as deep as the press will allow. We drill slowly, backing off every inch or so to keep the drill bit clean and the hole true. You might want to get a cup of coffee and maybe a sandwich while I drill all 24 of our pen blank halves.
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Now that we have all our holes drilled, we move back to the miter saw. I've added a stop block to the horizontal jig. After a few test cuts, I'm ready to cut each of the blanks to the exact lenght. The pen we're making has a different size for the top and bottom barrel, so I'll cut all the tops, reset my stop block and then cut all the bottoms, remembering to keep my line oriented at all times. By drilling and then cutting, we get a nice clean cut. If we had cut to length then drilled, the wood may have splinted when the drill bit exited.
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The next step in the process is to glue brass tubes into the blanks. I'm using a fifteen minute epoxy, so we have to move quickly. It's also messy, so everyone gets a pair of disposable rubber gloves. You can never have enough disposable rubber gloves I always say. In the upper left of the picture are some Bethlehem Olive woods pens blanks which I have aready glued up, and are ready to turn, but I think this is a good place to stop for the day. We'll get a fresh start tomorrow.
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It's a new day and the fun begins right from the start as we move to the lathe. Like some crazy shish-kebob, the blanks are mounted to a mandrel and shaft using bushings which act as spacers and a guide while turning.
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In this picture, a gouge tool has been used with the lathe on low speed to knock the corners off making them roundish. Can you see the pen inside the wood yet?
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With the lathe on it's highest speed, a skew tool is used to shape the wood. The pen we're making in this illustration is a tapered "Big Ben Cigar". Although simular in size, each of the bushings are slightly smaller than the next. From here, we'll use varying grits of sandpaper to do the final shaping.
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I've sanded to a 600 grit and added a drop of friction polish while the wood is turning. This increases the silky smoothness three fold. There are as many ways to finish wood as there are types of wood. There are quick finishes and long lasting finishes, but no quick and long lasting finishes. I use a process which takes three days to apply and nearly thirty to fully cure.
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Here we see three typical types of Kauri wood. The left has a light color and the right a dark color. With a tight grain and no defects, they would be perfect for furniture making, but for pens, not so much. The center piece with it's notty "burl" is highly prized in pen making, and will be the only one of the three to become a FountainCityFurniture pen.
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The final step is to press the various 24K gold titanium parts together. This is a description of the plating process from the manufacturer: "This method produces an extremely durable and the most durable plating. Titanium nitride matched to the color of the gold is molecularly bonded to the part and then 24K gold is bonded (sputtered) on the part to achieve a color match to our other gold parts. The parts are again re-plated after this. The final result is that the parts will virtually never wear. We pioneered this process for writing instruments and are not aware of another company using the exact process we use."
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Voila!
It's beautiful, isn't it? Honestly, the picture has been optimized(degraded) for faster internet downloading. To truely appreciate it, it needs to be held and viewed upclose. I offer hand turned pens ranging from $25.00 to $250.00
Each one of them made one at a time with care.
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