Some new pen blanks
My sweetie sometimes asks what I’m doing in the shop, and sometimes I tell her.
Today, I did the preliminary turning on four cholla and resin pen blanks I poured a week ago. Since then, I repaired one of the blanks that broke coming out of the mold, drilled holes through the middles of them, glued in the pen tubes, and repaired another that broke as I was squaring up the end, and trimmed all four to the proper lengths. One had a bubble right next to the end of the pen tube, so I fixed that with a tiny bit of resin.
The blanks generally break when I start messing with them before they’ve had a chance to fully cure, because the slow hardener I’m using takes 3-4 days to finish curing. Before that, parts are brittle, and other parts are still soft and sometimes sticky.
After a weekend of zero shop time, but it was ok (I didn’t wait for the last patch to fully cure), I did the preliminary turning on the blanks today, and patched some bubbles in the resin with a contrasting color and CA glue, then sanded the blanks to 400 grit, and applied a coat of tung oil to protect the cholla canes.
That will cure overnight, and tomorrow I’ll sand to 800 or 2000 grit with wet-dry paper and deal with any remaining imperfections, and apply another coat of tung oil. Thursday (a couple more days with no shop time are coming this week), I can maybe finish polishing the blanks and assemble the pens, and have them ready on Friday.
Yeah, they’re pretty, but I always forget just how involved these things are, and just how long it takes to go from raw materials to something I can give away, because nobody would pay what I would need to ask for them to make a decent wage making these things, and I need to remember that when folks at the senior center tell me I should sell my pens, because everyone will want one!
Plus, my sweetie doesn’t ask what I’m up to in the shop as often any more. ;–)
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