Three Newish Pens

My last posting (a long time ago!) was about capless pens. I mentioned the use of a homemade mandrel for turning the capless pen, and that I was convinced I needed to buy a real one. So, $70 later (to Arizona Silhouette) and I had the capless pen mandrel, the lathe chuck, and oh by the way, a mandrel for bottle stoppers and some bottle stopper kits.

In any case, here’s a new capless Euro-style pen made of cocobolo and ebony, plus two regular capped pens – one in big leaf maple burl and the other in spalted maple. The spalted maple blank came in the 2nd pen swap, by the way! It’s my first pen made from one of the blanks from the giant box of wonder.

These are all made from Woodcraft “premium” kits. I wanted to see how they’d come out, and got a few when they were on sale a few months ago. I haven’t actually used any of these pens, since I hope to sell them or (depending on whether anyone deserves them) give them away as birthday or other presents.

I was not originally planning to include the ebony on the first two pens, but that came about due to – guess what? – a blowout on each blank as I was facing the brass tubes. It’s not that I hadn’t thought of using additional woods in this way, but that was going to be a future experiment. But necessity is the mother of invention, so I cut into my thirty-year old ebony turning blanks, that I got when I was a kid planning to make musical instruments – six 20×2x2 ebony blanks for about $30 at the time!

-- Nils Davis, Menlo Park, CA