Out with the Old, In with the New

I had been wanting to make a Pen/Pencil set, but had not found exactly what I was looking for in wood. Yesterday Susie and I decide to finally split the Old butcher block we picked up at an auction long ago. It was one of those projects that looked better at the auction house than it did in the shop. Susie thought it was a good buy at $5. It weighed about 300lbs.

Needless to say, we have had to move it around in the shop several time, tried to fix the splitting joints. No matter what we did, it never got any better. So it would just sit. We had always talked about just turning it into fire wood for the wood burner. Yesterday was the day. After splitting it into manageable pieces, I picked one up and it had hundreds of little bumps all over. Looking at it closer I realized it was a piece of Birdseye maple. Had it split at the glue joint like most of the chucks, it would not have been as evident. It still seemed to be to small for anything as it split into three pieces. So it was left in the pile for now.

Last night I woke up during the night at thought that the pieces would be big enough for the Pen/pencil set. This morning I threw a few more logs on the fire, sorted through the complete stack to see if I could find more pieces. There were no more. I set the band saw up and cut some ¾” square pieces and made the pen/pencil set.

As I tried to photograph these, I discovered that I could never capture the true beauty of the pen and pencil. Flash on, flash off, more light, less light; it did not matter. After about 20 photos this was the best one I had.

The set is Big Ben set, cigar style. 24 kt gold plated, German works.

Thanks for viewing.

-- Joel Tille