A few new pens

I’ve been turning a few pens a month, maybe more, and wanted to share some of the new ones. One of these is my current “daily writer” – the copper Euro pen made with “Cats Eye” acrylic. I got the kit and the blank from Woodturningz. I just made the Slimline pencil yesterday, from a Woodcraft blank called “Tequila Sunrise” or something like that, and I think it’s going to become a favorite as well. I decided not to turn it “bushing to bushing” as I usually do, and left a very slight little bulge in it, that I think will be quite pleasant to use. In general, though, I must say I prefer the Euro-style pens to all the others I’ve made.

From left to right, these are four Euro pens, in Zebrawood, Sea Foam acrylic, stained maple (not a good idea, as it turns out), Cats Eye; a cigar pen in “Fire and Ice”; and the slimline pencil.

One thing I’ve learned is that while acrylic is especially challenging to turn, it’s much more time-consuming than (most) woods. The zebrawood pen took about ten minutes to turn, while the slimline pencil took almost an hour, because it’s much faster to take off wood than it is to take off acrylic. On the other hand, I’m not showing the Amboyna Burl pen I made last week, because it ended up exploding off the brass tube so often I had to abandon it when I couldn’t find all the pieces to glue back on. So far on Amboyna Burl I’m 2 for 4. I’m hoping the first two weren’t just beginner’s luck.

-- Nils Davis, Menlo Park, CA