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A while back I made a post about a hand held drum that I was building. The drum was my contribution for our woodturning clubs entry into the 2009 AAW Symposium Club Collaborative Project. The theme for this years Collaborative project was “The South West”. Our club chairman came up with the idea of This platter was turned from Cape Beech from Zambezi Exotics. It was made by Gene O’Donnell, a member of the N.E Florida Woodturning Association. Cape Beech Platter by Gene O'Donnell
Cape Beech Platter by Gene  Ebonized Maple Pen Click to enlarge In the June 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking there was an article by Brian Boggs that really caught my attention. The article was on ebonizing wood. As I read the article I imagined a pen made from ebonized maple inlaid with aluminum. Why not just use ebony? Well, a couple of reasons. Firstly, though not a huge factor when dealing with pen blanks, maple is a lot cheaper. Secondly, maple is a lot easier to work with. Finally, ebony has a tendency to crack and split. I laminated a maple pen blank with some aluminum, turned it and then followed the steps outlined by Brian on ebonizing. The picture above shows the results. Read on to see what is involved and my thoughts.
A couple of friends in my woodturning club have been encouraging me to put some of my pen designs in some larger turnings. This is my first attempt. The original concept called for a six sided bowl where the six legs lined up with the design of the lid. However, a I got this neat tip for marking out the holes on a drawer to drill for a handle from a recent issue of Fine Woodworking. In the course of my work I put a lot of hardware on cabinets. I have a jig for marking the doors and drawers. The typical distance between centers Inspiration for this pen came from some of the work of Ed Davidson. You can see more of his work at http://yoyospin.com. One of the fun things about turning a closed end pen is that it frees up more design considerations as you are not restricted by the hardware on the end of the I drill all my pen blanks on the lathe. It takes a little bit longer than using a drill press, but I find it to be more accurate, both in terms of the hole size and drilling through the center of the blank. The later is particularly important when drilling a segmented blank, as you need to drill directly through the center of the design. I’m sure others have slightly different techniques, so feel free to post any comments or tips on something I may not have mentioned. The pen blanks I show here are cherry. A customer ordered a couple of Perfect Fits and supplied a slab of cherry from which I milled these two blanks.
You can click on any of the images to see a larger version. |
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