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 I recently got a request for a pen to be made with wood supplied by my customer. He sent me a beautiful piece of Black Walnut and requested the pen show as much of the wood as possible. I decided that replacing the finial with a custom wood finial would show off more of Syzygy Pens Newsletter November 2009 SPECIAL OFFERS Just in time for the holiday season! Use coupon code 1aec884194 for a 10% discount on all orders over $100. Offer valid until 12/31/2009. Please feel free to forward this newsletter to any of your friends you think might be interested in One of the many blogs I follow is Buzz Saw by Rockler Woodworking. In a recent post they announced they are now carrying a wide range of Laser Cut Pen Kits designed for the Sierra style pen. I was pleasantly surprised to see a very complimentary link to my blog in their posting! Thanks I just finished this pen yesterday. It is a gift for a friend. The pen is made from Coastal Red Milkwood with dyed black veneers. I call this design” Syzygy”. Syzygy is an astronomical term referring to the alignment of the planets, specifically the sun, the moon and the earth. It occurs at the Works of Art, the gallery where I am showing some of my work, have donated a booth to the American Cancer Society in support of “Strides against Breast Cancer”. The goal is to raise $4,000 so several artists & craftsmen have placed work in this booth with price tags marked from 20% to 100% of This is an update to my post on Ebonizing Wood from a couple days ago. In that post I mentioned I was having trouble getting a shine on the aluminum without knocking the ebonzing off. I found the solution. Patience. I was not giving the ebonzing solution time to dry. I made another pen  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. 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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