Pen making

How to turn a Comfort style pen on a lathe.

This is my first video on YouTube.  So any feedback is appreciated.

The video starts out showing all the part necessary for making the pen.  This includes two wood blanks with 7mm holes drilled through them, two brass barrel inserts, the pen twist mechanism, a gold center ring, a gold tip, a gold end cap, the rubber comfort grip, a gold pocket clip and ink pen refill.  All these were purchased from Penn State Industries a while ago.  I believe they still the kit.

A two part 15 minute expoxy is mixed up and used to glue the brass tube inserts into the predrilled wood blanks.  As you can see my glue is rather old but still worked once I got some out of the bottle.

Once the glue has setup, which should take about 15 minutes (I waited about an hour), the two pieces are taken over to the drill press, there we used the barrel trimmer to square the ends of the wood blanks and make them flush with the brass tubes. Both ends of each pen blank is trued up.  If you didn’t do this the pen could have uneven gaps when putting it together.  (For safety, it’s a good idea to insert the blanks into a vise or clamp of some type before turning on the drill press.  If you lose control of the piece, you could get a little hurt.)

Now its over to the lathe.  We take the pen mandrel and insert two 7 mm bushings, then a comfort bushing (I think these are 8 mm), one of the wood blanks, then another comfort bushing, the other wood blank and lastly a 7 mm bushing.  the mandrel is then top off with a couple more 7 mm bushings and everything is tightened with a brass screw nut on the end of the mandrel.  The order of the bushings is important because they determine how thick to turn the pen down to.

The mandrel is then installed with the pen blank on the lathe and the tailstock is slid into place to secure everything.  The tool rest is then positioned so it covers the full length of the pen and is near the center of the mandrel.  The tool rest is then slid close the pen blank but not so close enough it hits the pen blanks.

I then use a roughing gouge to round the pen into shape.  Once I have it close, I use a skew to shave it down a little finer.  This is not nessacary since sanding will do most of the finish work.

I just noticed that I complete left out the sanding part of the video.  Oh well, sanding boring right?  I’ll just fill the missing pat of the video here. The sanding was done while turning the pen blank at a low speed and the tool rest removed.  We started with 150 grit then 240, 320 and finished with 400 grit.

Since this a comfort pen, we need  place for the rubber grip.  This is where we measure one inch for the end and use the parting tool to remove the inch of wood down to the brass barrel.

The pen is finished with a polishing wax and applied with pressure while the lathe turns at a low speed until it gets hot to the touch.  This insures a lasting shine.

The top and bottom pen blanks are now ready to be assembled into a finished pen.  We first slip the rubber comfort piece onto the front pen blank.  This is not a easy as it looks.  Once that is in place, we take the gold pen tip and press it into place using the pen press.  This will insure a tight fit.  Then we take the back half of the pen blank and add the pocket clip and secure it into place by pressing the gold end cap on to the end of the pen barrel.  Now we take the front half of the pen and press in the twist mechanizem and add the ink cartridge.  The center gold ring is added and the the back half of the pen is slipped into place.

There you have it. A completed comfort pen!