Thread: AUGUST Pen Swap

Those pens are fantastic Skew . Not sure of the faults you mention, I assume on the other side .

I still have no idea how your doing it, especially that lower one, I need a step by step idiots guide

bloody hell you guys are good.

hard choice to vote

btw mine will be posted up tommorow

I acheived my diamonds, I used tasmanian oak and cherry and bloodwood.
First of all I cut the blood wood in half and the cherry in half. glued these two together.
. Then I cut it opposite way. Let it dry so now I have the checker look from the end that is the same as the top of the pen. I never went with diamonds up there I just used the checker in opposite directions.
I then cut all three blanks up the same thickness of my blank width, and I began joining the checker between the tas oak on both side of the checker. So to look at it I had tas oak, checker, tas oak
Once that was dry I joined them up so that the checker lined up with the tas oak each time in a step form.
Like in picture attached. Then I cut along the dark lines.
I look forward to how others did theres but that what I did. I also learnt to keep the diamonds I had to stick with a larger pen or they turned circles.
HTH
Toni

It's really very easy Neil... first you cut your wood up into lots of very tiny pieces which you throw in handfuls randonly around the workshop. After retrieving the few bits you can, cursing the ones you can see in places which you know are gonna cause grief later (like inside motor cowls and your TS mitre track!) but you can't readily get to, you dip a tube in glue and start applying pieces with a pair of tweezers.

After an hour or two of inventing new words, you throw it all to the bench-top, grab a chisel to pry off the bits that are still glued to your fingers and storm indoors in a huff, where you're pointedly told to "P*** off back to the shed if you're going to come in here with that attitude."

The following day, you finally work up the courage to face up to the bench... pick up the tube of hardener you'd left on the bench and replace the cap. You then spend some time trying to prise the alleged "pen blanks" out of the congealed mess and restore the benchtop to some semblance of normailty with a scraper, thinners, acetone and more new words. You then go to pick up the blanks from the saw table where you put them while you cleaned the benchtop and promptly realise you should've cleaned the blanks first. [sigh]

After cleaning the blanks and saw table, not necessarily in that order, you reglue (again) the pieces you broke out (again) in your over-enthusiastic cleaning of the blanks and realise that a trip to Bunnies is sounding pretty good about now. Not that you actually get there, as you stop for a counter-meal on the way and, while pondering the pen situation through amber-coloured glasses, manage to bump up the enthusiasm level a bit.

Back to the shed and... then you wish you'd thought to bring the amber-coloured glasses with you. Nevertheless, out of sheer, bloody-minded determination that after all the stress tha these... these... "vague semblances of pen blanks," these "mockeries of workshop practices" have put you through, they are going onto the lathe and they are going to turn into something. Boom or bust, pens or dust. You don't care. (Hang on... wasn't that the attitude that caused the problem in the first place? )

Surprisingly, the moon was in the right phase, Jupiter in correct orientation with Saturn and I managed to hold my tongue just so... so nothing went *BOOM!* or *CLANK* or even *click* A few odd shavings, but no shrapnel. Bit of a let-down, really...

Like I said... it's really very easy, I didn't have to try hard at all! :eek:

Mind you, I won't guarantee results if the above procedure's not followed exactly to the letter. Come to that, I won't guarantee results even if it is!

I found out that Araldite can be turned, if you use a woodchip filler.

Your explanations always amuse me Skew . Considering your methodology, I am amazed how even you got the pattern. The join when they all met must have really tested you.

I am always interested in different way of doing things. You never know when you might need them - like doing a cross of some sort .

Thanks for all the fun, I certainly enjoyed this one - now where am I supposed to send one of my pens, I assume the auction or something for a charity will still happen.

Cheers

As you all know, I had I had some difficulties with this one. But they paled into nothingness, compared with deciding which way to vote. Again, well done all of you.

By the way, my pen was not an entry (it certainly didn't qualify), it was only to show what I ended up with.

Alright, alright. Here's the way it was supposed to happen:

As everyone has found out, unless you do somthing similar to Dai Sensei's method you get distortion as you turn the pen round. Being strongly individualistic I didn't do it his way... I cheated. I worked out the dimensions of my diamonds so that they weren't so wide they were bigger than the pen, but not so small that the distortion was immediately obvious. Mine do distort, but I tried to do them in such a way that it takes more than a casual glance to spot it.

I wanted a pen 8-11mm wide, so I did some maths and worked out the diamonds should be 6mm wide and about 5mm to a side, giving 30° points. I then sliced up all three blanks like a loaf of bread but at a 30° angle, with each slice being 5mm thick. Then taking one slice from pile A, one from pile B, one from pile C, repeating, I glued up a pair of longer than normal blanks, to allow for loss from the next round of cuts.

The leftovers were put aside for the third experiment.

Once dried, I rolled the first blank over 90° so the diagonals were on the sides and sliced'n'diced it in exactly the same way as before. I then simply rearranged the order of the slices to create the pattern. Simple. This was the one that made the pen with the "arrow-head" or "fish-scale" pattern. If I'd turned too much away, this would've become distorted into "diagonal two-way arrows," if I didn't turn enough it would've looked like sideways skewed diamonds. Diamond size vs. pen diameter really matters!

The other blank I didn't roll over, but sliced'n'diced the 5mm slices at -30° instead, then rearranged the slices to give a diamond pattern on opposing sides. It was then rolled over 90° and sliced'n'diced a further two times, again at both 30° and -30° This is the blank that gave the "nearly diamond" diamonds. As I said, they weren't really but the size fools the eye a bit.

I decided to try a lamination between each segment (the third pen made from the leftovers) 'cos I know that a diagonal laminate slashing across the pen always looks straight, even though you know it's just an oval wrapped around the pen. So I wondered "will this help the illusion that the diamonds are really diamond shaped?" And I had to give it a go.

The third pen was made in exactly the same way as the second, except a thin(nish) laminate was inserted between each slice every time I reglued. Just as well, 'cos I was running out of wood slices!

At least... that's how I think I did it! 'Cos after all the above came the drilling the blanks (easy peasy) and the... the... (dear me, I'm feeling so traumatised I can barely even say it!) the [takes a big breath] gluingthetubesintheblank (PLEASE don't ask me to say it again!) and before then things are a little bit hazy...