Tuesday, December 13, 2005

The gift that keeps on giving

I mentioned earlier that I’ve already opened my Christmas present from my wife. That’s right, the lathe. I had the opportunity to make my first “thing” on it today! Rather than turning a square piece of scrap wood into a round piece of scrap wood, I made my first pens.

I did get a little anxious though. I don’t actually have any finish for them yet. (Apparently shellac is one of the top recommendations...?) So I had to improvise a little. What I ended up doing is sanding the pen blanks down to a 400 grit sand paper and then wiped them down with a tack cloth. I used an old linen napkin to then buff the residue from the tack cloth to remove that sticky (or tacky!) feeling. I’m pretty happy with the results.

Here is a picture of all of the components used to make a pen:


This is the first pen I made:


Here is a picture of the three pens that I made today. The first pen is on the bottom, the second pen in the middle and the third on top:


All three of these were made with Rosewood. Now that I kinda know what I'm doing, I'm really looking forward to getting several different types of wood to see which I like the best! My favorite online store Woodcraft has a great sample pack of exotic woods that I want to get.

3 comments:

Jenn said...

They came out great! I'm amazed at how fast you did them, too. You da man!

foxymama said...

Those are beautiful!!! I think Rosewood is such a pretty wood anyway. Nice work, D! Really, really spiffy!! Can you tell that I think they're fantastic? ~;^)

darrylmasterson said...

Thanks!

I like that I can now go to the dungeon and get a project completed start to finish in a fairly short period of time.

Taking months to complete a project really makes it hard to blog about... at least without getting boring!