What Do I Need/where Do I Buy?

[VladDracule]

Hello All,

 

Recently i discovered a co-worker of mine would have an interest in doing some turning! He has a lathe and some other woodmaking equipment.

 

What im wondering is what do you need to be sure you have in addition to the lathe?

 

Also, where do i but all the materials needed? I understand I would need a blank, nib/feed, and a converter or something of the sorts. Where do i acquire these along with directions on how to assemble everything?

[Bruce Markwardt]

Those are pretty broad questions with no simple answers. I suggest you go to the IAP website and do some digging around there. There are several tutorials in their library. Great place to start!

[richardandtracy]

It depends on the lathe.

 

If it's a wood lathe, then first off you need some turning chisels. If it's a metal lathe, the pen blanks can be turned with carbide insert tooling or hss tooling without changes from the metal setup.

 

Then comes the type of pens you wish to turn. Kit pens tend to have brass re-inforcing tubes glued inside a hole drilled through the blank. These are then fitted on a mandrel on the lathe and the outside is turned to the size you want. Mandrels can be made on a metal lathe, or bought for a wood lathe. Holes for the re-inforcing tubes can be bored or drilled on the lathe, but it's quicker with a drill press. Finally, you'll need a big vice to press the kit pen parts together once the tubes are turned to size and polished.

It is a bit more involved if you want to do non-kit pens. Then you will need a nib unit, drills of the right size, taps of the right size for the nib unit (and they are really awkward thread sizes). Then you'll need a cap-barrel thread tap & die set ($140 or so). Collet chucks are really needed for non-kit pens as they ensure concentricity for the multitude of operations you'll need to do. It is probable you'll need mandrels to suit the pen you are making - which can be made on a metal lathe.

 

The finish is usually a polished finish. With wood blanks this can be achieved by sealing the surface with Cyano Acrylate (superglue, aka CA) then sanded and polished with increasingly fine grades of micromesh. Acrylic pens can be polished with micromesh alone to a glossy finish.

These are a kit pens I did. The two tubes for each pen were turned on a mandrel (I have a metal lathe so made the mandrel myself) to the diameter I wanted, polished and trimmed to length, then the chrome & gold fittings were gently pressed into the ends of the tubes by clamping together with a vice. The adhesive used was Epoxy, as I find it more reliable than CA:

http://i771.photobucket.com/albums/xx356/richardandtracy/penmaking/Sdc15214a.jpg

 

In conclusion, it is quickest to get started with a kit pen on a wood lathe. Custom pens are easier on a metal lathe than on a wood lathe, though many have started doing really fancy custom pens on a wood lathe.

 

Hope this helps a little.

 

Regards,

 

Richard.