Corn Cob Pens

Yes, corn cob pens!  I’ve made a dozen or so of these over the years, they are very popular around here.  We recently brought a bunch of pens in to Legacy Outfitters, a store in Logansport that sells items made by local artists and craftsmen, and several of them sold.  One of these was a corn cob pen.  The customer who bought it asked if I could make three more.  So here they are being made.

It all starts with a corn cob.  Dry.  Don’t go pick an ear out of your garden and chuck it up.  It needs to be dry.  I bought a bag of ears of corn for feeding squirrels.  The were nice and dry, and there were a few different colors.  First cut them to length, drill them out, and glue the tubes in.

CA works well with corn cobs.

I had five sets of tubes, so we cut up five pairs of blanks.

Then drilled the rest and glued them up.

Here are the five pairs of blanks.  I squared the blanks up with a squaring jig for my disk sander.  This works much better than the barrel trimmers.  It doesn’t catch or tear out.

I mounted the blank on the mandrel and started turning it down.  Corn cob is very soft, so I use a sharp spindle gouge and make light cuts.

Once it’s turned down almost to the bushings, I applied a good coat of thin CA, followed by a coat of medium.  This hardens the cob, and the medium fills in the pits and gaps.  It may take a couple of coats.  I apply accelerator after each coat.

Once this is done, I sand it with 13 different grits, from 150 all the way to 12,000.  I sand all the way before starting the CA finish.  I apply a thin coat with a paper towel, apply accelerator, and then give it a light sanding with 600 grit.  I apply 4 or 5 coats like this.  Then I repeat the 9 Micro Mesh sanding grits.

After 12,000 grit, it’s done.  It basically has a plastic coating, polished like glass.

Here they are close up.  You may have noticed there are only four pens.

 

Somebody got a little aggressive roughing them down and had his first blank explosion.  Luckily, corn cob isn’t that hard.

Thanks for reading!