The process of turning seems like it could be simple. You take a blank and you pick out a kit. Put the blank on the lathe and turn it put in the inserts and there you have it a pen. I’ve learned it’s very personnel to the individual receiving that pen maybe even more so to the person creating that pen.
For a year, yes you read that correctly, Sam has been creating gifts for family. To put this into perspective Bill has been creating a requested item(s) for longer than that. Everything is done and ready to ship except one last pen. Now this pen requires a blank to be made because of the way it has been visualized. It has a Footprints in the Sand pen kit so the blank needs to carry that theme. What could be better than Olive wood from the Holy land combined with blue acrylic. That blue acrylic can’t be just plain old blue it needs to evoke the sea lapping at the sand as represented by the Olive wood.
There have been a few attempts made and things were learned about combing wood and acrylic but nothing felt right. As you can see in the pic above there were bubbles, the blue color was a little dark and seemed to cloudy, and the breaks in the wood were deep and jagged. In this last attempt we used a method for breaking the wood which you can check out here: https://youtu.be/XLuWjwksncc?si=0tR_HNqTyLxX8sr While the other blanks also had the Olive wood broken the effect wasn’t as nice as what we got using the TheCrafsMan method. Using the method that TheCrafsMan showed the breaks were smaller and not as deep. When cast in acrylic they almost appear to be more of a moonscape or some other worldly landscape.
Now the debate was do you use each half and create separate blanks or do you use the two halves and pour the acrylic between them? In the end it was decided to use the two halves and create two blanks. Mostly because of the silicone mold size. As a side note this silicone mold is very nice.
After looking at the unmolded blanks Sam says, “Do we have any clear pen tube inserts?” Which started a conversation about what would happen if you tried to turn without the metal tube insert and if clear metal existed in places other than sci fi. Would white be better than brass? If you use white should it be somehow colored blue? If you color it what is the best way to do that so that the color won’t wear off when it is pushed in? That is when the idea of changing the color of the actual method using a chemical process came up. https://youtu.be/kyFAp4t2QFk?si=hwTLsZxydqDnkAVi
While I had originally been thinking about electroplating after watching this video on anodizing metals seems to be the winner. More on the steps, the results, and the finished (hopefully) piece to come. There is a lot of the artist that goes into the creation. It’s easy to miss that if have never watched or been involved in the process of birth. It’s just a pen after all.
