Hello pen people.
As another Friday rolls around at the speed of light, I thought I’d share one of the pens I made this week.
I had a few issues with my metal lathe that I shared in a previous post and, as often happens, once I started to address that isolated issue I ended up making some other changes. One of which was to move away from using collets and going back to using a 3-jaw chuck.
This was a big change for me as my whole workflow had been built up around running on collets, and I was a bit concerned about going back (I’ve made over 800 pens that way). However I realised in the last couple of weeks that I was starting to see a small unintended taper appearing on my work. After a lot of investigation and playing around I realised it was the collet chuck that was causing the issue. I’m still unsure exactly why, but I have an idea. Anyway simply swapping it out for the 3-jaw solved the problem, and this pen is the first pen I made with the new setup.
One thing I had taken for granted is the fact that the collet chuck has a very flat face, with no bits of metal protruding that can catch your finger or nail during sanding. After changing over I was reminded, very quickly, that the 3-jaw isn’t quite so forgiving… Apart from that it all went pretty well.
This pen is made from original Conway Stewart Azure acrylic and has teal pearl accents. Sterling silver trim and a chrome plated steel pocket clip. The nib is a Jowo no6. The pen is around 145mm long closed, and the cap threads are 13mm triple lead.
Cheers
Ash
As another Friday rolls around at the speed of light, I thought I’d share one of the pens I made this week.
I had a few issues with my metal lathe that I shared in a previous post and, as often happens, once I started to address that isolated issue I ended up making some other changes. One of which was to move away from using collets and going back to using a 3-jaw chuck.
This was a big change for me as my whole workflow had been built up around running on collets, and I was a bit concerned about going back (I’ve made over 800 pens that way). However I realised in the last couple of weeks that I was starting to see a small unintended taper appearing on my work. After a lot of investigation and playing around I realised it was the collet chuck that was causing the issue. I’m still unsure exactly why, but I have an idea. Anyway simply swapping it out for the 3-jaw solved the problem, and this pen is the first pen I made with the new setup.
One thing I had taken for granted is the fact that the collet chuck has a very flat face, with no bits of metal protruding that can catch your finger or nail during sanding. After changing over I was reminded, very quickly, that the 3-jaw isn’t quite so forgiving… Apart from that it all went pretty well.
This pen is made from original Conway Stewart Azure acrylic and has teal pearl accents. Sterling silver trim and a chrome plated steel pocket clip. The nib is a Jowo no6. The pen is around 145mm long closed, and the cap threads are 13mm triple lead.
Cheers
Ash
