It’s been a busy couple of days with some good results!
For some time now I’ve been wanting to do one of mans’ greatest inventions – a shoe horn. You can get the kits, but frankly I think the price of them would force the price of the finished item past what people would be willing to pay. However, while out shopping yesterday I found some with tacky handles which I knew would be perfect and bought a few to try.
This morning I got to it and using a section of birch from a wood bag I have, cut it down to size and gave it a shot. It was a nice bit of wood, had a bit of a twist to it that had split it slightly but gave it good character. When I turned it down, the split had to be filled (CA glue and some of the sawdust from the turning itself) and the result is… well you can see for yourself! Finished with sanding, Yorkshire Grit and Danish oil.
Harlequin Pen
As you may have saw with my Valentines pen, sometimes a lot of prep work goes into a pen long before it hits the lathe.
I’ll often design sections in 3D which are printed and then used to make silicone moulds; the resin is then cast and sometimes some real assembly work takes place before more resin is used to make the actual blank.
I’m in the middle of one of those type of pens at the moment. It’s not for any special occasion, just something I want to do.
This is a harlequin style pen; a simple design at the moment with just two colours (Pirate Gold and Blue).
The 3D model needed to create the silicone mould is a set of 12 cubes in 2 sets of six.
They are then cast to make a set of the first colour (as in the photo) then the same again with the second colour (currently setting in the mould).
They’ll be assembled and tubed as per the second design picture, then should end up like the final design picture when turned. I’ll update as we go!
Gift Pens
In my post of 16th January I talked about a pen where I matched the font on the laser engraving to the hairdresser shop font; the Chantelle pen below is the finished item. The photos really don’t pick up the nice speckling in the black upper section!
The second pen is pinecones cut down and set in blue/white resin, and is a custom order. Terrible picture, I’ll take a decent one tomorrow when I hand the pen over. I had to mess in Photoshop to get it to show the patterning, so the colours aren’t quite accurate.
What else?
I’ve finally gotten around to doing a white glitter pen body for a colleague that I’ve been promising for some time. This is also a “version 2” pen, as last time as well as the white glitter I added some bigger silver glitter bits which went dull and looked like grey splodges. I was hoping to complete that today, but found that I was out of the silver version of that pen so have had to order some more :-/
Last week I thought my cup turner design was complete. When I came to disassemble the old one, I realised a little change that would make assembly easier (simply a grooved hole in the top to pass the wires down) and while I was on added some outriggers to the base for stability. That was it, nothing else needed!
Or so I thought. When going through a quick dry run for assembly, I realised being able to hide the smaller circuit board inside the tower would make it look so much better.
That’s now re-designed and printed so I can get down to it and make an assembly video. It’s been so hard making myself wait and do that, I just want to get it made now that I have a couple of mugs to try it on. 🙂
