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Cheap pen press

PensShedWoodturning
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Woodworking

Made my first pen a little while back, and while it didn’t turn out too badly, using a woodworking vice to press the pen parts together was a bit janky at best and I didn’t find using the tailstock on the lathe much better.

Thing is, dedicated pen presses are spendy. The basic axminster one is fairly straightforward:

But that’s €75 and that’s not a rip-off pricing either, that’s from the carpentry store and they don’t charge much more than you’d pay buying from the source and shipping it. And fancier ones get spendier – the “deluxe” one is 115 euro (and I can’t even find the basic one in stock anywhere right now). And going to China’s cheapest didn’t help – the lowest price I could find was $45 but with another $25 in shipping.… Read the rest

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Neoplastic fun

BowlsColouringWoodturning
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Woodworking

A while ago, Stewart Furini was playing around with colouring a wooden bowl in a neoplastic fashion (think Mondrain) using paints and stains. It looked like fun so I thought I’d give it a try.

Turns out, it’s a little harder than it looks. I started with a miniature bowl blank because it was the first thing to hand.

Very simple shape (the idea was to part off at that thin line about an inch in from the chuck jaws so the proportions of the final cup wouldn’t be horrible). The colouring should be simple – airbrush with the lightest colour, then mask off squares with masking tape and airbrush successively darker hues and finish off with black lines on top (you’d do it the other way round with paints, in the same way that the order you paint with oils is the opposite order to that for watercolours).… Read the rest

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Mothers Day flowers

WoodturningWoodworking

Well, if you buy flowers they’re all nice and well but they die after a while, so I thought it’d be nice to make ones that don’t.

Miniature (2″ diameter I think) spalted beech bowl blank turned to a bud vase (I know some people call them weed pots, they have no imagination), then textured using a dremel and a few saburrtooth rasps as well as the standard metal burr you can get for dremels, then stained inside the textured parts with an airbrush, sanded the outside to clean off the stain from the surface and then did a graduated blue/green stain to get a kind of underwatery vibe on the vase.

The flowers are made from sycamore spindles, turn down the diameter to an inch or so and then push back the grain with the heel of the skew to form them, then airbrushed with more stain (this is where having a small army of airbrushes comes in handy) and after parting off, drill a 2mm hole in the back of the flower and insert some florist’s wire and CA glue to hold it all in place.… Read the rest

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