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Pen practice

Friend of mine got married recently and he made his own wedding pens. Which were very pretty.

So I thought I’d like to try making a fancy pen or two. I got a pen turning kit a while ago, and made a single pen before six other things cropped up, but I did enjoy it so I’d been planning to make more and this got me off my ass to do so. First up, made a shedmade pen press, then went onto Feinesholz and Taylors Mirfield and spent a lot more money than I normally would on these things, and got some nice kits and blanks and tooling. First though, I wanted to get a bit more practice in before ruining a few hundred quid’s worth of raw materials, so I picked out one of the acrylic blanks I got when I bought the lathe, one of the padouk wood blanks I got at the same time, and thought I’d like to use the third pen kit to try out making a segmented pen blank.… Read the rest

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Turns out, you *can* make a rabbit from an egg…

I like a lot of Rebecca DeGroot‘s stuff, it’s very nicely weird and creepy.

So when she did a how-to video for making an easter rabbit, I thought I’d have a go.

So, first up, turn the body and head from some sycamore spindles I had after the snowman production line at solstice. The head and body are basically just eggs…

The ears are made as a long pointy egg as well, but from a blank which is a glue-up with a piece of paper between the two halves.

Similar to how you’d do an inside-out turning blank, but just two pieces here instead of four or more. Once the shape is turned, you just split the shape along the paper line and sand off the remaining paper (newspaper will do, but any heavy paper works well).… Read the rest

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Could things just stop breaking please?

So immediately after buying it a nice new jig and making it a new backing board, the lidl grinder gave up on the grinding life. There’s something about noticing that your bowl gouge is bouncing on the stone and then realising that that’s happening because the stone is wobbling while doing around four thousand rpm in front of your face that will trigger both a sharp step to the right out of the line of fire, and will bump up the schedule for buying kit for the shed.

I probably shouldn’t be so annoyed, I got a good five years out of that and I paid about €35 for it from Lidl, so I definitely got my money’s worth. And I’ve since taken it apart and the problem seems small enough that it can do light duty with a wire wheel or a buffing wheel later on, but for now it’s gone into storage along with the wheels (which were grand, they’re axminster wheels and are sound).… Read the rest

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