Posts from — January 2010

Well, at least partly – it’s been through the skim cutting, but not yet sanded or cut into cubes.

Most of the koa was just undersized, so I’ll be saving that for later use in my 1/2″ cube based puzzles. This is not a reflection on the seller – these were extras thrown in to fill my box of wood and if I were actually turning pens they’d most likely be fine. Almost all of the mango was usable (and all the ones from the auction were), the red river gum was just a touch undersized (for me) and the tamarind and signature turned out just beautiful I’m going to have to find out how to get more of that.

So, here are the followup photos: taken after the skim cut on the saw. These are not wetted down at all.

koa: (hmmm, guess I didn’t get this one uploaded – I’ll fix this later

mango: some of the mango shows a bit of curl

tamarind: This showed some surprising color

red river gum:

signature: this was the most surprising. I’ll be very interested to see this with some finish on it to give it depth. Since I have some pieces that can’t be used due to the knot in them you’ll most likely see some waterloxed pictures tomorrow

So here’s what happened – since I cut wood into 3/4″ cubes, I don’t really need a lot to get started and I wanted to try out some new types. I figured that a relatively inexpensive way to try something out would be pen blanks. I’ve looked at pen blanks in the stores (Rockler, Woodcraft) but they tend to be just a bit undersized for my purposes so I went looking on EBay.

I found a bunch of auctions from a guy in Hawaii and tried a few. I found out that some of those blanks go for a lot of money. Well, he sells in packs of 10 and if you’re making custom pens it’s probably really not all that much money, but it’s more than I wanted to go on this first time around.

One nice thing about him is that he’ll throw in some extras of what he has around – I’m guessing it gets rid of some of his scrap and since it’s a flat rate box it doesn’t matter. It’s also nice because his are rough cut to about 7/8″ which gives me plenty of space to process them down to size. I took advantage of his offer to supersize the shipping and he’d throw in a bunch more different things.

So, here’s what I got when I won my 10 mango root pen blanks.

Mango Root Pen Blank

Koa pen blank

Red River Gum pen blank

Tamarind cutoff

I had to ask him what this next wood was as I was having great difficulties finding anything about it. He wrote what kind of wood each of the pieces was (a very big help, by the way) and this was labelled “signature”. You try looking for wood and signature and see if you find a tree of that name

Signature/Autograph flat grain

Signature/Autograph end grain

So, now I’m off to put these pieces through the saw, cut them down to my cube blanks. Once I get a smoother surface on them, I’ll wet them and show them once again.

Oh, in case you’re interested, you can find him on EBay as the seller named eganlaw and search for his pen and turning blanks using “joel* Hawaiian”.