There are some things that are the same for all pens, regardless of their size or shape - selecting the wood, sawing the wood into pen blanks, drilling, gluing, and trimming. The wood selection and sawing is on this page. The other topics will be discussed on the other pages in this section, "The Basics". These topics may be accessed by clicking on the title from the row of buttons at the bottom of this page. -
-- Wood selection and sawing pen blanks (on this page)
-- Drilling for the brass tubes
-- Gluing the tubes
-- Trimming
"The Wood", buy or saw?
There are only two ways to get a piece of wood to make a pen - we can purchase it, or we can cut it ourselves from a larger piece of wood.
There is nothing wrong with purchasing wood for pens. I have done that myself when I wanted something special, such as Mesquite burl. But there are a few things we should always remember:
- Quality, grain figuring, grain orientation, and low price are not mutually inclusive. I always hear the question of where the best wood can be purchased for the lowest price. It may not be possible to answer that question.
- Those who are selling pen blanks are usually into that business for the profit, and that means that the blanks are cut for the maximum number from a piece of wood. Cutting pen blanks for figure or grain orientation will yield a lesser number of pen blanks from the same piece of wood, and their price will be higher to compensate for the loss.
- Always test a new supplier with a small order to check that their definition of "outstanding" is the same as ours.
Sawing Our Own
There are many advantages to sawing our own pen blanks. The most obvious is that we have control of the grain pattern in the pen blank. The photograph shows two bookmatched (faces are
opposite sides of same cut) pieces of "Pacific Yew" that have little character other than its natural grain and color. If they were cut along the lines as shown on the Left, we would get more pieces - (10) full length, (1) "maybe", and (5) half-blanks.
If they were cut diaginally as shown on the "Right", we would get fewer pen blanks, (8) full length and (4) half blanks, and it would take twice as long to cut them. This is the same question that faces the commercial sawyer, do we we cut for numbers or quality?
A good reason for cutting our own wood is that the choice is ours; and the wood is often free.
We have the same decision when we have a piece of wood that has some grain figuring in it. Do we cut it straight with the grain or diagonally?
Cutting the piece of wood on the Right with the same pattern as that on the Left would give us 8 full-length blanks, two of them highly figured blanks, two that might finish out with some figuring along one side, and four with straight grain along the length of the pen barrel. Cutting the wood on a diagonal to the grain will give us only (5) pen blanks, but all of them will share some figuring, and the diagonal grain orientation will give a better appearance to the finished pen.
My choice would be to cut them on the diagonal. The next photo will show us why.
Which Wood?
A few things about which wood we use for the pen. A pen can be made from almost anything that we can dry without its self-destruction.
-- We must be able to work with the wood without fear of an allergic reaction to it. This is at the top of my list because I am sensitive to nearly all tropical hardwoods. Regardless of their outrageous coloring or grain, I have to pass them up.
-- Choose the wood for its color, grain, or figure.
-- It must be wood. Corian and other synthetic materials look like what they are, plastic, and nobody likes them.
-- The more bold or outrageous the grain pattern, the better.
-- The only solid colors that are popular are black (Ebony) and white (Holly).
-- Everybody loves "Birdseye Maple", Maple Burl, and Olive
-- Wood with tight grain patterns and small features will look better.
-- There is no restriction on species or hardness because we will be using CA glue to "harden" the softer wood, but there is a limit to what we can do. Spalted woods can be a problem.
-- IT MUST BE DRY. Any residual moisture will result in shrinking after the wood is drilled for the brass tubes, and they may not fit. We could complete and assemble the pen from moist wood, but the thin pen barrel will shrink and crack as it dries. If there is any doubt about the moisture content, either wait or run it through a drying schedule in the Microwave Oven.
I cut and store pen blanks that are between 3/4" and 1" square and 5" long. The wood isn't always DRY and this size allows for whatever warpping and movement that it may take as it dries. The blanks could be cut to a smaller size for the smaller "Slimline" pens, but I prefer not to make the selection of the wood for its end use when I am sawing it. It also makes storage an easier task.
These two pieces were turned from the two pieces marked as No's. 1 and 2 in the previous photo. This illustrates, better than anything I could say, why we should be cutting our pen blanks on a diagonal with the grain.
