Here’s a shot of the entire shop (mostly) after all has been set up and organized pretty well. Little desk at bottom left was made with scraps of my old work bench – has nib tuning/grinding stuff and a little laptop. Metal lathe and wood lathe on right. Wood lathe is pretty much just being used for the buffing wheel now. Makes quick work of polishing those pens. It’s such a pleasure to work in here now.
The next few days we’ll be gone camping. So I won’t be answering emails until Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.
I also uploaded a couple new videos of the metal lathe in action here.
School is out, Summer is here, and I’m going to be one busy pen making fool. 🙂 I’m very excited to get some work done.
Have a great summer everybody!
Like the picture of the shop Shawn; I feel like we are doing things in parallel. I did order the metal lathe (Little Machine Shop 8.5 X 16 Sieg SC4); definitely not the horse that yours is, but for me enough for now.
Now that you have upgraded your shop, what about taking a shot at making titanium fountain pens out of solid rods of pure titanium. I know machining titanium is hard and time consuming. I see a good amount of interest among pen lovers. To avoid machining and to keep cost low, readily available extruded titanium tubes may be the starting material. The barrel end cap and the cap crown of some other material may be inserted. The threadings for mating barrel ans section and cap and barrel may be done on brass or resin inserts.
I’ll look at it – but no promises. 🙂
Hey what do you use for a high gloss polish on your pens? I know you wet sand to 1000 but I’m curious if you use compounds on your buffing wheel?