Baron PenStripes

[leehljp]

I tried something new with this sterling silver Baron. Wood is Holly with 1.5 mm black plastic stripes in the grooves that I cut in the holly.

This was basically an experiment and worked OK. I will probably be trying a few more in the future, but for now, I am just going to look at this one.





AT the moment, I am having more trouble getting a very sharp picture with my camera. Learning "f-stops!" Not my cup of tea.

[DonHo]

Great looking pen. Did you cut the groves using the indexing fuction on the Rikon? How about a little, how to info, I think more than just me might be interested in trying a pen like that.
DonHo

[leehljp]

Thanks Don.
I did it the old fashion and hard way. I haven't figured out how to use the indexer yet.

Here are the detailed steps that I used. It is a little long but I did want to get the major steps in.

I have been searching for some very thin saw blades and found a 1.5 mm blade and put it on my saw. I started with this. I have since found a 1 mm blade that I will use for my next one.

1. Starting with a slightly larger than 3/4 in pen blank, I ripped it until it was square at very close to 3/4 inch; I pencil marked the center lines on the end so that I could line up the blank to rip the slots. Double checked and made sure they were precisely centered.
2. With as jig to hold the blank, I cut the edges off and made the blank 8 sided.

3. I set the depth of the saw blade to about 1/4 inch.
4. Next, I set the fence so that the blade would rip the groove precisely in the center.

5. For the first plastic strip, I CAed it in place, It wanted to catch too much and my fingers kept sticking. So I went to plan B for the rest.
6. I mixed 30 minute epoxy for the rest and used rubber bands to hold everything together. (CA is better for Plastic, learned the hard way, more on this below.)
7. After the epoxy cured for 24 hours, I sanded down two side with my belt sander until the ribs were _almost_ flush with the wood, but I did not go all the way to the wood.

8. Next I raised the saw blade to 1/2 inch, set the fence very finely so that the rip fence would allow the blade to remove everything as close to the wood as possible without cutting more wood off. Using the sanded sides against the fence, I pushed the blank through (with two push sticks). The purpose of this is to keep the 8 sided blank as squared as possible. An easier way would be to cut the strips just a minute' tad less than the height of the grooves and that will save some of the extra work that I went through on this step.
9. After that step, Cut blanks into proper lenghts.

10. Place the blanks onto the lathe chuck for precise centering. Drill the holes. Feed SLOWLY. Exit carefully or make the blanks long and cut them off after the required depth is reached.
11. I used small hand cut sanding pads on a barrel trimmer and power sanded the blanks down to the barrels. I did not want to chance the trimmer blades catching.

12. Turn, taking small light cuts. The lower barrel came apart when it caught while turning, but nothing was hurt. I learned from this that CA holds better on smooth plastic than Epoxy does. I took the two pices and formed them back around the tube; placed two rubber bands, doubled, trippled and more - and made them tight on the blank, which was on the tube. Thin CAed everything, rubber bands included, later CAed again.
13. Next day finished the lower part, taking little bitty bites and using regularly sharpened chisel. I sanded the last 1/32 in down. Worked well and finished with CA.

Hope this helps.

[crokett]

Very nice. My dad has a Delta lathe waiting for me to come tune it up. Maybe next spring I will have the time to do that.

[jking]

Very nice. It's good to see more pen activity lately.

[LCHIEN]

...
AT the moment, I am having more trouble getting a very sharp picture with my camera. Learning "f-stops!" Not my cup of tea.

Hank,
You might check into getting a set of closeup lenses for your camera.

http://www.amazon.com/Tiffen-58mm-Cl.../dp/B00004ZCD9

In the above link, the set of three lenses screw onto the front of the lens on your camera. 58mm in this case is the accessory thread ring size (diameter) of the camera lens, nothing to do with the focal length or anything else. Common accessory rings sizes are 49, 52, 55, 58 mm.
If your camera lens has a threaded ring on the front (most 35mm SLRs and most digital SLR-like or SLR cameras have this, but point and shoot cameras usually don't) then you can use the close-up lenses.

The lenses are diopter lenses and look for most purposes like filters sold for camera lenses, except filters are flat glass with spectral tranmission blocking and diopter lenses are clear but have curved lenses to change the focus.

Common sets have +1, +2, and +4 diopters and sometimes a "Macro" fourth size.
These can commonly be found on eBay - Tiffen and DKE are a couple of makers.

anyway they can be put on singly or in pairs to decrease the minimum focus distance - my cameras minimum focusing distance is about 7 inches even in macro mode at least zoom so I can get within 2-3 inches if I want to quite easily, at which point it gets hard to light your subject because the camera casts a shadow. Once you get within about 10 inches of a camera the built-in flash is set too high up to illuminate the subject anyway.

No exposure compensation or f-stop fiddling required.

You might look into a set, should run around $20 on eBay (or the Akihabara)

Nice pen, by the way.

[leehljp]

Thanks for the comments fellows. I appreciate it!

Loring, My real problem is that my Japanese version of the Canon Rebel XT with an ultrasonic EFS 17-85 stabilized lens does so well on auto focus and other "auto" settings for most picts that I don't have to mess with it - but one big problem - depth of field on close ups.

Closest shot is 1.2 ft. Depth of field in macro mode and auto or manual focus usually makes one part of the pen in focus and another part out of focus. For this reason, I had to learn the Depth Of Field settings, and did this for the first time on this pen shot.

That brought up a second problem. The greater the DOF (32 in this case) spots and dirt really began to show up. The original pict had several black spots that looked like it was something on the lense. It wasn't. I got nervous that my camera had suddenly gone bad. I reduced the f-stops and the spots went away. At this point, I realized that I was playing with something that I had no clue about!

I remember reading about "dirt" and digital cameras a couple of years ago and how it was different than regular cameras. I don't remember the specifics but I did read that it can play havoc.

[Scottydont]

That is a classy looking pen! Great job.