Three new pens

[DonHo]

I've been turning a few pens lately, here are the latest 3. From the left they are: a .308 as the botton of the pen with deer antler top, a 30/06 bottom with deer antler top and an ultra chrome cigar pen in kingwood.
Thanks for looking,
DonHo

[Anna]

Don, wow. You have to teach me how to do that. I love the deer antler stuff, although I heard that they're pretty difficult to turn. But how do you use the .308 and 30/06? I know a couple of gun nuts who'll love pens like those.

[gad5264]

Nice looking pieces Don

[DonHo]

"But how do you use the .308 and 30/06?"

The casings are the easy part. A guy over on penturners.org sells the casings with the bullet drilled as a nib and with a twist mechanism already installed. Here is a link
http://www.penturners.org/forum/topi...TOPIC_ID=29826

Check for all his post, he sells the casings powder coated also and he sells the tube and clip, etc for the upper part if you don't have extras.

As for turning deer antler, it's fairly straight forward to turn. The hard part is drilling the antler for the tube. I struggled with that for a while until a guy told me the secret was to turn the antler between centers until it's almost round then drill it. An even easier way and cheaper too if you are only going to make 2 or 3 antler pens is to buy the antler blanks already drilled. This is the only place I've seen them offered.
http://www.augumspenworks.com/apwwebsite_033.htm
You only need one blank for the cartridge pens, so you can buy enough for 2 pens for $7 and won't have any waste.

Hope this helps,
DonHo

[Uncle Cracker]

Ebay has pre-drilled antler blanks on a fairly regular basis. It does eliminate a lot of the work.