My first acrylic pen - Virage Chrome Kit :

My first acrylic pen - Virage Chrome Kit :

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interestingly enough, I had so far not purchased any pen blank, only have bought pen kit from the retailers and used no name wood on those. Sometime I wonder if anyone would purchase a pen made from such nameless wood.

Any way, I had received two beautiful acrylic blanks as a gift from beartoothwoods.com and did not know how to use them without a proper set of tools and lathe machine. A couple of attempts to sand

these acrylic blanks into shape like the wood blanks, was extremely frustrating. Acylic is a very hard and stubborn material in that respect. So these blanks were lying aside.

 

Finally however I found out that by spraying soap water on the  coarse sand paper the acrylic cuts much better, though not as good as wood, but reasonably better. Wonder if real pen turners use a coolant flow while turning acylic  similar to turning stainless steel !

 

With no  experience with acylic, I set off to make a kit pen using a
 Virage kit.
 

Had one more revelation once the holes were made with a hand drill for tube insertion - that is,
a) The material started to look translucent and quite nice by itself
b) The view of the brass tubes through the material was very un-inspiring.

So I discarded the idea of the brass tubes and decided to fit the hardware directly.

 

Tried to polish the insides using cookng oil and a cellulose head & die grinder, that smoothened most of the drill and reamer marks.

 

 

Outer sides were sanded to two sets of hex sections at 45 degrees to each and the ends were sanded tapered-  final looks were a twisty  near round shape.

 

Final polish with all eight grades of micromesh stick was still not sufficient to remove all of the sanding marks. Even tried to use brasso once, not much improvement in the shine. I need to learn about acrylic surface finish.

Fitting the hardware took its toll as well as I had messed up a bit at the clip finial and spilled some CA- had to do some damage control, but the chrome is damaged for good. Noted that the visble parts of the hardware is reducing the looks, at least to me, my kids were very happy with pen though.

 

That is how my first handmade acrylic pen goes.

Wonder how viewers would find it. Any suggestions on how to improve the looks by some coating like

melamyne etc?