that was then

Shop class. Grade 8. I made this bowl.

I’m still kind of weirded out that they let 12 year olds play with a lathe back in the day, but my bowl turned out pretty nicely. Thank you, shop teacher at Ryerson Public School! That was the first and until recently last time I ever touched a lathe, but I’ve always wanted to try it again.

this is now

Lee Valley Tools, Turn a Pen Seminar. I made this pen.

For 50 years I’ve been impressed by this idea that you could magically convert square things, like this hunka wood (a pen blank) -

into round things, like the pen shown above. It’s the magic of the lathe! Square things become Round things!

Our local Lee Valley Tools occasionally runs seminars as a way of persuading you to buy more tools from Lee Valley, so I signed up for their Pen Turning Seminar last weekend. For $50, you got a hunk of wood, and a bag of parts,

and, fortunately, a competent instructor (Thomas) to lead you through making a pen.

You get to toss around words like gouge and mandrel and collet and Morse Taper in a kind of semi-intelligent way while you’re turning your square thing into a round thing.

I really enjoyed that. And of course on the way out of the store, you cannot help but look at the lathes for sale, and you start doing the mental calculations of how much money you could save on pens if you had your own lathe.

Daughter-in-law helpfully noted …

I stopped by your house today and Cathy literally said “this is going to be the most expensive pen he’ll ever have…because after this class he’s going to want a lathe”

Yeah, I think she’s right.

Thomas started off by asking the class if anybody had used a lathe before. “I made a bowl in grade 8”, I said, and he laughed and mentioned that 50% of his students usually started that way and then never did anything for decades after.

He was a great instructor but he hurled so many tips and tricks at us before we even mounted the blank on the lathe that I think I want to take the class again and take better notes. and then I’ll have TWO pens and the not-buying-pens cost savings will REALLY start to build up.

have I bought a lathe yet

No. Not yet. But I did buy this book -

which is full of gorgeous pens and practical projects, such as making corn-cob pipes out of actual corn cobs.

I never thought that corn-cob pipes would be something I admired.

do you know somebody who’s really good at this?

As a matter of fact, yes! My former Apple colleague Bret Siegel makes gorgeous pens out of ACTUAL DRUMSTICKS used in ACTUAL CONCERTS which he then re-sells. What a great idea. Are you a friend of the band Widespread Panic who also needs a pen? (Who isn’t, really.)

Check out Bret’s pens for sale for more.

Bret shared this video with me of part of the process of turning a Widespread Panic drumstick into a pen -

pretty cool. Isn’t it crazy that you can convince a lathe that it’s actually a drill press, and that the drill bit doesn’t even bother turning.

And I have a lot of Argonotes drum sticks in the garage, hmmm, I wonder what people would pay for those?

so what’s next?

Well, you’d need

• A lathe;
• Some gouges;
• A strategy for dealing with sharpening the gouges. In watching Youtube videos, they seem to skip over this part. Thomas said “What you don’t see is that they’re probably stopping every two minutes to re-sharpen on the grinder.";
• A grinder. Or, I dunno, can you subscribe to sharp tools and have Amazon send you new sharp ones every week? Which reminds me, one of my kids noticed I had some Amazon-brand rechargeable AA batteries and actually asked me “So … Do you send them back to Amazon to be recharged?";
• Probably a good idea to sign up for another Lee Valley course on sharpening;
• A drill press because why not, you have to drill a straight hole through the pen “blank” to get started;
• Space in the garage to set everything up.

That last step is going to be the hardest.