* Pen Making

So I think I touched on this last week or maybe a little before and that is metal work. I started off using brass. This is a quite soft metal and it is something that its easy to work with on the lathe and I can get to a nice high shine using the equipment I have. I have wanted a silver like metal to offer something a bit different on my pens too. My first stop was steel, specifically stainless steel, I chose that metal because it doesn’t tarnish and go dull like normal steel would or aluminium. However I wasn’t prepared for how hard a material stainless steel is, it is hard to turn, hard to drill, hard to tap and trying to get all the marks out with sandpaper takes forever.

I am still working on the 10 pens I started after the pen show but I have a few days off I have picked out the next few pens. [Here](https://i.imgur.com/0GnICNK.jpg) is the run up of pens.

Anyway, on with the metal work. The purple pen has a stainless steel band threaded and glued [on](https://i.imgur.com/R5wyumg.jpg) and the greeny brown one has brass threaded and glued on. Normally I just thread them on, however very occasionally a little bit of epoxy is needed. Here is a close up of the [brass](https://i.imgur.com/SUo7hS8.jpg) band.

Now I needed to find an alternative to a silvery metal, now I could use silver but that is waayyyy to expensive. (apologies for the very misty photos on the next few) I asked around and found that Silver Nickel is the war forward (Thank you Greg and Eric). [This](https://i.imgur.com/XWQ164f.jpg) is my first attempt at using Nickel with a steel clip attached. [A full image of the pen.](https://i.imgur.com/FDA4cba.jpg)

I have a plan, I have a tonne of short blanks I made with multiple resin pours so they are all very intricate. I plan to use a plain and complimentary blank to make some tips and section with the silver bands on either end to set it off. I think [they](https://i.imgur.com/JANLBLW.jpg) will look great, what do you think?

Anyway that’s it for this week.