Pens of pewter/wood

[willstewart]

A few pens with pewter as well as wood in the blanks.  A different effect.

[Mike313]

Nice work!

[Bryan Milham]

Pens aren't my thing, although I can appreciate good work.

But reading the article, well done on working out how to remove pewter dust from the wood, I've not seen that method written down anywhere before.

[willstewart]

An afterthought - a pen in rosewood and malachite.  This was done by squaring up malachite pieces on a disk sander, gluing to a wood base with epoxy and then re-sanding and gluing another wood piece on top.  This works but the malachite is quite brittle and finishing used a lot of sanding!  I will try the fairly expensive 'Tru-stone' acrylic/malachite blanks which seem only available in the US (UK equivalents are cheaper but just look like green plastic to me!).  Pics of the completed pen and a part-glued stage attached. 

[willstewart]

One more item for this thread - pics of some items made from one blank of 'tru-stone' malachite (85% stone-in-acrylic).  One blank is shown plus 3 items made from the other (I bought 2 blanks).  I got these from Penn industries in the US - no problem but already quite expensive and of course with import duty on delivery (which was fairly quick).  The rather convincing malachite-like patterning is presumably made during manufacture.  They smell (on machining) and polish like acrylic (so no coating) and finish well (as does actual malachite of course).  I am not an acrylic blank user but these are quite hard and need repeated tool sharpening, but otherwise turn well.  The result does really look like malachite!

[Tim Pettigrew]

That's really interesting.  I'm very much interested in turning naturally occurring minerals so pictured for comparison is a pen turned from alabaster picked up from a beach in Somerset together with a picture of where it was collected.

[willstewart]

TP - fascinating and looks good!