Video: Pen Turning: Mounting Pen Blanks

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When pen turning, wood workers mount pen blanks onto a wood lathe with a pen mandrel and several moving parts. Mount pen blanks into a lathe with a wood turning expert in this free video on pen turning.

- Pen Turning: Mounting Pen Blanks
- Pen Turning: Clip & Transmission Fitting

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Video Transcript

So here we have the two halves of our pen blank. Again one's a little bit longer than the other one, and we need to mount them on the lathe. Now there's a special system designed for mounting pen blanks on the lathe, and we call it a mandrel system, a pen mandrel. This is it, you'll see that there's a morse taper that fits into the head stock on this one, and as you look at this you'll see also that there are some spacer bushings. These spacer bushings separate the pieces so you've got room to work with your tool. They also give you the critical diameters of the pen parts that you need to turn the wood down to. And so, we'll put that in position like that, and we can take off that little nut that's at the end. Now this one I'm going to mount so that the tip of the pen--here's my grain match that I want--I'm going to put what's going to be the tip of the pen toward the head stock. That really doesn't matter, that's not too critical. And so there's one bushing right here, we'll slide that forward, put in another bushing, which gives this a little bit of clearance and space there, and then we'll put the second pen blank on there. And this is where it's important that the grain match line up, so that when we complete the pen, you have that nice match between both halves of the pen. And then we'll put another spacer bushing there, and then the brass nut on the end which compresses them all together. We want to tighten this down so that it's snug but not over-tight. Then we'll bring the tail stock up into position. Nothing the point that I have on the tail stock is going to fit nice and tight into the dimple on the end of the mandrel. So we'll bring that forward, a little bit of pressure from the tail stock just enough to make it firm, we don't want to over-tighten the tail stock because it may flex the mandrel and make it so that it doesn't run true. And the pen blank now is mounted on the lathe and ready to start the turning process.

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Pen Turning: Mounting Pen Blanks

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