Countertop Pen Materials

If you've been making pens, you're probably real used to working with blanks like this that are wooden, like these cherry blanks that I've got here, but I wanna make you aware of another whole product that's out there on the marketplace and that you can probably get for not a lot of dough. What you wanna do is look in the Yellow Pages under solid surface countertops or under countertops, and find somebody in your area that's working with solid surface material. I've got examples of that stuff out here in front of me. And a lot of times at those fabricating shops, pieces that get small are no good to them, because of course, they wanna make these big, huge countertops. So just like I've got all sorts of wood offcuts in my shop that I don't know what to do, with these countertop shops end up with countertop pieces in their shops they dunno what to do with. What's cool about this, is the look of the finished pen that you can produce. This one, made out of solid surface countertop, looks like it was turned out of a chunk of stone. It was actually made from a piece of this one here on the right side of my pile. So what I do is, go to the cabinet shop, look for whatever scraps they have laying around. Bring those scraps home, start cutting 'em down into the sizes I need for my pen blanks. Now, a lot of the material is only a 1/2 inch thick, that'll do a lot of different pen styles. If you wanna go to the larger pens, look for material that's a little bit thicker. Like these 3/4 inch pieces. Now the wooden blanks, if you're prepping those on your own, you're probably doing a lot of that cutting on a bandsaw. A downside to the solid surface is that it can be pretty abrasive to a bandsaw blade. So you're gonna wanna produce your blanks on the table saw with a carbide blade instead of on the bandsaw. When you're doing your turning, again, because of its abrasiveness. Your best bet in turning this material is to use high-speed steel chisels instead of tool steel, that'll hold its edge a lot longer. As you work through, you develop your shape, you're ready to sand and finish. You don't apply finish to these, you polish 'em. So take 'em through the turning process, get 'em real smooth. Then buff that finish out, and you'll have a shine that looks just like this from a unique material that in its first life was destined to be a countertop.