CA Glue as a Pen Finish

It may be hard to believe but CA glue, cyanoacrylates, makes a wonderful and durable finish for pens like this. The deal is that when we get done with this process the finish it leaves on there is gonna be very, very shiny. And unlike some of the other pen type finishes that are shiny when you're done the CA glue is very capable of being handled and holding onto that shine for a long time. Some of the other finishes the more you handle the pen or other turnings the more that shine leaves the turning. With the CA glue it's very, very durable. It's gonna shiny forever. What I just got done doing was sanding as I normally would. Now the finery of sander the better finish you're gonna get. This is a little bit of Rosewood here. I sanded that up to an 800 grit. Then running the lathe with a little bit of lacquer thinner on my paper towel, I clean the sawdust residue off of there. What I wanna do next is reduce the RPM on the machine. We're ready to apply the glue. We don't wanna do that at this high sanding speed. So I'm gonna dial my RPMs way down. So I'm running at a much lower RPM. So you wanna set your lathe on slow. We wanna use a thick form of CA glue. Now what's gonna happen is I'm gonna wide up a paper towel, get it nicely folded here, apply the CA glue to the paper towel and then apply that and turn to the pen turning, keeping it moving. We wanna be very conservative with the glue so that it's not flying all over the place, getting on you getting on your safety glasses. So it takes just very little glue just enough to get that surface wet. Once we've got that on there we'll let that dry and have a look at the next step. And that's just enough there for one side. Now I can hit the other side. Now we'll give that first coat a chance to cure on there. You can use accelerator if you want but if you do be very conservative if you overuse accelerator in any application with CA glue it can cause it to crystallize. So really, I prefer to just give it a little bit of time allow that glue to cure without the accelerator. Then we'll be ready for sanding this out. We wanna get a total of three coats on this. Now I'm gonna take the speed back up on my lathe using an 800 grit sandpaper. I'm gonna sand that CA glue out. Slow my RPMs back down. Wipe the sanding dust off. Now another coat of glue. First time I did this, I was amazed that when I got to this step, that the glue didn't just grab onto that paper towel and wrap it around the pen. I've had such great luck using CA glue for so many instant gluing applications. I thought for sure that it would bind the paper towel right to the pen. But as long as you keep moving, give it a chance to cure. It's gonna work out just fine. So now we'll let that second coat dry, sand it out. We get one more coat on there. That takes care of the third coat on here. Now, a couple things are important. Again, I'm at a low RPM. On this particular machine right now I'm running at 600 RPM. You wanna keep that low, so the glue doesn't come zinging off. The benefit to the paper towel is that if it does catch the paper's gonna tear. Instead of using a rag as a general rule for finishing, I always wanna finish with a paper towel, not a cloth rag just because of that potential for catching pulling my fingers into the machine. Third coat is dry. Take my RPM back up. Gonna level that out, gonna sand that with my 800 grit. It's very smooth. Clean that residue off. Now, gonna close my glue bottle cos if I leave that open too long it's gonna start to cure right there inside the tip. To get a nice polish on this, I'm gonna hit it with just a little bit of a buffing compound on the stick. And that's what's gonna bring the sheen up. Look at the gloss that's on that Rosewood. Very, very nice real high sheen. And like I said, the real beauty of this is that this pan is gonna hold that gloss despite lots and lots of handling for a really really long time. CA glue works great for a finish these applications.