Projects and Kids

After talking to my 9 year old last week we decided we needed to make some projects for several family members. We talked about it and came up with a good idea for a few of them.

My son loves pen turning, so we wanted to do something around that.

I still have some acrylic pen blanks from several years ago. So far they’ve seemed like good entry-level stock for a young turner. With a sharp gouge, the material comes off easy and doesn’t make a lot of dust.

I like the fact that I can stay close while he works to coach and teach. I’ve found it easy to reach over the work piece as it turns and highlight the areas needing attention with a pencil.

This makes it easy for him to focus on an area and not get stuck in one spot.

His favorite part is sanding. We usually start with 120 grit and use a ShopVac to pull away the dust until we switch to wet sanding with 400 grit. Each pen was sanded all the way to 2500 grit leaving a nice satin finish.

After the turning was done, it was just a matter of assembling the kits using a small vise to press the parts together.

We wanted to personalize these projects, so we also made a holder for each pen.

First, I cut three blanks out of this chunk of pecan.

Yes, I know there’s only two blocks in the picture. Here’s the third one.

My son and I sat down and designed a personalized carving for each block based the names my kids use for the recipients.

The designs were done in Easel, then run on the mini CNC to carve the names. The 9 year old watched each one like a hawk.

The little dot next to the right of each name was a marker for a hole to be drilled later. The block on the bottom had a little insect damage that added a little character.

To highlight the lettering, each block got a quick shot with some black paint.

After a little time to dry, they were sanded to remove the excess.

After drilling a 3/8″ hole at each dot to hold the pen, each block got a few coats of shellac.

I’ll post more another time about kids in the shop and all the good things that can follow, but for now I’ll just say this was a fun little project.