Ebony

[aggromere]

I didn't take any pictures. I just received an order of inlace stuff and wanted to play around with it. I was making three cigar pens using some ebony blanks I bought at rockler on sale for $1 each. I turned them all down to near size and then cut some grooves in them and filled them with inlace. So far so good. The next day I turned them again. Two of the three turned out pretty good, but I had to add some more inlace to the third. I went ahead and polished and waxed, etc one of them and set it aside to assemble later.

This morning I was assembling some ultra cigars and pulled out the finished ebony blank to assemble as well. One of the sleeves now has a hairline crack in it about 1/2 inch long. It wasn't there yesterday.

Is that a function of the inlace, the ebony, the cheap blank or just the luck of the draw. The blanks where already round and were not stablized.

Is ebony a bad wood or do I need better blanks, or what?

thanks.

 

[maxwell_smart007]

Ebony is prone to cracking - it's just the nature of the beast. Sometimes a heavy-hand at sanding can cause it to crack, sometimes it happens regardless...

Ebony's a tricky wood!

 

[leehljp]

Heat build up in drilling affects ebonies and snakewoods along with a few others considerably. It is a general consensus among many long time users that the stress of heating during drilling brings about cracks later. Some people will take all day or two days to drill a snakewood blank to keep heat from building up. They wait two weeks or more before assembling them. Generally ebonies are not quite as sensitive as snakewoods, but they can be.

Quick heat and humidity changes can cause this too. Overheating such as leaving an ebony pen in a car (even in the glovebox) on a warm spring day can cause cracking.

Someone on this forum (he will remain nameless from me until he is ready to present his results) is testing theories on cracks in a pretty scientific way (IMO). He is also checking one of my theories that ebonies and snakewoods crack because of the hard glue prevents movement that are critical to those woods. I, and a few others think that since snakewoods and ebonies are so brittle, they need flexible glues such as flexible epoxy or silicone type of glues.

Cracking comes with the territory with ebonies but some people have less (or no) problems with cracks. I will venture to say that these people are VERY careful in drilling, assembling, handling and storage of these wood pens.

 

[Ligget]

I looked at a few of my first pens today, one of them was an ebony Patriot/Atlas. Guess what? It had a hairline crack running the full length of the barrel.

These were pens I made when I first started penturning, not good enough to give away yet, but I still have them as I will salvage parts when required.

 

[aggromere]

materials

For me wood seems to turn easier, but I find it easier to make a good looking pen with arylic, resin or gemstone blanks. They are a little harder to turn but they finish nicer for me and it seems they will hold up better, though not sure about that

 

[Dvoigt]

So what if you do drill too fast and build up heat and don't figure that out until you finish and notice that the bit is hot? Should you just scrap the blank because it will crack, or do you give it go and hope for the best?

 

[DurocShark]

Go ahead and put it on the shelf WITH NO TUBES and leave it be for a week or two. You may end up having to ream out the now slightly smaller hole, but you should be able to avoid cracks.