I bought the $12.00 set of 8 turning tools tools at Harbor Freight to learn which tools I would eventually grow into, with the ultimate goal of replacing the ones I use with high-end stuff. I also bought one of the sets of 5 'pen-sized' tools at a local tool shop for $25, but I rarely use the small stuff, and even though they have real brass ferules on them, I haven't noticed a difference in the steel. I've 'upgraded' the HF tools by reshaping and honing them to be razor sharp, and belt sanding off all of the really square corners on the full length of them that might catch/dig in on my tool rest and keep me from being able to slide them back and forth smoothly, but other than that, they're working great!
Aside from maybe having to sharpen them a little more than the hand-forged, cryo-ice hardened, Damascus-folded, unobtanium coated Sheffield, UK jobs that I'll eventually buy for $40-$90 a pop, I'm still hammering away with my junky tools and loving life. I mainly use a 1" skew (read about using the skew before you just 'wing' it), a 3/4" gouge, and a cheapo 1/16" parting tool I bought from the little 'impulse buy' cardboard box near the checkout stand at Woodcraft for like $2.50.
Now, if you get into bowls and such, you will need to look at some higher priced tools, but for small stuff like a pen? Go cheap until you learn what works for you, and then replace with real stuff. I'll let you know how I do when I start replacing, but my advice is learn how to sharpen! The nice thing about crappy steel tools is that you're sort of forced to sharpen a lot (repetition is practice!), and when you blow it and really muck up an edge, or angle, or shape, you're not seeing dollar signs flying out the window when you have to take off 1/8" of the tool to fix a flub.
After learning the basic stuff, I've also seen a lot of shop-made tools that are fabricated out of common materials that are used to make some really amazing stuff, for instance, Ron in Drums PA's miniature hollowing tools made out of cold rolled steel rod and 1/8" allen wrenches. I've actually held these tools in my hand and looked at them, and the only thing that's really special about them is the ingenuity it took to come up with the process of creating them!
You'll learn, as you live on this forum a while, that most of us are just winging it. As for tools, if it cuts wood, and you can figure out how to make it work for you, the sky's the limit! There are ideas coming out of the weirdest places around here, and that's what makes this forum so awesome. Any of us can think up something that will have the vets wondering why they never thought of it. Most of the stuff we do here is out of the box, and we all got different boxes, you know?
That being said, occasionally there's some freak show that comes up with really stupid and dangerous ideas - Please peruse through my previous 400 posts for good examples of this. [
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