Navigator - Lining up wood grain

[putnamm]

I am looking for tips and suggestions on the best way to line up the wood grain when assembling a rollerball pen. I am making five Navigator pens out of cocobolo. I've made one of these before. It is my personal, daily use pen, and I love it--even with its imperfections. One of those imperfections is that I didn't have the foresight to line up the grain.

The Naviator has a twist-on cap. So the issue is how to assemble the pen such that the grain line up when twisted closed?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Mark

 

[Curly]

The way we do it is to assemble the barrel and press it together.
Next screw the cap part that mates to the barrel on it.
Take the cap blank and slide it on the cap hardware getting the grain lined up with the barrel as best you can.
Start to press the cap on just enough to get it started.
Remove the cap from the barrel and then press it on the rest of the way.
Complete the assembly of the rest of the pen.
When you screw the cap on the barrel it should be perfectly aligned on one of the three or four thread starts.
You could do it the other way around if you prefer. Cap then barrel.

 

[SteveG]

Quoting Curly: "..You could do it the other way around if you prefer. Cap then barrel."

I use the same process as first described by Curly. But I have not had success "the other way around". My experience has been that if I were to press everything together on the cap, then try to align the barrel threads, by pre-aligning the barrel threads by hand, then pressing the barrel fully, I would often find that the alignment was not successful. The barrel pressing operation would tend to upset the final registration position for the barrel threads resulting in a less than ideal overall alignment.

So as a matter of practice, I choose to always fully press the barrel components first, as initially described by Curly. For me, this approach has reliably yielded the desired overall alignment. As an added note, when initially screwing on the cap component piece, do it fairly tightly. It is a small piece, and you are doing it by hand. Once the pen is fully assembled, there will be much more leverage when "capping" the pen, and THAT is exactly when you want everything to end up in perfect alignment.