JD Combs Sr
Member
..., remember all those old slightly bent and now unused pen mandrels and thumb-nuts that are currently stuck in the back of a drawer someplace.:biggrin:
Well I came up with a use for at least one of mine.:wink: A couple weeks back I cut one of the mandrels in two and use one piece to make a shaft for a 3/4" pen mill I had just bought(wrong size for the rest of my mill shafts:redface
,
anyway it worked fine but... a few weeks later I run across another thread talking about squaring blanks on the lathe using a custom sanding disc then later that day I was checking out Rick Herrel's "Custom Made penturning tools/accessories" vendor catalog and ran across his "Economy Sanding Mills". His sanding mill looked a lot like a pen mandrel with the thumb nut on it,
so a grabbed the remaining piece of the mandrel I had cut into and installed a thumb nut and presto I had a sanding mandrel.
A PSA sanding disc, a 3/4" hole punch and a 1/4" hole punch later I was ready to go.
Here it is squaring up a 7mm tube.
Add a Sierra pen mill bushing and...wha laa
Now what do I do with the new pen mill. I guess it will still be good for hogging off extra long blanks.
Well I came up with a use for at least one of mine.:wink: A couple weeks back I cut one of the mandrels in two and use one piece to make a shaft for a 3/4" pen mill I had just bought(wrong size for the rest of my mill shafts:redface
, anyway it worked fine but... a few weeks later I run across another thread talking about squaring blanks on the lathe using a custom sanding disc then later that day I was checking out Rick Herrel's "Custom Made penturning tools/accessories" vendor catalog and ran across his "Economy Sanding Mills". His sanding mill looked a lot like a pen mandrel with the thumb nut on it,
so a grabbed the remaining piece of the mandrel I had cut into and installed a thumb nut and presto I had a sanding mandrel.
A PSA sanding disc, a 3/4" hole punch and a 1/4" hole punch later I was ready to go.
Here it is squaring up a 7mm tube.
Add a Sierra pen mill bushing and...wha laa
Now what do I do with the new pen mill
. I guess it will still be good for hogging off extra long blanks.