fafow
Member
Hey all! I'm Craig Raper and I'm a pen turning addict. hah. Well, it is certainly addicting. My wife has been involved in woodworking for a number of years and over the last few we have been working on buying the right equipment for her. We are getting close to a complete shop and Christmas of 2006 she bought me a Jet 12inch lathe along with some tools for it. I had wanted to make bowls and spent time this year here and there just getting familiar with the lathe and how the different gouges and skews work. I finally made my first pen Dec 16 of this year and after doing a few of them got kind of hooked. I always figured making pens would be a minor thing for me and I would do most of my work on bowls. Well, I still hope to get to bowls, but pens are a heck of a lot of fun and I have gotten a lot of satisfaction hearing opinions of family and friends about the pens I have given out as gifts. Amazing how they look past the small imperfections even when told that they are there. I am a fairly quick learner and have been doing a lot of research on finishing. I was surprised to see how wide open that is in terms of what is best. This site is great for getting all kinds of info to help in my quest to make pens as best as I can. Thanks for the comments that have been posted. I've learned a lot from reading them and have gotten some courage to try a few things as well. Keep up the good work. Almost forgot... I work as a mainframe computer consultant designing software and data modeling (database design). My other main hobby is baking/cooking and in what little time I have left I have been converting cassette tapes to cd and cleaning up the sound using Sound Forge.
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