How long do you spend on a pen?

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I know when I tell my wife "I turned 5 pens today" or something along that line, what I really mean is .... 2 days before I rounded the blanks, yesterday I drilled them and glued the tubes in .... and today "I turned 5 pens" ! :biggrin:

I did, with the help of my little brother and my Dad, catch about 150 fish one day! :) honest ... I DID! The mackerel were running that day! Had to go door to door giving them away! I don't even LIKE fish!
 
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I agree with most of the posts. It takes you as long as it takes to have a completed item.

I cut glue and drill my blanks one day and hope to get to turning, finish and assembly the next. If it's two or more days later, so be it. I enjoy it. That's what really matters.
 
what difference does it make how fast someone ELSE can do it???
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That is a very good point. I doesn't really matter how fast someone else can make a pen. I do want to make the best possible pen that I can make, but I also want to feel like I am working efficiently. From what the majority of the people have said, it sounds like the time that it takes me to produce a pen is about average, and that now I just have to make sure that the quality of my pens is constantly improving.
 
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I have to say that impend ten mins total with my ca finish...that's it...the rst takes a lot more time : )

Grub
 
Agree with everyone that says time to make a pen not as important as getting it done right. Some have mention they use an assembly line approach to making pens. I prefer to use the term get organized. How you organize yourself entirely up to you. Goal here is get most out of available time you have to make pens.

I do not use a written plan, but if that helps you get organized go ahead. My routine does not vary too much from what other have already said.
 
1-2 hours for a two piece pen with a standard pen blank I purchased (wood or PR).

My segmented pens sometimes take me weeks of work 3-4 nights a week to build. Most have 30-50 hours in them.

I just got my first "big" pen order for 30 shredded money elegant beauty kits, and I hope to do them assembly style and get them done in 20-25 hours, but I have no idea how many holes I'll have to fill with CA and sand down, etc.

Hope this helps!
 
Ben, you and me are in the same boat. I've got two little girls at home and it was hard for me to find time doing what I was so passionate about. I would steal away to the garage to turn a pen while my wife had the kids in the tub. I dreaded that phone call telling me to come inside. I made a lot of mistakes doing it that way.
Arrange it with your wife ahead of time and do what you can do. Remember, this is fun. Breath deep and enjoy your new craft!
 
First of all you only get to see the success case not the cases that ended up in a shoe box. We all have them. The blanks that ended up too plain, too whatever that makes them just a wasted blank or a wasted tube. No one mentions them but we all have them.

I use to do a lot of high number production work. An order for fifty pens of one type was small. When you get into large numbers you not a hobby turner but a production turner. Different world, with less satisfaction and tons more headaches. You learn to hate one pen style at a time because you do it over and over again until you hate it.

The time savings is in doing repeated steps as efficiently as possible. In fact if you are not highly efficient you will never finish a order. It is all numbers, time and thinking in advance. We all know all the steps in making a pen but have you thought how to do it efficiently? Not likely because you want to enjoy the process not bang them out like eggs on a layer farm. Here is how I do large orders with a rough time estimate.

You need hundreds of blanks to work with, maybe a thousand for large orders. Your selection of blanks the best blanks makes the entire output possible. If you have a order for 50 pens you start out selecting 60-65 of your best blanks for the job. Draw a line, witness marks, on two sides of the blanks for matching later. Two sides because you can see one of the two sides easily when you pick the up later and find your witness marks for faster work. Figure 30 minutes to find and select 60-65 nice blanks.

Then go to the band saw and cut each blank to length using your sled and put both blanks together with a rubber band to hold them. Place them is a box to keep the entire group together. Figure half an hour to cut all the blanks.

Now go to the drill press. Drill 120-130 half blanks. Making sure that the witness marks are used to keep both halves aligned in your pen drilling press. I use a small waste block under every one to prevent blowouts. Then put the two half blanks back together with the rubber band. Repeat over and over again. Figure 30-45 minutes for the drilling.

Now you get to glue the tubes in the blanks. I used Gorilla glue so I did not scuff every tube to give the glue a surface to grab. That had to save me ten seconds on every blank. You still have to load the tube surface with glue, work the tube into the blanks several times to get even glue coverage. Then wrap the pair back in the rubber band. This time I went around both blanks the long ways to use the rubber band to keep the tubes from extruding as the glue dries. Put on a long flat area so the glue can dry. Another 20 minutes glueing the lot.

Then you get to trim the blanks by your method of choice. I use to use a drill press vise to hold the blanks and a end mill trimmer in the drill press. It took half a minute per set of blanks. 30 minutes if all went well 60 if real hard wood which takes much more time than say a soft spalted maple.

Then I went over to the Woodwrite lathe and set the blanks on the production mandrel. It is a automatic lathe and will round the blanks into a perfect cylinder after four or five passes. You do not have to watch the process. I just wanted the blanks turned round and maybe 75% if the way down to the final size. While the blank was turning I would be working on my Delta lathe on another blank so the time spent here was free because I was working on a second pen. Well it still takes time to mount, set and run the lathe so figure two to three minutes moving blanks around and set up time.

Then they are taken off the Woodwrite and put on my Delta lathe. Then the real hand work of turning is done. When you turn the same pen a few hundred times you can turn on down to 1-2mm of the final size in a very short time. Simple pens take five to ten minutes and complex ones take ten minute to an hour. We all get bogged down sometimes. Figure ten minutes as a good average.

Sand as needed with the factory steel bushings. I use to dry sand all blanks to 800-1200, then I found MM and it took even more step. EEE if you like, sanding sealer if needed based on the type of wood. Another few minutes, maybe a lot more. Call it five minutes in a perfect world.

Then off the Delta and onto the old Delta lathe in the "clean area" that only finishing is done. Might need five or ten coats of finish. May find that after five it just does not look like you expect. Then you have to decide if you will be better sanding it down, sanding it all off and starting over or decide the blanks is never gong to be a keeper and chuck it in the trash can. If it turns out perfect and the finish is all that you hope for you place the finished pen blanks in a plastic bang and set aside. Call it 10 minutes on a good day and 30 on a bad day.

Now you have perfectly finished pen blanks that need to be assembled. First check everyone of them again in better light. Do not be surprised if you fine a third of them need more finishing or have some here to fore unseen blemish. It is either redo them to correct the flaw or pitch them. Blanks and tubes are cheaper than pen kits but by now you have a real major investment in time in each semi finished pen blank. It is a judgment call, but sometimes you just have to admit the wood wins again. I finished one blanks four times before I gave up. Hard to quit sometimes. If perfect you put them together and re-polish as needed. Then into the display case or into the pen box they go. Another one or two in a perfect case ten or more sometimes.

So the pen order of 50 pens takes me well over 1725 minutes or a little over 28 hours by my quick estimation. 40 or more in some cases. Call it a pen every 30 minutes. Think my times are too slow for each step? I just finished a order for 175 pens for the local high school and It took almost a hundred hours for the job. Worse I donated the blanks, kits and time. The only thing they paid for was laser engraving. The things we do for our kids.

So when you hear people claim a pen takes an hour or more they are working fairly quickly. When they claim it takes three, four or five hours they are working on a hard pen style or they are working at the Federal Governments speed.
 
ldb2000 said:
As long as it takes to get it right !!!
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Same here!

Sometime 15 minutes sometimes 15 weeks.

My shop is like Mr. Roger's neighborhood. People are always dropping by to see what's new, just to chat, have a beer, borrow tools, etc.

Fortunately, My wife has learned to recognize when I am onto something special and keeps folks away.

I have gone to the shop and stay for 36 hours before. When I "get in the zone" I'm there until that nagging idea in my head spews ink. Sometimes my best work comes after 10-12 hours of repeated failures.

Sometimes the simplest tasks elude me. I went through a phase not to long ago where I couldn't make a slimline. Then a pahse where I couldn't make a CA finish.

I guess my point is that if you try to put a stopwatch on your pen making you are apt to ruin your passion. I know I would.

Respectfully submitted.
 
Wow - great post jfoh. I never though about how pens would be done en mass. Thank you.

I guess I work at federal gov't speed - but I have no public to server, nor is it my livelyhood, so I dont care.
 
I work kinda like Jhof's post. I make runs of 25 pens at a time in steps. (two piece pens so 50 blanks) I do it over a period of two days, sometimes three, depending on what else I'm doing. Sometimes I just don't feel like making pens so I take a day or two off to do other things, like visitings stores, etc.

1. Table saw: cutting blanks and segments. (30 minutes)
2. Workbench: gluing up segments. (2 hours)
3. Lathe: rounding blanks (1.5 hours)
4. Lathe: drilling blanks (2 hours)
5. Lathe: Squaring ends (2 hours)
6. Lathe: Turn to size (1 hour)
7. Lathe: Preliminary finish (1.5 hours)
8. House in airconditioning: Gluing on cigar labels (1 hour)
9. Lathe: Final finish (3 hours)
10. Lathe: Assembly (1 hour)

About 15.5 hours to do 25 pretty nice pens or about 35 or 40 minutes a pen.
 
I would be in the camp with those who say... "Who cares how long it takes"! Is it important to know your neighbor has a replicator and can crank out 20 pens an hour?

There are a ton of different answers since no two people really turn exactly for the same reasons.

I am so glad I never got to the point to where I had to crank out pens to build up stock for a show. I consider my pens more than "Stock" on a table and consider the time spent making each pen as a pleasurable time. I take pride in my craft and would rather display a dozen very nice pens than 300 "Stock" pens any day.

And keep one thing in mind........ some folks tend to exagerate just a bit now and then! :biggrin:
 
Texatdurango said:
I would be in the camp with those who say... "Who cares how long it takes"! Is it important to know your neighbor has a replicator and can crank out 20 pens an hour?

There are a ton of different answers since no two people really turn exactly for the same reasons.

I am so glad I never got to the point to where I had to crank out pens to build up stock for a show. I consider my pens more than "Stock" on a table and consider the time spent making each pen as a pleasurable time. I take pride in my craft and would rather display a dozen very nice pens than 300 "Stock" pens any day.

And keep one thing in mind........ some folks tend to exagerate just a bit now and then! :biggrin:
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:good: What Roy said!
 
It takes me about an hour and a half per pen. I have a fridge full of beer next to me, so I'm never in any hurry to finish.
 
IF it is a hobby you can spend five or ten hours on each pen. IF you have a large order you can not. Most, if not almost all posters here are hobbyist, who sell a few pens, so they have no need to churn out pens like crazy. You can spend all day on a pen if you like.

The few here who try to make real money on pens will tell you off line that it is a very hard to remain highly profitable making and selling pens.Most just hope to offset the other cost by selling a few pens to pay for other cost in pen making . Like people who stock guns find out that their average wage is below minimum wages, most here will fine that you work more often for less than a buck an hour than you do for more than ten dollars an hour. DO the math. It is a hobby, not a big money maker. If pens were major money makers they would have sent all the work over to China. We can have fun with our hobby and still recover some of our investment. Kind of like having your cake and eating it at the same time.
 
Some may say, "Until it is done."

I would refer back to the old saying: "A true artist never finishes a piece, they just stop working on it."
 
I have found that the more I am in a rush to finish a pen, the longer it takes. Slow down and don't worry about it.
 
I'm still new to this whole pen turning stuff. For me it depends on the pen and the material.So far anywhere from an hour and a half to six hours.
 
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How long does it take.

I am a little over a year as a pen turner and have not yet graduated beyond slim lines. I timed my self on one pen from start to finish. It took 3 hours and that was one that went without a hitch. I usually only make one pen at a time, use a shop made jig for drilling and hand barrel trimmer, use CA finish. So, better drilling would be the main thing I could improve on. I just don't see any way of doing better that a couple of hours.:frown:
 
I usually start two or three at a time in hopes that I have a new pen by the end of the day (3-5 hours). Seldom are they the same style.
I'm kind of glad the probably 2-3 hours per pen isn't much shorter...I have more pens than I need and a large inventory (for me this is about 100 pens) just means I need to get rid of some...somehow! I don't do shows...about half a dozen fundraising sales a year. I guess I should admit...the time to make a pen includes beer consumption.

But I'm having fun!
 
Turning pens is either a hobby or work to be completed. If a hobby you spend as much time as you desire and enjoy the process. If work you try to be as efficient as possible so you get the job done. Pens are a hobby for me so time is not money it is therapy.

I make pens for the local high school graduation ceremony. 175-200 pens each year are turned and engraved with the students name. I figure it takes 30 minutes a pen these days. I turn 200-225 pens and select the best 175-200 ones for use. I turn extras because final turned blanks are not all equal. Wood is a very funny thing to work with. Some blanks get very average when completed due to loss of grain pattern or odd grain structure. Average pens are no fun to give to a person on his or her special day. I want them all to be as perfect and special as I can make them.

My engraver no longer will engrave finished pens. He is concerned with the chemicals and the laser causing him health problems. So for the last several years all pens are sanded to completion, names engraved and then I have to finish them.

My real bottle neck is finishing. Sometimes I can get a finish to come out perfectly with just a little time and effort and sometimes I repeat the finish over and over again. Some pens finish up well in just a few minutes and some seem to take hours. The engraving for this years class is completed and about two thirds of them are finished. After finishing I let them sit for a month and go back and inspect the finish. Sometimes you miss stuff and sometimes they just get weird. Time spent aging the blanks does let the finish stabilize.

This year is my next to last year doing this and next years blanks are already turned round to over sized blanks. I guess if I tracked the time I would find 30 minutes per pen might be low, perhaps more like a hour. But this is a gift and I do not care about making them on a tight timeline and time or cost per pen is not my concern.
 
Great post, I think that it's handy to know where you can speed things up and not lose quality. I'd say it's at the turning/finishing stages. Cutting blanks, drilling and assembly - there's not much you can do there to cut time so it's at the turning and finishing stages that you can gain a bit of time. Sharp tools help to get your blank ready quicker, they save sandpaper as well. The part that slows me down is the CA finish. Once the calipers come out time is lost in another dimension:eek:.
 
jfoh said:
My engraver no longer will engrave finished pens. He is concerned with the chemicals and the laser causing him health problems. So for the last several years all pens are sanded to completion, names engraved and then I have to finish them.
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He must not have his laser vented properly. I hope he fixes it. Breathing the smoke from the lased wood probably isn't very good for him, either.
 
Tiger said:
Great post, I think that it's handy to know where you can speed things up and not lose quality. I'd say it's at the turning/finishing stages. Cutting blanks, drilling and assembly - there's not much you can do there to cut time so it's at the turning and finishing stages that you can gain a bit of time. Sharp tools help to get your blank ready quicker, they save sandpaper as well. The part that slows me down is the CA finish. Once the calipers come out time is lost in another dimension:eek:.
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I would argue that other than simply improving your technique (in every step), you can't save any time simply by doing something faster as that is how errors and accidents happen.

The way to save time is to cut down on the time you spend not working on making the pen; the time that it takes you to move from the drilling to gluing steps, for instance. The easiest way to do this is to make many pens at a time. That way, you aren't setting up the drill, drilling one pen's blank, moving on to the next workstation, preparing the tubes, gluing them in, waiting for them to dry, etc. Every time that you move from one task to the other, you are spending time.

I bet that we have around 60 or 70 pens currently in process because I work in big batches to save time.
 
How long does it take.

Hey, I probably spent close to 8 hours on my first pen. I think I still average about 3 hours. Now, I do one pen at a time start to finish, so it takes a little longer. Also, I use a shop made jig for drilling which slows me down. I do a lot of measuring to be as sure as I can to get a smooth transition from wood to kit parts, especially on the nib end of slim lines. Than, I don't always get it perfect.
 
I know one thing...when I rush my normal pace, things go wrong. I'm sure my pace is slower than most but I'm happy with my results. Now I have to take a nap :)
 
Andrew Arndts said:
I know of guys that will say, I can dress out a deer in 3 minutes." First I don't eat at their home and if they offer up I respectfully decline... When I Dress out a Deer, I take my time to do it right.
That being said, it doesn't matter how long you take making a pen. Just do it right.
I drilled and glued (epoxy) up 5 blanks yesterday. Drilled and glued up another in the morning. Started knockin' them out in the afternoon. Completed them all by 1AM. I think I did pretty well far as time goes.

I heard somewhere that making pens is a skill builder. So lay your sharp tools wood.
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I don't think it takes over 5 minutes to properly field dress a deer. What's so difficult? And just what would doing it right entail?

That being said, how long you spend on each pen depends pretty much on how long you want to spend. I cut, drill and tube in batches and usually leave them set for a couple of days before turning. Sanding and finishing take me longer than turning most of the time because I sand/micromesh to a high polish. Finishing usually involves more than one coat.
 
However long it takes you is exactly the right amount of time. You're still new so don't rush it. Compare how you are doing now vs. how you are doing 50 pens from now...100 pens from now...250 pens from now.

People post about how long they have been making pens, but that really isn't a standard for comparison when 5 different people who started out 3 years ago together may have completely different amounts of time allotted each week for penturning. Is it an hour a day? 5 hours only on the third Saturday of every other month?

Don't try to be faster than somebody else, just try to be better than you were yesterday. Best of luck!
 
If it's wood and not spalted, or punky or too burly to hurry, I can probably knock out just about any pen in about 20 to 30 minutes. Those pens I get about 2 to 3 times material costs. If it's fancy and needs a fine touch, all bets are off. If I want to make a Celtic knot or a segmented pen or a real looking cigar pen, it can be many hours, not even counting glue curing or other waiting time.

I like wood better, but tend to gravitate to the highly figured, burly, spalted unusual looking pens. I like to dress them in top shelf hardware. I really enjoy some of the guest artists blanks on many of my favorite sites. You know, those blanks that can cost $35 to $100 plus just for the blank. So many creative folks out there and such a thin demographic to purchase those high end productions. But, that's what I enjoy.

So my answer? ....... It depends. ;)
 
Glenn McCullough said:
My guess is, and they'll never admit it, that the ones who say they finish a pen in 15-30 minutes are making slims to sell for $15-20.00, maybe less. It is a b-b slim with a friction polish that will be in the garbage next year. They are not your typical penturners, here.
They are in it for the bucks and thats all. God bless 'em.
After 700 pens, I still take close to an hour for a slim...if all goes well, really well. But it doesnt. I had two blanks of found spalted birch the other day and one blew up, the other was so punky I had to ditch it. 0-2 was no problem, the other four I made yesterday are stunning!
Dont feel because it takes a bit longer to make, you are not doing as well. I get no less than $35.00 for a slim. You can get it if you build your reputation to that level.
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I can turn a slim in 15 or 20 minutes but that's not the total amount of time spent on it....It usually takes me longer to sand and get ready for finish than it does turning...15 steps if I don't do any over....I don't use the CA finish that a lot do so I'm using other products --- that doesn't mean it takes less time though.
 
I was turning pens pretty fast for a while but I've since slowed way down. I found I had a tendency to get in too much of a hurry and kept forgetting little important steps and hurting my productivity. Since then my average time for 1-2 pens is usually about 4-6 hours. Not counting gluing barrels in since I let them setup for at least 24 hours before working on them. I know, that is a ridiculous amount of time with little actual payoff. But I enjoy the time in my shop and working on pens. Oh also part of that time is the finish I use. It takes a pretty good amount of time for it to dry on the lathe but much longer off.
 
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So first of all anyone who tells you 15-20 minutes suffers from the same ailment I do (according to my wife) . The turning may take 15-20 minutes, but it took alot more time than just turning. It sometimes takes me 15 minutes to get the ends clean enoough for the pen mill or sanding rig. So including marking, cutting, drilling, glueing, squaring etc, will cause the whole process to take more than 15-20 minutes.
 
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So this thread has left me confused, with two questons:

1. Why would anyone dress a deer?
2. How do you get it to stand still long enough to put the clothes on?

Seems like a strange form of entertainment some of you have!
 
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