Well, here it is. My first attempt at a snake skin pen. The skin is a spitting cobra skin which has been dyed deep green. I orderd it from http://www.implora.com
I used a couple of the pen blank halves that were too narrow to normally use for this pen. Using a piece of scrap, the width was cut to 1 1/4 inches. This gave me just a slight overlap. The length was cut to size plus 1/16 inch overhang. Taking a suggestion from Fred (thanks by the way), I glued the skin to the pen with Carpenter's glue. I wiped off the excess with a damp cloth and it pretty much dried in 5 minutes. I used a surgical blade to cut off the excess skin at both ends.
Next, I placed the pen blanks back on the lathe, with the skin overlap facing away from me. Since this is new to me too, I first coated the blank with BLO, with the lathe on. (NOTE: If you didn't remove all the excess glue, you're going to see it here in clumps.) I then applied several layers of CA glue.
Next, I began sanding with the MM through 12,000. When this was done, I first thought I sanded too far into the skin because the halves looked horrible. But, once I applied my first coat of friction polish to it was, the halves looked a lot better.
The skin is still a bit thick at the ends, but for a first attempt, I am pleased with the results. You can feel the scales very nicely along the entire length of the pen. The image shown was done using my scanner. I'm sure a photo would show a lot better detail and I will attempt to do so tomorrow, but I wanted to share this right away.
One more thing, if you are going to work with snake skin, be warned if really stinks; worse than turning deer antler.
I used a couple of the pen blank halves that were too narrow to normally use for this pen. Using a piece of scrap, the width was cut to 1 1/4 inches. This gave me just a slight overlap. The length was cut to size plus 1/16 inch overhang. Taking a suggestion from Fred (thanks by the way), I glued the skin to the pen with Carpenter's glue. I wiped off the excess with a damp cloth and it pretty much dried in 5 minutes. I used a surgical blade to cut off the excess skin at both ends.
Next, I placed the pen blanks back on the lathe, with the skin overlap facing away from me. Since this is new to me too, I first coated the blank with BLO, with the lathe on. (NOTE: If you didn't remove all the excess glue, you're going to see it here in clumps.) I then applied several layers of CA glue.
Next, I began sanding with the MM through 12,000. When this was done, I first thought I sanded too far into the skin because the halves looked horrible. But, once I applied my first coat of friction polish to it was, the halves looked a lot better.
The skin is still a bit thick at the ends, but for a first attempt, I am pleased with the results. You can feel the scales very nicely along the entire length of the pen. The image shown was done using my scanner. I'm sure a photo would show a lot better detail and I will attempt to do so tomorrow, but I wanted to share this right away.
One more thing, if you are going to work with snake skin, be warned if really stinks; worse than turning deer antler.