My solution - elimiate the bushings
Hello all. New here, have been tuning pens for a couple of months now.
I was getting the bushings stuck, and tearing the CA finish when I tried to remove the bushings. I tried waxing the bushings, no luck. I would stop after every coat of CA, break the bushings free, tighten everything back up, put on the next coat, and still get tears on the last coat.
So what I came up with was 2 cone shaped jigs on a 7mm tube (with a bit of the bare tube exposed. The other thing I decided to do was to apply finish to one blank at a time, so for a 2 blank pen, I'll turn them together, sand them together, but when I go to apply finish, I'll do one blank at a time.
For a 7 mm blank, the blank is held by the bare tubes of the jig, so there is some space between the top of the blank. For larger sizes of tubes, they ride on the cone shaped portion, so there is still free space next to the ends of the blank.
The first pic shows the jigs.
The 2nd pic shows the jigs holding a 7mm blank before finish was applied.
I've also used these to apply finish to a 10mm blank, and they worked great.
What I would change would be to make them shorter. For the 7mm slimline blank in the 2nd photo, I only had about 3 turns of the brass nut to tighten things down. The brass tubes I used for the jigs were 1.75" long. For the 10 mm blank that I did, since the blank rides on the cone shaped portion, part of the jig fits inside the blank, so I had to use a spacer bushing.
And if the blank does get stuck to the jig, it is away from the surface of the blank.