tdotrob
Member
Of all the finishes pen kits come in, aluminum is the one I find hardest to match to a blank. So I got the bright idea to carve the barrel for an aluminum finish kit out of an aluminum rod. I bought 2 kits each in aluminum of several PSI styles and picked the Anvil EDC as the first experimental subject.
The barrel started as 3/4 inch rod stock mounted in a collet chuck. After marking I tried a carbide parting tool for a few minutes before giving up and just using the good old hacksaw. Then I faced off the end and added a dimple in the center to start the drill bit. I have a boring head for ring making and thought I might skip the tubes but the bits were too big so I drilled and epoxied the tube in as usual.
For shaping I took an old EWT Ci1-R4 carbide cutter and sharpened it up on a diamond stone. It cut smooth but slow when freshly sharpened and it took 2 sharpenings and 8 rotations of the cutter to complete the barrel. Then I wet-sanded to 3000 and ran through several buffing compounds starting with black emery and finishing with red rouge.
It isn't quite the mirror finish I was going for but it is reflective enough that it freaked out the camera meter and auto-focus. Still, it's clear I need practice polishing aluminum before I'll get it to look like I wanted. Also, I should probably have started with a kit I was already familiar with because when screwing on the cap assembly the clip left a spiral scratch on the barrel before I noticed and covered it with one of the plastic bags from the kit.
This was always going to be a practice pen experiment so wasn't going to be gifted or sold. Which is great because I like the pen a lot despite the scratches - which I might try to buff out later. At only 28 grams it lives up to the name and might become my new EDC pen.
Thanks for checking it out!
The barrel started as 3/4 inch rod stock mounted in a collet chuck. After marking I tried a carbide parting tool for a few minutes before giving up and just using the good old hacksaw. Then I faced off the end and added a dimple in the center to start the drill bit. I have a boring head for ring making and thought I might skip the tubes but the bits were too big so I drilled and epoxied the tube in as usual.
For shaping I took an old EWT Ci1-R4 carbide cutter and sharpened it up on a diamond stone. It cut smooth but slow when freshly sharpened and it took 2 sharpenings and 8 rotations of the cutter to complete the barrel. Then I wet-sanded to 3000 and ran through several buffing compounds starting with black emery and finishing with red rouge.
It isn't quite the mirror finish I was going for but it is reflective enough that it freaked out the camera meter and auto-focus. Still, it's clear I need practice polishing aluminum before I'll get it to look like I wanted. Also, I should probably have started with a kit I was already familiar with because when screwing on the cap assembly the clip left a spiral scratch on the barrel before I noticed and covered it with one of the plastic bags from the kit.
This was always going to be a practice pen experiment so wasn't going to be gifted or sold. Which is great because I like the pen a lot despite the scratches - which I might try to buff out later. At only 28 grams it lives up to the name and might become my new EDC pen.
Thanks for checking it out!
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