My first Snake Skin Slim Line pen

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Efletche

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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.

20051643519_Scan0001a.jpg
 
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Now THAT's a pen to fear...and a heckuva nice job in blank prep and finishing. Thanks for sharing so much of your process as well, Edward
 
Not too much. When you look at the pen (not the scan), the scales are dark and the area around them is lighter. I would have to say it darkened them a bit, but not by much. I brought this pen to work with me this morning and one of the Administrators bought it, flaws and all.

By the way, I thought there would be this huge bump along the shaft of the pen from overlapping the skin but you really don't. I'm curious how a pen would come out by just applting the skin to a bare brass tube and layering the CA over it. My pen was very narrow and yet this skin really increased the thicknes of the pen. I'll have to play with that too.
 
Nice job Edward. I think I will leave the snake skin pens alone and just continue experimenting with leather.I have this thing about snakes! Good looking pen and congradulations on the sale.
 
Thanks for the compliments. I don't know about the rattlesnake skin thickness, but these cobra skins are slightly thicker than heavy duty paper. Fred, did you do the lizzard similar to how I did the snake skin? I'd be curious to compare techniques.
 
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