Heirloom Woodturnings
Member
I'm sure that I'm not the first to do this, but I thought it was worth sharing anyhow.
One of my least favorite jobs in making pens is sanding the brass tubes. Maybe I'm a wuss but when I sanded a bunch of tubes by hand it ended up hurting my fingers! As I make pens in larger and larger batches and try to consolidate similar operations I figured there was a better way to automate this process a little. I was gluing up ten pen blanks for 10mm cigar pens and this is what I came up with. I used a 1/4 inch hardwood dowel I had in the shop and cut it to about 7 inches long, then wrapped masking tape on the end until the 10mm brass tube just fit snugly but was still able to be pulled off easily with finger pressure. I chucked the untaped end in the drill press and turned it on. I then hand sanded each brass tube with Norton 80 grit carbide paper. They came out beautifully with a nice cross-hatched pattern. I was able to put on and remove the brass tubes
without turning off power to the drill press and sanding the lot of 20 brass tubes took all of about 2 minutes or so. I plan to make a couple of other wood mandrels like this for other sizes of brass tubes. Not a very elegant solution but it worked like a charm.
One of my least favorite jobs in making pens is sanding the brass tubes. Maybe I'm a wuss but when I sanded a bunch of tubes by hand it ended up hurting my fingers! As I make pens in larger and larger batches and try to consolidate similar operations I figured there was a better way to automate this process a little. I was gluing up ten pen blanks for 10mm cigar pens and this is what I came up with. I used a 1/4 inch hardwood dowel I had in the shop and cut it to about 7 inches long, then wrapped masking tape on the end until the 10mm brass tube just fit snugly but was still able to be pulled off easily with finger pressure. I chucked the untaped end in the drill press and turned it on. I then hand sanded each brass tube with Norton 80 grit carbide paper. They came out beautifully with a nice cross-hatched pattern. I was able to put on and remove the brass tubes
without turning off power to the drill press and sanding the lot of 20 brass tubes took all of about 2 minutes or so. I plan to make a couple of other wood mandrels like this for other sizes of brass tubes. Not a very elegant solution but it worked like a charm.