Pen Turning

The very first project we worked on in senior engineering was the tradition of creating our own pens to keep and use. Throughout this process I learned how to use many of the woodworking machines like the saw, drill press, and lathe. The project took about a week to complete in total. Preparing the wood included picking out what wood I wanted to use, gluing the pieces together to dry overnight, cutting them down to size, and sanding down the corners for a smoother shaping experience. After that I drilled through the pieces using the drill press and shaped them down with a flat edge chisel and then a rounded chisel. The final touches were to put varnish on the pen and assemble all of the pieces. During this project, the only problem I ran in to was when drilling, the lathe pushed a bit of wood up inside of a piece, which made it feel like it had gone all the way through, but there was really still more that had to be drilled through. Fixing this just meant going back to the lathe and drilling further into the wood piece. Below is the completed project and some documentation of the steps I took along the way as well as the problem I encountered: