This pen, 190mm long, I did in red beech, with no finish except for some oil and beeswax. It's a pretty boring timber with the sole virtue that it's pretty easy to work.
The nib is held in place with a bamboo plug fixed by friction alone, and though it would be theoretically possible to swap nibs, effectively it's a permanent fixture.
Today I have increased our coat-hanging capabilities.
The hangers themselves are matai, the baseboard is rimu, and the mushrooms that hide the mounting screws are oak.
I suppose I could have just gone down to Bunnings and bought some metal coat hooks, but where's the fun in that?
This one is in matai (I think), and is very small — only 65mm long, and 17mm in diameter. I oiled it with rice bran oil, so it's food-safe.
One thing I learned from this is not to be too stingy about the waste, and to give it a decent bite in the chuck. This one I knocked off its axis and had to try to reseat, and though I got it turning mostly true, it was never really the same again.
Also, if I was to do these on a regular basis, I would definitely have to make myself a custom small bowl scraper for carving out the bowl. I bodged up this one using my swan-neck carbide scraper, because it was the only tool I had with a small enough cutting edge to get in there. It worked, but it was not ideal for the task.
They are, from left to right:
I started with the kowhai, when I pulled an old dead dry branch off a tree alongside our driveway the other day. Then on to the others to try out this or that — the most recent being the tiny one on the right, today, to try out a new set of 8mm chuck jaws that just arrived.
I have no immediate use for finials of any size, but they're a quick and useful test bed for trying things out. Something that has become especially apparent with the tinier ones is that I need better eyes, and possibly smaller tools as well.
So I made a set of collets in Blender and 3d printed them.
With this set I can get down to about 7.5 or 7 mm, but if I need to go any smaller than that I can whip up another collet in about quarter of an hour.
Because they're being used for very small pieces, they don't have to endure much in the way of working pressure. Which is good, because though PLA filament is fairly tough for plastic, it is still just plastic.
I did once buy a set of jaws from AliExpress that would go down to about 6 mm, but it turned out once they arrived that not only would they not fit on the chuck they said they would, they wouldn't fit on any of the other chucks I had either. They'd need some attention from a machinist to make them fit, and I don't have those skills or that equipment. Fortunately, they were fairly cheap, so I didn't lose much by it. But it still pissed me off.
I pulled a dry dead branch off the kowhai that grows alongside our driveway this morning; it didn't so much break off as exploded into fragments. I turned this little finial from one of its sticks. It's about 80mm long, so not very big.
The kowhai turned well enough in general, but it is very brittle, and it chipped out badly around the collar of the piece. Also, it has an odd colour seam running up it — I'd normally assume that it was a heart-sap differentiation, but it runs across the grain, so it beats me what causes it.
It's not an unattractive timber (apart from the bug holes) but its brittleness would severely limit its usefulness.