Another approach to applying CA glue to a Pen

well good morning it's a couple days before 2015 if you can believe that it's 20 below zero outside and I don't mind the temperature so much but it's the snow it never melts it just builds up builds up later on in the spring it'll blow around till it wears out that's Wyoming for you now I'm going to do a couple projects here a couple videos one is going to be on making this decorative Center band on a litted box show you how I did that and the other video I'm going to do is on applying CA glue for a finish now that's really popular now all right and I've seen people do the paper towel they do a little piece of PL plastic like this and what I discovered is that one reason for doing this is the CA glue doesn't soak in like it does on a paper towel and it's smoother all right I had a business card laying there and I thought wow that's slick I can use that so let me set up and I'll get busy now what I have chucked up into my pen mandrel is a bit of Thule Burl I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly Thule Burl now this beautiful exotic wood comes from Morocco and there's no l in the word but I'm still not sure how to pronounce it and I'm going to turn an executive roller ball pen it's a two-part pen anyway I'm going to cut out a lot of this because all I'm going to do is just take that down to the point where I can start applying a finish I'll show you a bit of this now the focus on this particular video is going to be on applying a CA glue finish but you're also going to see my basic process for turning a pen and I'm trying to go for a bit of a bulbous shape on each part of the pen blanks now I had to take a look at the directions for this pen kit and it's a two-part pen kit obviously and I'm going to put a little high point right here where I got this pencil Mark and a high point here and I'm going to just work my way down to the bushings and then we'll do a little sanding now as I work the wood down with the skew chisel you'll see that High Point developing on the large blank and the small blank and I like that a little bit better than just a straight line on that pin blank as this video progresses you're going to see that a lot of what I'm doing is kind of hit and miss and there are some failures in there that's all right so I'm just trying to provide an option for applying a CA finish that might be beneficial to you so you can just kind of check that out on your own thanks now I've got my pen blanks where I want them I'm going to do a little sanding off camera and I'll come back when I start applying my finish I've sanded my pen blanks to 800 grit sandpaper and I've also used a little bit of steel wool and it's got a really really polished finish on that now applying the CA glue and I'm going to use some star bond this is some medium thin now from start to finish I'm going to just use CA glue here to keep this uh demonstration simple so I'm using some star Bond CA glue this is the medium thin it's it's very thin now somebody had the idea to apply the CA glue with a little bit of plastic some sort this is just a little plastic bag for a pen kit part this works great now the last couple days I've been turning pens and I had a business card laying around and I'm thinking why is that plastic better than a paper towel well the paper towel soaks in the CA glue so why not use something like this with a glossy finish on it and this is one of my business business cards I've got a bunch of business cards laying around and this is an old one that's got the wrong email address anyway uh I'm going to just put that on there I'm going to trim my speed and my lathe down a little bit now the first coat I'm going to let soak in very well so that's going to seal that so my first coat is going to be the sealer coat with my thin CA glue and I'm going to just put some across the face of this card and um apply that CA glue [Music] and I'm going to try to get quite a bit on there and what I'm looking for is that surface to turn wet so I'm going to just wipe off the excess glue well I know what you're thinking why am I wiping that off with the paper towel I have not yet perfected the technique of applying the CA glue in one nice even l and when I do that I won't have to wipe it off but I'm just getting a little bit too much on there to begin with so I've got to practice and that is going to be really pretty I'm going to let that sit for a while now here is my business card that I was applying the CA glue with and it melted the finish on that card well we don't want that uh ink onto our pen blank so that didn't work very well and maybe a different business card will so I'm thinking okay what else is slick here is a little photograph I did a coat off camera and it worked very glossy finish on that and I'm going to do another coat of the the thin see how that works and I'm going to apply some on the face of that just enough to wet that and you can probably see that okay I'm going to stop there and then do the the bigger blank now I think it's important that when you get to that stage and you've got CA glue on the surface turn your lathe off or else it's going to just kind of do weird things so wiping that down a little bit with the grain and I'll let that dry and I I'm going to start my sanding process at this stage now please keep in mind I'm in the early stages of applying my CA finish I'm going to apply three four five coats on that to begin with before I start uh sanding my finish so I'm just building up layers right now okay this is the first sanding of my finish and I'm probably sanding quite a bit of that CA glue off that but I'm using some 12200 grit sandpaper and then I'm going to just buff that just a bit with some steel wool and kind of rub that along the grain now I don't love steel wool because it leaves those little little bits of metal all over the place so I'm going to wipe that down with a paper towel and I'm going to go to my thicker CA glue right now and I'm going to use my my photograph I think that works pretty good absolutely smooth finish on that now I was able to locate some medium super glue so I'm going to use that so I've got that sanded again to about 1,00 grit apply a little bit more Super Glue this is the thin super glue I'm going to put a little bit on the Leading Edge here and put that on as quickly as I can there we go make sure that surface is wet and I've been using accelerator so I'm going to hit that with some some accelerator now I need to apply a little bit of CA glue on the shorter Barrel here little bit more of my medium super [Music] glue now I just finished up with some 1200 grit sandpaper and I'm going to just buff that just a little bit with my steel wool I've got several coats of thin and medium Super Glue on this so far and I'm just about ready for maybe a final coat now there's my final coat of CA glue and I still got some little ripples in there that I'm not sure if you can see I was watching a video the other day and they were using teac cut as a final application on this and since we're not dealing with raw wood we can use a swirl remover or something like that on this final application so I'm going to do a little bit of that polishing off camera and I'll give you a real nice closeup of this pen now before I started polishing it as I'm doing now I did sand the CA glue finish to 4,000 grit and tried to get as good a finish as I could on there before I started doing this polishing and I'm polishing with a bit of water in addition to this plastic polish now that's really shiny I really like that got some that white powder on there let me put this pen together and I'll show it to you in just a second I like that well thank you very much for watching once again and let me know how you do with this process I'd like to hear from you talk to you next time

Channel: WYOMINGWOODTURNER

Views: 60,773

Keywords: Adhesive, Cyanoacrylate (Invention), turning a pen, pen turning, pens, hand made pen, Pen (Product Category), pen blank, CA glue, Making, hand made, hand crafted

Id: BNgDK7Xj_Dk

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 31 2014