Brass Pen 1 Piece Hexagonal With Engraved Instructables Logo

In this Instructable I will show you how I make an Engraved brass pen out of a piece of 10mm Hexagonal Solid Brass Bar.

I will be using a Mini Metal Lathe for drilling and turning the pen, and the CNC machine with a Carbide Drag bit to engrave the pen.

I converted my bench grinder into a buffing machine and the polishing will be done on this, I will be using the Brown and Blue polishing compounds for brass.

The engraving sketch and Toolpath will be created with Vetric Cut2D.

The usual Personal Protective equipment should be worn when using a mini lathe, in this case the CNC machine router is not actually spinning as its a drag bit, but I will still wear safety glasses.

Lets make a Pen!

10mm Hexagonal Brass Bar @ approx 120mm in Length

Carbide Drag Bit

Slimline Gold pen Kit

Mini Metal Lathe

CNC machine

Buffing machine

Brown and Blue polishing compounds

Wet and dry paper 600 and 1000 grit

Metal polish

The length of bar for the pen is approx 106mm the 2 slimline pen kit ferrules measure 104mm so we need a bit to play with.

The first operation on the Mini Lathe is to drill the hole through the bar to accept the slimline pen ferrules, to start off we use a pilot drill to centre the hole, the next drill size will be 4.9mm and then the final hole size will be 6.9mm, with both ends drilled to 6.9mm we can now move onto turning the ends.

With the cross sled angle set at around 7 as in the photos we use the cross sled handle to cut the taper, this taper is the nib end so it needs to be more of a taper, I use an old tip as a guide, the same principle applies to the other end of the pen with the cross sled angle set at 3, after cutting the tapers I use the wet and dry paper, starting off with the 600 grade and then onto 1000 grit with metal polish we are only polishing the tapered ends at this point.

Onto buffing the pen body.

We start off on the course sisal buffing wheel and removing any jaw marks and scratches with the brown polishing compound, and then with all scratches removed its onto a final polish with the Blue compound.

With the body nicely polished we can move onto fitting the pen internals.

After the polishing stage the pen body can be engraved, in my haste I neglected to do this but doing it at a later stage is ok as its only engraved on one of the sides.

The first part of installing the pen kit is to get one of the ferrules and file it to give it a rough finish, this ferrule will be CA glued into the back part of the pen, the clip end, apply CA glue sparingly to the ferrule and push into the pen body, use rubber gloves, be careful not to get any on your fingers, wipe any excess glue off with Acetone.

The 2nd part is pressing the nib tip end into the 2nd ferrule, I have adhesive backed neoprene in the jaws of my vice so as not to damage the pen components.

With both parts lined up press the nib end into the ferrule, then take the transmission component and with the brass part going into the ferrule press this until it reaches the end of the brass part, this can be adjusted later depending on how much of the pen nib you want to protrude.

The refill can now be inserted and screwed in, check how much of the nib protrudes through the tip and adjust at this point if needed.

The clip and tap can now be pressed into the body of the pen, adjust the clip to suit before pressing full home, now take the lower tube mechanism with refill screwed in tight and push it all the way in, twisting the tip will see the nib coming in and out.

That is the pen finished now onto engraving it.

I use Vetric Cut2D to engrave the pen.

The first stage is to input the pen dimensions, in this case its 75mm x 5mm for our engraving area and we will start from the centre of the pen(Our Zero)

The next stage is to import the Instructables logo, find a suitable logo and save it, then use the import Bitmap to import it into the sketch.

Trace bitmap and the delete the back ground and do any resizing at this point, highlight the area to resize and click twice to reveal the arrows to alter the size.

In the Toolpath section click on the engrave tab, pressure is set to 0.2 highlight the complete sketch and calculate, review then rename the Toolpath, save it and then send to the CNC machine.

I'm using a 6mm shank drag bit, its spring loaded so as soon as it makes contact I depress it down just slightly as its only scratching the surface so to speak.

Set zero at this point, load the file and engrave the pen.

To be honest the logo is really small as we only have 5mm to work with but it came out ok.

It always surprises me on how small this drag bit will engrave.

That's it the pen is finished, from a piece of solid hexagonal bar to a really good looking pen.

I hope you enjoyed this Instructable and thanks for looking.