# trying to be square



## Rich L (Jul 7, 2014)

This post is a long time coming and rather than wait another couple months I hazard to show the half-way done part. My caveat here is that the “fit” is good but the “finish” will improve when I get finished. Getting this far with this new process took months in itself.

I have long been wanting to do some more exotic inlay work and to do that I settled on the EDM process. The reason is that I wanted to create sharp inside corners - sharper than what can be done with even the very smallest end mills. Die sinking EDM is the ticket to this goal. Another possible method would be using a shaper or adapting the slotting head I have for the mill but shaping requires secure workholding (read “clamping”) because there is pressure put on the workpiece. I have small and thin pieces I want to work with downstream and and clamping these things down to enable mechanical metal removal could very well be problematic. EDM does not put pressure on the workpiece and it's easier; you just make the electrode and then make the hole. Well, not always _quite_ that easy.

So, to get educated on the process I visited a friend in Texas who has one of the EDM devices - actually he has three - and he taught me to use it and apply that new-found skill to a couple of silver pen barrels I had brought with me. I had already drawn up my prospective design and that included three spirals of square holes in the barrels. The square hole approach was to keep it simple but the shape of a hole capable of being “burned” by a sinker EDM is really only limited to the imagination. 

In order to make these holes I needed to make an electrode in the shape I needed - a square. Electrodes can be made from just about conductive material but the common materials are copper, copper-tungsten, and graphite. My teacher eschews graphite so I used some scrap copper-tungsten (WCu) to make my square electrode.

Making EDM electrodes is a challenge in itself because of the accuracy and precision required. It was required that I make a square accurate to ±.0005 of my declared dimension which was a 6mm square (yeah, I’m mixing units). The precision of the milling needed to be about half of that; in other words no excursion while milling. On top of that I needed to make two different sized squares - one for the “roughing” operation which would make my square hole slightly undersized and with slightly rounded corners and then a “finishing” square which would take off a tiny bit more to get my final 6mm dimension and to square up the corners.

Maybe the digression into EDM processes is interesting to some and one can always do the internet tutorial to find out more.

OK, electrodes made so now to burn the holes. I lightly clamped the barrel in a dividing head and set that up in the EDM tank so that the electrode would meet it at the right angle. The dividing head was used to get the spirals evenly spaced aroung the circumference. Actually a simple spin indexer would have been easier to deal with. Each hole took about 15 minutes to do. 

Barrels made - returned back home from Texas. Now I need to make the square inlays and I did that out of my current favorite inly material: mother of pearl (MOP). I got three colors of that from knifehandles.com - white, black-lip, and gold-lip. I used a tool and cutter grinder to cut rough squares and I used a different version of the same to grind them precisely to size. I had to make a special tool to hold each square so that the grind would be square on all three axes. he tool shown has a precise 5mm square recess to hold the rough MOP square and you can see the spring used to hold it down. By the way, I fashioned the spring out of a scrap piece of 1095 steel that I had to initially anneal, then shape, then heat to critical temp, quench, and finally temper to spring hardness.

Most of the MOP pieces were too thick so you can see the manual method of thinning them down using my finger to hold them agains a slow spinning flat sanding wheel. Each piece was then fit into one of the holes in the barrel, glued in, and then the high parts were filed and sanded off to be flush with the silver surface. Another tool I had to make was a mandrel that would just slip inside the barrel that had a surface to prevent the MOP squares from just falling through.

All in a day’s work  

I have the second barrel to finish and then for the next project, since my feet are nice and wet, I’ll be doing some more complex designs.

The next half of this pen - the cap and the clip will follow in a subsequent post and the objective will be to inlay 3mm squares in the clip. The holes, or recesses, will be blind, unlike the holes in the barrel and I've already made some trials. I'll also be embellishing the section with some square-like design  but that won't be an EDM thing.

Cheers,
Rich

Pic 1: machining the WCu electrode
Pic 2: "sinking" the square holes. Typically EDM work is done submerged in a dielectric fluid (oil) but for fun and picture taking this setup just kept a flood of the fluid going so the spark erosion could happen.
Pic 3: the two barrels with nice square holes in them
Pic 4: a bunch of rough square MOP pieces
Pic 5: the MOP square special custom holder tool
Pic 6: using a diamond wheel on a tool and cutter grinder to square and size up the MOP squares. Too many "squares."
Pic 7: "finger" grinding to thin the MOP squares
Pic 8: Mandrel used to position (for depth) the squares in the holes
Pic 9: trial layout
Pic 10: all glued in
Pic 11: filing off high points
Pic 12: finish sanding
Pic 13: assembled barrel
Pic 14: a closeup


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## skiprat (Jul 7, 2014)

Rich, I wanna be like you when I grow up!!.....:wink:
That is simply mind blowing, but then again, I don't think you have done less previously. 
There are a few members here that I wonder why they even bother mixing with us 'Turn By Numbers Kit Assemblers' but I'm really glad you do!!:wink::biggrin:


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## Krash (Jul 7, 2014)

Impressive!


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## JP61 (Jul 7, 2014)

Very nice!


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## KenV (Jul 7, 2014)

NEAT!!!!   NEAT!!!  NEAT!!!!


MORE!!!   MORE!!!  MORE!!!!


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## thebillofwrites (Jul 7, 2014)

WOW


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## Gregf (Jul 7, 2014)

Wow!
Thanks for sharing this.


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## BRobbins629 (Jul 7, 2014)

Too cool for words.


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## Jim15 (Jul 7, 2014)

Beautiful work.


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## rholiday (Jul 7, 2014)

Awesome!!


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## Janster (Jul 7, 2014)

..way to kool for school!


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## skiprat (Jul 7, 2014)

Rich, please can I ask a couple of (probably) daft questions?

Looking at my quick sketch, a milled cut across the blank could create something like the left image (A). But I assume that your method is sort of a 'plunge' cut like (B)?
The red lines plus the arc of the tube would be your glue surface?
By my logic, a milled cut glue line won't allow the inlay to be accidently pressed into the barrel. The glue is really just holding the inlay in place and the horizontal flat is providing the mechanical strength.  If the glue line is completely vertical ( as in B ) are you relying on the glue for mechanical strength?

I can see that a horizontal milled cut may allow the 'flat' of the barrel to be seen through the very thing layer of MOP though.

Using either method, unless you curve the inside of the MOP, is there enough space down the tube to take the ink reservoir / converter once the inlays have been glued in?


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## Harley2001 (Jul 7, 2014)

Iam lose for words.


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## kruzzer (Jul 7, 2014)

I was just gonna make on of those but you beat me to it... Amazing work


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## MarkD (Jul 7, 2014)

Outstanding work. Great thinking outside the box!


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## mark james (Jul 7, 2014)

Folks (artists)  like you amaze me!  And I am happy to see your work and try to understand 10% of it!  I kind of understand the process, but clearly see the amazing product.

Great Inspiration.  Don't ever hesitate to post your work - it is needed to be seen!

THANK YOU!


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## jyreene (Jul 7, 2014)

That is slick. Guess I'll have to save up for a mill now too.


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## Rich L (Jul 7, 2014)

skiprat said:


> Rich, please can I ask a couple of (probably) daft questions?
> 
> Looking at my quick sketch, a milled cut across the blank could create something like the left image (A). But I assume that your method is sort of a 'plunge' cut like (B)?
> The red lines plus the arc of the tube would be your glue surface?
> ...



Thanks for the questions!

They are plunge cuts to minimize the thinness (maximize thickness?) of the MOP edge. To make a 6mm square inlay on a 1/2 inch (mixing units again, but those are the sizes I'm dealing with) diameter barrel would produce, in my opinion, edges that would be too thin and prone to chipping. With a plunge cut the edges are 90º perpendicular to the axis and greater than that parallel to the axis.

The pen in this picture has inlays done with a milled cut but the depth is significant thus keeping the edge _not_ so thin.

The 6mm squares don't go in so far to prevent the converter from entering the barrel but I do a bit more "reaming" just to keep the inside cleaner. That was the purpose of the mandrel to limit inlay depth. I also fill the inside with epoxy and then drill out the excess leaving a layer of resin to help with the mechanical support you suggest.

One approach I thought I might try but discarded is to not burn quite all the way through thus leaving a thin but substantial enough shelf on two sides to provide backside support for the inlay. The difficulty in that is multiple finishing burns would be necessary to get the internal bottom angle of a semi-blind hole square enough to make the effort worthwhile. That was a time and effort vs expediency/impatience decision. Plus I've not had a problem with inlays coming out with my methods that include the internal epoxy.

Cheers,
Rich


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## Dale Lynch (Jul 7, 2014)

Duh..run that by me again.Never mind,I'm not smart enough to follow along.Fantastic work Rich.


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## Dalecamino (Jul 7, 2014)

Spanx said:


> Duh..run that by me again.Never mind,I'm not smart enough to follow along.Fantastic work Rich.


 

Ditto! :redface::biggrin:  Still love the results. Thanks Rich!


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## greggas (Jul 7, 2014)

Sure looks like you had fun working on the solutions for this...nice combination of engineering and art...thanks for sharing


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## robutacion (Jul 7, 2014)

skiprat said:


> Rich, I wanna be like you when I grow up!!.....:wink:
> That is simply mind blowing, but then again, I don't think you have done less previously.
> There are a few members here that I wonder why they even bother mixing with us 'Turn By Numbers Kit Assemblers' but I'm really glad you do!!:wink::biggrin:



Well, the way I see it is, is people like Rich that keeps raising the bar and give some incentive to others, to try improve what they do.  Sure, no one as the type of equipment some other here have but, you will surprise yourself when you put some ingenuity together with necessity...!

Is the fact that people like Rich still takes the time to be around and share what he does that, all of us should be thankful for, this has been a "trend" with IAP, the better students never leave the classroom...!

Amazing work Rich, congrats...!

Cheers
George


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## plano_harry (Jul 7, 2014)

Mind boggling process and incredible execution aside, the design itself is superb and I just love looking at it!


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## nanosec12 (Jul 7, 2014)

I'll admit, I had to google EDM to figure out what you were talking about...Not sure how Electronic Dance Music played a part, but however you did it, that is one Beautiful proof of concept...

Keep the challenges coming


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## Rich L (Jul 7, 2014)

robutacion said:


> Well, the way I see it is, is people like Rich that keeps raising the bar and give some incentive to others, to try improve what they do.  Sure, no one as the type of equipment some other here have but, you will surprise yourself when you put some ingenuity together with necessity...!
> 
> Is the fact that people like Rich still takes the time to be around and share what he does that, all of us should be thankful for, this has been a "trend" with IAP, the better students never leave the classroom...!
> 
> ...



It is my pleasure to share successes, defeats, reasons for those, discuss problems, and to argue (to a point!).



nanosec12 said:


> I'll admit, I had to google EDM to figure out what you were talking about...Not sure how Electronic Dance Music played a part, but however you did it, that is one Beautiful proof of concept...
> 
> Keep the challenges coming



That's funny! In fact there is an "EDM" website (edmperformance.com) that warns folks about what Google does to the search. They say on their opening page: "If you Google® “EDM” you will find “Electronic Dance Music” pop up on the top of the screen. You will also find “electrical discharge machines” somewhere on the bottom of that same page." So, EDM in this context means _electrical discharge machining_ and I should have said that at the outset. However, I was dancin' when it came out OK!

Cheers,
Rich


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## dexter0606 (Jul 8, 2014)

Very Nice!!!
This is where the artistry in pen making comes into play, not just picking a pretty color and turning a barrel. 
This is it. And you're a member of the small group on here that are the true artists.
Wow
Job well done


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## hippi (Jul 8, 2014)

that is really neat,  a very nice shape


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## Turned Around (Jul 8, 2014)

that is awesome


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## johncrane (Jul 8, 2014)

Luv your work Rich!


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## Bryguy (Jul 8, 2014)

I'm bl wn away. I am impessed by your patience, tenacity and the beauty of the result.


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## wizard (Jul 8, 2014)

That is both amazing and inspiring!! I had time today to go to your site and look at some of your creations. Your design and creation called the Slipstream is without a doubt one of the most beautiful pens I have ever seen. Your attention to the tiny detail is evident from the choice of shade and iridescence of MOP on the cap to your unique design of the nib made for you by Bock. Thank you for posting. Doc


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## rrumohr1 (Jul 9, 2014)

*Beautiful*

When I see this amazing work. I respond as I did when first hearing Leo Koettke perform.  Go home and sell my equipment... 

Then it was a guitar but now I am more patient. I will strive to improve from my "assemble by number" abilities to something close to this art work. 

Thank you for posting your motivators and education methodology.


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## Big (Jul 9, 2014)

Just wow, that is amazing!


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## rbaron (Aug 7, 2014)

Excellent work. Wish I knew how to do that. How long did it take from start to finish?


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## Dai Sensei (Aug 9, 2014)

As others have said, they are amazing pens, well worth the effort 

Not sure how much you charge for these beauties, but I am sure like many other pen turners, you get far more pride and satisfaction from the process and end product than the selling price .


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