Artist Information - David J. Tilson
I
have been a self-taught woodworker for nearly twenty years now, having learned
to work wood by reading books and magazines, then building skills and trying
out different techniques by making small projects and sample pieces. Since
I started out with a very small shop and only a couple of small power tools,
I initially concentrated on making small, carved boxes with hand tools, often
using wood gathered from local street and park trees that had been cut down.
My shop has grown, and I now have a nearly full complement of power tools. I still enjoy using hand tools most of all, and, like the craftsmen of the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th Century, I have found a balance between using electrical and muscle power to produce tight-fitting joinery and to get glass-smooth surfaces quickly. My shop space has grown, and so have many of the projects I work on, which now include furniture, cabinets and built-in furniture, accessories, boxes, and lathe-turned items such as bowls, boxes, and fine writing instruments. I still like to use locally harvested wood, but I often find myself running to the lumberyard instead of the lumber stack on cabinet and furniture projects, due to the small dimensions of lumber available from local trees.
One of my current projects is all about testing the limits of turned pens. One thing I like about making wood-bodied pens is the fact that it is easy to turn a pen the first time, but it takes lots of practice, experience, and experimentation to perfect the process. In addition to building an aesthetic sense for designing a piece of functional art, there’s the process of learning the properties of different materials and hardware kits, finding a versatile and highly durable finish, and, of course, becoming proficient on the wood lathe.
The process of making a basic wooden pen starts with a blank about an inch square and five inches long, and a hardware kit with the mechanism and ink refill. This is cut into one or two shorter lengths and drilled to receive brass tubes, which will make the core around which the pen will be assembled later. After some trimming, the blanks, with brass tubes inside, are mounted on the lathe and shaped by hand to the desired contour, and the ends are matched precisely to the size of the metallic hardware. After sanding and finishing, the wood blanks and hardware components are assembled into a finished pen.
In searching out the limits of what can be done with these wooden pen kits, I often find myself spending hours gluing smaller blocks of wood, metal, and acrylic together to make the blank for a pen. Other times, I may take a twig, or a length of bamboo cane, and have a blank ready to go in minutes. Once the pen has been shaped on the lathe, I may apply a texture to its surface, or perhaps an inlay, or even a “tattoo” of sorts. I may also modify the hardware components, or replace them with parts that I make to match the wood blank. I prefer to use a “high-build” CA finish, which leaves a highly durable, glass-like acrylic coating on the pen and enhances the colors of the wood.
The hardware kits I use are of the highest quality I have found, and where I can find ways to improve on them, I do; such as replacing ballpoint ink refills with brand-name gel rollerball refills, which write much more smoothly and reliably. I also test the pen mechanisms, ink refills, plating, materials and finishes regularly with everyday hard use to ensure that they hold to the same standard of quality with which I handcraft each pen I make.