Afternoon with my Freaky Daughter

Today, my daughter came home from Oakville for Easter weekend. She brought her cat along, and some new, funky ideas.

My daughter is in the process of stretching her ears, and at the moment she's resting at an 8g, which is 3mm.She plans to stretch up to a 2g, which is 6mm. She asked me if was possible to turn some earrings, and I thought I'd give it a go with some scraps from my box.

Starting with some fun acrylic squares in a medley of colours, I started to round the square edges, while my daughter took all the pictures.

Here it is on the lathe, with the router coming in to shave off another half millimetre of acrylic. This is probably the most time consuming part, as there's a lot of excess material to be rid of.

Eventually I got each square down to 7.4 millimetres for each plug. 

After, I shaved off the little X mark I put on each square to find the center.

 Looked like this by the time I shaved it off.

 Carved out the shaft, which needed to be only six millimetres.

This also took a lot of patience.

A lot of patience.

Cut it down to size, and smoothed the end off on a fine grit sandpaper.

This is what the unpolished plug looked like. 6mm shaft, 7.4 mm flare.

This is where the fun began.

 I sent the plug flying, and my daughter had to go after it.

Looking good- just about ready to go.

One last run on the buffing wheel--

And there she is, ready for wear.

This set we gave an equal flares, so they're also reversible. 

I think she likes them.

Another ED Conversion

The problem with this pen was 

"the section hole is too wide for the nib/feed and is also allowing air leakage through the threads with the barrel"

So he had a spare nib unit that I made up a new section, threaded it to take the nib unit.  I also made it to take a converter for him.  I think that it will only be used as a ED so I sealed the threaded nib unit into the section so that hopefully it will work out as an ED

On the original section there was a small O ring added, but then the section would not sit tight to the body of the pen.

By making a step inside the body I was able to get it so the O ring sets just inside so the section sits tight to the body now.

Making A Pen To Use The Zebra Style Refills

I have always like the refills that Zebra has for their F series ballpoints but they did not seem to work in any other pen that I had so I built one.

This has no clip because my wife is trying it out for me and she is not keen on clips.

Very simple and clean design.

Royal Ball Point

I got this little pen a while ago because I thought it was sort of cute.

It is only 3 1/2 inches and does not seem to have any cap.

The refill was all dried out of course.

But I was able to cut down a Bic refill and now I have a pen that writes but no idea about it's history.

Anyone?

New Section And Nib For An Indian Made ED

I got this one sent to me to make up a new section to hold the customer's nib unit.

He did not like the nib and there were leaking issues so this is what I made up for him.

Before on the left and after on the right

New Click Pen

I was doing some cleaning up yesterday trying to keep busy and I came across this rod of plastic.

I was needing a click pen so I built this one to take the Parker gel refills.

I was able to come up with a Parker clip off of a modern pen that I was able to make work.

Commissioned Piston Filler

This is the second piston filler that I have made out of this material.  I had about 5/8 of an inch left over so it was close.