Adam Bauer
02-05-2007, 4:46 PM
So this weekend Rocker had a pretty good sale on their European pen kits. So I bought some since the price was right. Now, be advised I am about as novice as you can be while still having used a lathe. In total I've made two pens and they were both at a woodcraft freedom pen turn-a-thon and both pens were just regular slimlines. So anyhow, I look at the bushings and all three are different. No documentation comes with the bushings so I assume that the pen kit instructions tell me which bushing goes on the tip, middle, and clip ends of the blanks. No such luck! All that is on the instructions is a generic how to make a pen instructions that I assume are on the back of all the rocker pen kit instructions. Additionally, the instructions tell me to leave a tenon on the end of the upper section for the center band to go over. Now my assumption of how the bushings work is that the bushing is how small you can go and still have the blank match up with the hardware. Also by the wording of the kit it made me assume that the tenon would be smaller than the bushing size. However, this leads to two problems. There were two different sized barrels in this kit but nowhere in the instructions does it mention which is the top and which is the bottom barrel. Second, I compared all of the bushings to the center band and all of bushings could be put through the center band from the kit. If I was to make a tenon smaller than the bushing it would definately be too small for the kit.
I'm just a beginner like I said so maybe these are all non-issue type of items but for a new person they are definately annoying and will cause me to rethink the purchase of any futher pen kits from Rockler. I've looked at the instructions for the penn state euro kits and they are a ton more detailed.
Has anybody else found instructions on pen kits to be sub-par or is this just a case of my being too inexperienced?
I'm just a beginner like I said so maybe these are all non-issue type of items but for a new person they are definately annoying and will cause me to rethink the purchase of any futher pen kits from Rockler. I've looked at the instructions for the penn state euro kits and they are a ton more detailed.
Has anybody else found instructions on pen kits to be sub-par or is this just a case of my being too inexperienced?