I have been reading these post and just purchased a glowforge. Has anyone engraved a pen yet. If you have please let me know and if possible post a picture. Thanks.
What material? wood, aluminum?
This was a recent example of someone doing a drumstick which could be close to a wood pen.
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It was wood.
I did a set of pencils for my son with a Deadpool logo and quote on one side (“Maximum effort!” - gotta keep it safe for school), and his name on the opposite side. I used a variation of Jules’ alignment method to keep everything straight. In my variation, I drew a rectangle of appropriate dimension to hold the pencils straight, then I did the text and laid them in the center of the rectangle and directly on top of each other. The rectangle and both sets of text were different colors so they were different steps in the UI.
I then put some cardboard from a beer box in the forge, cut the rectangles (I duplicated the final design five times and spaced them out to make five pencils at once). Then I put the pencils into the resulting slots, ignored the rectangle, and ran one pass with one of the texts. I finished up by flipping the pencils over, ignoring the first two steps in the UI and burning in the final line of text (his name).
Nothing to it 
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Thanks just wanted I needed to know. It looks great.
I just saw that post about the drumstick and I decided that I would have to try that as a single line engrave on a pen blank soon.
I have been using the Chinese 1000mw laser with the rubber band driven rotary to engrave pens for quite some time with great success but still hoping someone would come up with a rotary drive for the GF.
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Thanks appreciate the info and link. I’ll give it try.
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I read the information on the site and reviews elsewhere but just wanted to know if anyone had actually engraved a pen.
Thanks I appreciate your reply and the picture. Looks great exactly what I was looking for. Have you engraved any acrylic pens?
I turn wood and acrylic.
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i took an old broken pen blank and engraved a few lines on it (burned, turned, burned again, rinse repeat). took me a few attempts to dial in the settings.
i need to get back to it this week. my father in law turns pens and he sent a few unfinished blanks to me a couple of months ago to test on and i never did.
I have plenty of broken and blown blanks. Thanks for the info I will work on those first.
Is that an aluminum pen?
It is.
This is a much better explanation for what I did. Instead of building a special jig, you can just use a piece of scrap cardboard and cut the slots each time. You’ll never go wrong with this method.
Trip…stumble…fall…CRASH!.. Ta Da! 
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I’m going to try my first pen and do have a doe questions. What software do you use and what are you setting on the GF? Do you engrave before or after you assemble the pen? Finally, do you just center the pen or do you have a jig to hold the pen so it doesn’t move.
Thanks in advance for your help.
So to start, I too turn wood and acrylic. I have not tried acrylic yet though I’m sure my process would work the same.
As for the software, I use Inkscape as you can set the Object to Path and that will allow the software the GF uses to not pop up the annoying error that they don’t process text yet, if you’re using it to put text to the pen. As for the centering of the pen, always center as much as you can under the main camera, you get better results. I don’t use a “jig” per se. I actually use Play-doh to hold my pen pieces so they don’t roll from the exhaust fan. Oh, and I saw another question in there. I always engrave before I assemble. You can more easily recover if you do it that way. Also, probably the most important thing…to figure out the settings it’s best to try engraving the blank before you turn it anyway. Then you’ll have that specific pieces settings required. I mean, you’re going to turn all that away anyway so why not use it for specific testing? I have found though, that on wood, with masking, 800 speed at 80 power works well enough to fill with acrylic paint. Without masking you could bump up the speed to 1000. 
I hope this helped and wasn’t too confusing.
