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! 
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.
That was great thank you. I just tried one I turned with acrylic. Used 1000 with full power no masking. Looks great other than I tried filing in the letters and what I used didn’t work well so will have to clean it up.
Yeah, that looks great! To make the filling process cleaner/easier I use this masking paper from Johnson Plastics. Works like a champ even with low tack so it comes off easy but not too easy. Simply engrave and leave the masking paper on and push the fill into the engraved areas and give it a few minutes to dry and it’s golden.
Do you remember the settings you used for this aluminum pen? I’d like to do something similar, but don’t know where to start with testing. Thanks!
I’ll have to check tonight when I get home.
Quick reminder:
Glowforge requires us to confine discussion of manual settings in their forums to the Beyond the Manual category. The current preferred practice is to either move the entire thread to Beyond the Manual or, to start a new thread there and, link to it from this one.
I"m jealous. I just got my lathe 80% unburied from the move a year ago.
don’t have power to the lathe yet but the wire is very close 
Sorry, I seem to not have noted down the settings… But I think I remember them - I’ll post them in “beyond the manual”.
Psh. Just build your own Wardenclyffe Tower. Think outside of the box!
LOL, I had to look that up. rather overkillish
