Pen & Pencil Holder 2G

The first Pen & Pencil Holder I made (a couple of blogs down) was described by some friends as, for lack of a better word, "overkill". It would seem then that I doubled down with this second version. I understand that a coffee mug can easily be a pen and pencil holder. Or, for that matter, a coffee can will hold a lot more pens and pencils!

Well, hobbies, if they must be worthy of the time and effort, are not about convenience or what are easy to do. Sometimes it can be that the hobbyist will dare to engage in a project that has not been done before because he or she can. But, more importantly, no matter how simple a hobby is, how much patience it demands, how much creativity is involved, it is the feeding and the exercising of the mind through hands and eyes that are the reasons and the rewards. I found that the satisfaction I got from the simplest, perhaps the most rudimentary of projects I did when I first started, was just as fulfilling as the ones done recently. 

I would discourage anyone from doing something from someone's existing plan; in other words, don't copy what has already been done. I am talking about hobbyists, of course, and not of those engaged in commercial endeavors.  Half of the fun or challenge is when the mind tries to envision what the project is about, envisioning it in one's head, turning it over and over from every which view, long before it is on paper or the first saw cut.  Everything is first a mental calisthenics before the first saw dusts come flying.

Every woodworker must deal with scrap wood. If I don't throw them away then, no matter how long they've been in the scrap heap, I need to deal with them sooner or later.

The imagined structure and shape had been revised a few times because the quest to minimize the amount of material and how they are put together with the simplest number of steps are the goal.  From the simple pieces in the photo directly below to the fourth picture further down are what I mean by imagining and re-imagining until it has been simplified.

Base of oak edged with walnut.

A quality double-sided tape temporarily secures the top part to the base for a drill through. In final assembly, the top part will be elevated and appear to float 1/4 inch from the base.

To allow for  the pencil points, smaller diameter secondary holes were drilled through.