Wine Barrels into Pens

A customer of mine had made some wine with a few clients of his last year and was interested in getting the wine barrel slats made into pens for them. The wine really didn’t penetrate the wood very much (I thought it would be much more than it was, it went well less than 1/16” in), so I had to drill the holes close to the wine stain. It was a bit tricky with the curves of the wood, but I really like how these turned out. The pen fronts are varied thickness depending on how much material I was able to remove while keeping the stain there.

Some have more stain than others, and 1 of the 8 has none at all :( These are mounted on 7mm tubes, I wanted to be sure a kit was used that had a 3/8” tube or smaller just to be sure there was enough wood to turn properly. Although the curve of the wine barrel was minimal by the time the blanks were cut from it, it was still there and could easily be seen in each blank.

My customer was kind enough to let me keep the leftover wood (these used 1 slat, I have another 5 left), so I’ll be making some other ones later this year.

Thanks for looking.

-- John