Now my next question, what is the best finish to put on plastic pens, or maybe stabilized pens?

I've never made one, but I believe the acrylic pens are usually sanded to a high grit and then polished. No finish is really needed.

On the acrylics I sand to 400 grit, then I get out my micro mesh pads and wet sand up to 12,000 grit. No polish needed. Another option is to sand to say 600 - 800 grit then hit the blank with white diamond polish and buff it off with a rag.

As far as any type of wood, I dry sand to 1200 and use a CA/oil finish. One of these days I'll order up some micro mesh sandpaper.

Ok, might have jumped the gun on the CA/oil finish. It seems that I have found a couple woods that this finish just doesn't work well with. One of them being cherry, another is plywood. Yep I said plywood, well what other wood is more appropriate for the shop

So are those plywood pens made from CDX? I'm thinking about OSB myself.

I was thinking about the plywood pens. Why not flood the CA on it to get rid of the irregularities in the pen?
In other words use a bit more ca then you usually use.

Hmmmm let me grab a pic, brb

here we go


As you can see there is really no finish to speak of. This is after having put on 4 coats of CA. Cherry kind of does the same thing usually. Perhaps if one was to apply a coat of sanding sealer to start with.

Word of warning to any wanting to try a plywood, or for that matter, a lace wood pen. Before you use the barrel trimmer be sure to get a wood clamp around the end that you are trimming. You want the clamp on the face grain sides. You can't see it in this pic, but I had no clamp when I started trimming, and I almost split the blank in halves.