I designed and machined a mini clutch pencil

I machined all of the components excluding the spring at my college. I made the body and collet on a CNC lathe with live tool, and the rest of the parts on a manual lathe.

I used a Caran d'Ache Fixpencil as a reference for my design, so much so that my collet is functionally interchangeable with the Fixpencil collet.

To make my life harder I decided to engrave a height map into the side of the pencil. The map is of the Faroe Islands and wraps all the way around the body. Getting the map into CAD took a couple of weekends experimenting with QGIS software to get usable DXF files of contour lines.

All in all it was a good learning experience as I hadn't used a live tool lathe before this project.