Mini-wood lathe

[Riley]

I bought my 13 year old son a mini-lathe for xmas. I have some questions regarding the mandrel for pen making and also questions on the non-live end and tightening it.

If anybody knows this stuff let me know and I'll fire away on my questions.
Thanks

[Gumby]

We've got 5 of those things in the Woods shop. The pens are pretty cool. It was a lot better project than I thought it would be when the Woods teacher bought them.
I had to teach a section this semester, so I'm pretty familier with the set-up.

[Riley]

We have this Mandrel (see pic below), this is the only kind for the pen sets we have [stick pens, dont have a twist mechanism or anything], but it doesn't have a Morse taper. As per Murphy's Law, the Mandrel doesn't fit into the morse taper by 1 milimetre. So dad thinks that we can just put the mandrel into the lathe. The mandrel is about two thirds the size of the taper at the end. The only solution so far is to buy a new mandrel from someone else, but then we have problems with making sure it is the right size so on, buying twist pens, or buying a chuck.

- the 13 year old son

Dad's comment - In summary how would we attach this non-morse taper mandrel to the lathe, use a chuck or someother way? Todd - what kind of pens did the class build? stick pen or twist?

Thanks