Segmented Pens of different materials

[rstought]

Up till now, my segmented pen projects have all been wood-only, but I have recently been kicking around some designs that incorporate, for example, wood and TruStone and Alternate Ivory, and was wondering if there were any special considerations I needed to make in the areas of gluing and/or sanding/finishing when combining unlike materials? Will one type of glue (such as CA) suffice when combining the various parts, or do different materials "prefer" different glues? Can I utilize a single sanding protocol for the entire pen (where I might have used different ones, e.g dry vs. wet sanding and/or buffing for pens made entirely of the same material), or do I need address the different materials differently (depending, I guess, on the size of the piece of material - I presume I wouldn't need to obsess over a tiny inlay...)?

Any and all advice is greatly appreciated.

 

[skiprat]

Bob, I've made a few pens with different materials. Mostly with acrylic and brass or ali. I've never had much problems with using anything but CA for the joints. However, I've found that on a couple of them, the metal and acrylic have expanded and contracted differently with temperature. So when you make the pen everthing is nice and smooth, but later on and at a different temperature, there seems to be a bit of an edge to the joint. Strangely, it seems to me that the thinner the materials are the more pronounced the edges becomes.
I've also found that when sanding, the softer acrylic obviously sands down easier and can sand down further than you want, before the metal has. I have got around this simply by using wider bits of sandpaper.
I've never had problems mixing wood with acrylic.
I wet sand with metal/acrylic and dry with wood/acrylic.

Hope this helps
Good luck

 

[gketell]

Taking into account that I haven't done this yet in pen format:
Gorilla glue is guaranteed to hold the different materials together. That is its forté.
Use a sanding block that is hard so that the sandpaper can't dip "into" the softer material.

Good luck. I'm hoping to do my first metal+wood later this weekend.

GK