KMCloonan
Member
This past weekend I cast a hybrid blank of willow burl (with some of the bark still on it) and some Amazing Clear Cast resin with blue mica pigment. All was going well until I checked on the blank in the morning, and it looked like the resin had seeped around the sides of the wood blank, effectively lowering the level in the middle, so the thickness of the pool of resin in the middle was more like 5/8" instead of 3/4". So I decided I needed to add a little more resin to bring it up to 3/4", so I made up a small batch of epoxy, but this time I used green Mica powder and poured it on top of the already cured blue epoxy. Well, the blank looked pretty cool, so I cut it into2 pieces for a Baron pen. The result is below.
Part of me was excited at the interesting wood geometry, with a thin peninsula of wood reaching from the cap blank to the body blank. Also, I think the dark rind of bark adds some personality to the blank. The downside it that the epoxy looks awful. It's mottled, it looks like I did not paint the tubes (I did). The light green stripe is not the brass tube showing through - it's a remnant of the green top-off I did to the short blank. It also looks like the blue epoxy is contaminated or something - washed out? just not what I was hoping for. Maybe I need to use more Mica. And definitely no more 2-stage pours.
Anyway, comments, critiques, suggestions are always welcome. Thanks.
Part of me was excited at the interesting wood geometry, with a thin peninsula of wood reaching from the cap blank to the body blank. Also, I think the dark rind of bark adds some personality to the blank. The downside it that the epoxy looks awful. It's mottled, it looks like I did not paint the tubes (I did). The light green stripe is not the brass tube showing through - it's a remnant of the green top-off I did to the short blank. It also looks like the blue epoxy is contaminated or something - washed out? just not what I was hoping for. Maybe I need to use more Mica. And definitely no more 2-stage pours.
Anyway, comments, critiques, suggestions are always welcome. Thanks.