Butternut

[stonyloam]

Butternut is one of my favorite woods, but it does not seem to be very popular as a wood for pens. It can be a Little difficult to turn I have had one epic fail with a turkey call, but I thought it should work for a pen, especially with a CA finish. It is a pretty light weight wood. I tried it out on a couple of the service pens and found it has a tendency to chip, but it does sand easily and is not too hard to take to finish dimensions. So I decided to try one cigar. I screwed the pooch a little on the finish, but it did not look too bad. Worth a try if you get a chance IMHO:wink:.

 

[George417]

Interesting wood

:biggrin::biggrin::biggrin::biggrin:

 

[Jim Burr]

Hmmm...that would make a cool matchup with a copper sandwich!

 

[mrcook4570]

Very pretty grain in that piece.

 

[GaryMGg]

I love butternut; I have a small table I built I call the double-nut.
It's made from black walnut with butternut aprons.
As you know, butternut tends to be a soft hardwood -- I'd guess it's probably as soft as Juniper or cypress.
With a good CA soaking, I'd expect it'd do just fine.
I also expect butternut to be a good candidate for stabilizing.
When the grain is pretty as in your cigar pen, it can be hard to beat.

 

[plantman]

buttrnut

Terry: Love Butternut. It has a very soft and soothing color to it and works very easy. As Gary said, it is a soft hardwood. CA should take care of this however. Only problem I have with it is that it "wiskers" when you work with it. I can usualy overcome this by wetting the wood to bring up the grain and then resanding. I thing the coat of CA would have the same effect. Jim S

 

[Traguh]

I'm with Gary I would say it is a good wood to stabilize. I've done a lot of carving and butternut is one of the woods that people tend to use as a learning platform along with bass wood since they are both pretty soft. That pen turned out great with grain popping. Great job!