Experimenting with Black Walnut Hull

[Larryreitz]

The local squirrels have provided me with more black walnut trees than I would like. Preparing the nuts for eating is more trouble than I am willing to go through, however I figured preparing some for casting might be worth my time. This year's crop is not yet ready, but I found a few leftovers and cleaned them up and crushed them for casting with Liquid Diamonds Epoxy. My initial goal of getting a cast that mimicked a burl wood was not achieved. I was able to get four pens from my efforts shown below as follows:

The first cast with brown colored resin is a Cigar. I think it is interesting but definitely shows the need for smaller pieces of nut hull.

The second cast was done after looking up previous efforts here on IAP. I got two pens from it. The drilled blank for the Thank You pen was painted with a wine color and the hole for the Vertex pen was painted green. Thus the different shades in the two.

The fourth pen shown was done with more highly pulverized pieces of the remaining supply of black walnut hull. Due to my supply being low I had to do a tube in cast. The cast looked fine but as I turned the pen down it was obvious the color either wasn't fully mixed in the epoxy or some separation occurred under pressure as the wine colored tube was clearly visible in some spots. When I poured the resin seemed quite uniform in color.

Anyhow, further effort will have to await this year's crop of black walnuts.

 

[1080Wayne]

I like that green . Looks a lot nicer than your fingers would after playing around with green black walnuts .

 

[magpens]

My first impression of ALL of those pens is that they are very attractive !!

Nice work !!!

 

[qquake]

I don't know, I think I prefer the larger hull pieces in the Cigar. But they're all very cool looking.

 

[Alan Morrison]

I like all of those, Larry.
Very well done.
Alan

 

[egnald]

I like them all, but I'm a chunky style kind of guy! - Dave

 

[MRDucks2]

Thanks for sharing, Larry. I was just wondering his week what casting black walnut shells might look like as the one n May yard is loaded.

 

[Larryreitz]

Thanks for sharing, Larry. I was just wondering his week what casting black walnut shells might look like as the one ☝ n May yard is loaded.

I've let the back perimeter of our property go kind of wild so they keep popping up where I cannot mow. They are difficult to get rid of. If you cut them down numerous new shoots will pop up from the remainder. I have a few ideas I want to try, so maybe late this year I'll be able to post some more, hopefully better outcomes.