My first hybrid pepper mill turning blank

[TellicoTurning]

A friend that was getting out of his turning shop and selling and giving away all his tools and wood gave me a half can of silmar 41.... I'd never worked with resins before, but thought it would be fun and since I don't have a pressure pot and silmar 41 doesn't need pressure to set, I tried an experiment. I had a box of plastic boxes that I think I bought years ago to use as bottle stopper boxes or something along that line, but never used them.... they were 6" high, sooooo I thought a perfect mold for a midi pepper mill blank.... two problems occurred, 1. Silmar shrinks slightly as it cures... the blank was too short for a midi pepper mill... 2. the plastic in the mold stuck to the silmar and had to be turned away.... so I cut it down to a mini mill.... a chunk of white oak burl and the silmar dyed with orange alcohol ink... made it opaque which I liked....

This is what i came up with....

 

[Lucky2]

Very nice.

Len

 

[magpens]

Brilliant !!!

 

[socdad]

Well done, I do a fair amount of casting with polyester resin & I'm going to have to 'borrow' your idea.

 

[TellicoTurning]

Well done, I do a fair amount of casting with polyester resin & I'm going to have to 'borrow' your idea.

That's fine, but make sure your mold doesn't stick to the casting... pieces of that plastic flying every where when I turned it off was a little more exciting than I really wanted.
I like using the polyester resin, I did a few bottle stoppers with it and they turned out well.