paralam pen

[low_48]

Poor man's zebrawood? Found a small stick of paralam at work at the shipping skid scrap. Fir plys what to delaminate as it gets really thin, but held them back with thin CA. Looks like you want to put in some profile to accent the laminations.

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[tipusnr]

What is paralam? I can't find it in my wood book. Can see the the pen must look nice in the real world though!

 

[C_Ludwigsen]

I like the shape. It looks sleek. One of the better sculped shapes for a slimline that I've seen - but that is due to my tastes.

 

[low_48]

Paralam is a structural beam that is made like plywood, but all the plies run the same direction. They are thick plies like the stuff used in CDX plywood, but few voids. It needs to have fairly solid plies to keep the structural rating. You can get it at any of the building centers (BORGS), but talking them out of 1 or 2 feet might be a problem. I suppose they might sell you a 6 foot piece though, it runs less than $2 a foot. And that will be a boatload of blanks! Next one will be dyed.

 

[ilikewood]

Hey Richard, that looks pretty neat. I never thought of using paralem before.

BTW - If you need Zebrawood, I have it coming out of my ears. I'll trade for pretty much anything (don't need to be a poorman [])

 

[jwoodwright]

Wow! We had a Guest Visitor at our Club. He showed some of this wood. Each layer was solid wood and they make 4'x10' sheets and gang rip it to 6" wide. Each 6" length has a breaking strength of like 1.2 million lbs. I was impressed. They want to bring in a Mill and produce this, using 6" - 8" trees. State of Alaska was Unimpressed.[]The scraps would be great...

 

[paleydp]

Check out the picture at the bottom of this page on the woodchuckers site http://www.woodchuckers.com/WORKS.HTM It shows a piece of paralam and a completed bowl. I picked up a 4-foot section of paralam at a construction site while in Monterey last month. All I've done with it so far is cut it and drill it. Looks a lot like my plywood pens. You beat me to turning it. Nice pen!

 

[Docsmith45]

Parallam is a cool material to work with. The company my brother works for makes electrical power transmission stuctures and they use a lot of it. They also make some bridges from it. Go to

http://www.hughesbros.com/Brdglist.html

to see some bridges made from it. He has given me some small chunks and I've made some pens and knife handles from it. It's always fun to try odd materials.

Doc