Desert Ironwood Box Series

While waiting for the new glue to set on my segmented pen blanks, I decided to create a series of desert ironwood boxes. There are eleven boxes in the series. They are all basically the same theme, just different dimensions. I posted the largest on my Etsy store which you can see in the sidebar.

New Pen Designs

In the new year, I will be coming out with some exciting new pen designs. I will be departing from Sonoran Desert woods to a large degree and embracing some of the exotic woods. I do this because my designs feature wood colors. I will be combining these wood in different inlaid patterns.

My first obstacle to overcome was how to effective glue aluminum to wood. I will be using aluminum to separate the various woods. In researching this problem I discovered that most pen makers use superglue, however I found this approach to be unsatisfactory. The pieces just didn't stick together well. In fact I ran across one pen maker who went to the extent of gluing side pieces on their pen blanks to keep them together while drilling.

Not the approach I wanted to take.

A call to Loctite led me to a urethane glue that does a much better job of gluing aluminum to wood. But it takes 24 hours to full cure.

So right now I am assembling a number of pen blanks in my chosen designs. Next will be the big test: Can they withstand the drilling operation?

That will be my next post. Stay tuned.