Curved Laminate exercise, pen holder

[nuhobby]

Also Known As:
"Homage to the Mark V"

I did an experiment on making my own curved laminate. That's 4 layers of figured maple veneer, which were wrapped around an old Mark V Quill! Being forced around a curve seemed to make the veneers avoid their typical "bubbly" behaviors.

Only problem was despite wax & waxpaper, I got an iron stain during the gluing, so I deliberately stained the maple very dark to disguise it.

Then... the base of the pen holder is a bandsawn & kerfed old Oak Rolling Pin. The two sides of the contraption are some spalted poplar which I found on a store trash bin nearby here.

You can just look at a Mark V, and these projects come flying off it....

[curiousgeorge]

Nice job, Chris! Very imaginative. Thank you for posting it.

[a1gutterman]

Good re-use of materials nuhobby!:D

[a1gutterman]

Hi nuhobby,
The more that I thought about this project of yours, the more that I tried to figure how you clamped the laminated parts to glue-up around the quill. Care to share?

[nuhobby]

Thanks, gents, for your kind words.

Tim,
Really not much to my "clamping"... I had enough veneer to wrap the 4 layers & white-glue about 3/4-way around the old quill's circumference. Basically on the floor I laid them out, inside a final wrap of wax-paper, and rolled it all up as tight as I could. Then I wrapped the bundle with velcro-tape and set it aside 36 hours (resisting the temptation to open it up and look at the progress!).

Once it came out, I bandsawed to about a half-round section, getting rid of mismatched veneer-layer edges, and "jointed" the edges square with a few manual passes across a stationary 12" sanding disk. After all that, I chose the correct corresponding circle-cuts for my end-pieces.

Today I further put a pair of rare-earth magnets to hold the thing shut tight.

Working those miniatures until my "big ship" comes in!

[charlese]

I think that's really cool, Chris! Thanks for showing us!

[nuhobby]

Hi,

I tried my hand at another pen-holder, this time wrapping 5 layers of thin Bubinga veneer around a PVC-tube for for my curved-shell glue-up. Then I used the OPR to make a stopped groove in a piece of poplar, which I subsequently turned on the lathe. Here you see them working together to make a pen holder.... I had a disaster when bandsawing the thin veneer shell, so I had to epoxy it back together before finishing. Hey, it's better than sitting on the couch!