Lauren Rants: Casting Resin/Wood Pen Blanks and Applying Cyanoacrylate Pen Finishes

About Lauren

Lauren Rants is a dental technician by profession. He has had a great deal of experience in casting dental appliances and prosthetics. He is also active in a barber shop quartet that recently placed ninth in the world senior quartet competitions. He resides in Draper, UT. For several years Lauren has been a pen turner. He tired of turning simple wood pens and began experimenting with using colored resins to enhance distressed pen blanks. He now deliberately seeks out blanks with voids, cracks, worm holes or any defect that can be filled by casting resins. He also will split and loosely re-glue sound blanks to create long cracks that can be filled with colorful contrasting resin. He credits Curtis Seebeck, a Texan and pioneer of resin casting and founder of "Worthless Woods," with inspiring his casting efforts.

PART ONE: Casting Resin/Wood Pen Blanks

About Casting Resin Materials

Lauren favors Alumilite casting resin. It is a two part system that must be mixed in equal parts by weight to be activated. It sets without shrinkage or expansion and, unlike polyester resins such as Bondo or Bar Top, is essentially odorless. Alumilite resin is a bit less forgiving than polyester. Moisture will cause Alumilite to turn cloudy so dryness of all objects contacting the resin is important. The mixed resin has a reasonable pot life. Lauren has found the mixture remains flowable for about 15 minutes. When freshly mixed the resin has the viscosity of thin syrup so it can penetrate even small voids quite nicely and releases bubbles quite well. A nice variety of Alumilite tinting dyes are available. Lauren usually relies on primary colors but will use mixtures of them. He also uses finely ground metal powders in the mixture to create opalescence. The resins, dyes and powders are all available on-line at Alumilite.com. They are not inexpensive.

Preparing the Blanks

Lauren demonstrated how he uses a rotary carving tool with a grout removal bit to open and clean up cracks and voids in a distressed blank. He also showed how he intentionally distresses sound blanks. He used a chisel to split a blank lengthwise once or twice. The segments can then be glued back together loosely leaving long open cracks. He also showed how a sound blank can be cut on a scroll saw to simulate the peaks of a burl surface. He merely makes a series of jagged cuts that look like uneven saw teeth down the side the blank and then uses the rotary carver to cut longitudinal grooves in a random pattern down the length of the teeth. Lauren uses compressed air to blow away all debris and dust from the voids and defects.

Another technique Lauren demonstrated was how he would improve a blank cut from burl such that it had jagged areas at both ends but with a solid section in the center. He cut the blank in half at the solid center and reversed the two halves so that the jagged burl surfaces were then facing one another in the center of the pairing. He then joined the two halves by bridging the gap with a toothpick and securing it with C/A glue.

In this demonstration Lauren took three prepared blanks, laid them parallel to one another with a gap between each of them. This array was then bridged with toothpicks across the tops of the blanks and secured with C/A glue. This secured array was then laid into the bottom of a plastic casting tray and centered from the four edges of the tray. To prevent the blanks from floating when the resin would be poured into the tray, Lauren glued a popsicle stick laid on edge across the top of the array at both ends. He then wrapped wide painter’s tape around the ends of the casting tray so it secured the Popsicle sticks, and hence the entire array, in the tray leaving the entire middle of the array open to receive the resin later. Obviously, a casting tray must be chosen which is deeper than the thickness of the blanks so the resin can completely cover them. Also, the tray should be large enough to receive the array, but not so large as to waste much resin around the margins of the array.

With the tray containing the array of three blanks completed, Lauren placed it in a small toaster oven and preheated it to 150° F. Lauren finds this preheating facilitates penetration of the resin into the voids and cracks.

Casting

The A and B parts of the casting resin must be mixed in equal parts by weight. Lauren used a digital postage scale to weigh out the part A. He then thoroughly mixed the dye into the part A. His rule of thumb is about one drop of dye per ounce of resin. In this demonstration he used only blue dye but will mix colors when desired. He pointed out that some colors, such as turquoise, can only be achieved by adding a white dye to the mix of two other colors. In this demo Lauren also added a little silver metal powder to create opalescence. He then added an equal weight of part B resin to the mixture and again mixed thoroughly.

Lauren then removed the casting tray from the heating oven and began pouring the resin mixture into the tray to cover the array of blanks. The resin was poured quite slowly with the tray being rocked gently to ensure complete filling of all the void areas and displacement of trapped air bubbles .

Some people place their castings in a vacuum chamber to draw bubbles out of the fluid resin while setting. However, Lauren prefers to use a pressure pot which not only compresses any residual bubbles but also promotes penetration of the resin into every nook and cranny of the voids and defects. In this demonstration he placed the filled casting tray in an old spray-painting pressure pot. The pot was sealed and pressurized to 80 psi for the entire curing time (less than an hour in this case).