Aluminum and wood

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NGLJ

NGLJ

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Joined
Sep 15, 2021
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Surrey BC, Canada
Having tried aluminum and acrylic I tried my hand at aluminum and wood. When you are turning very dissimilar materials great care is needed near the intersection of the materials. Aluminum requires some pressure on the tool to get shavings whilst wood might require much less, depending upon the wood. Get this wrong and you are likely to take a bigger chunk out of the wood that you wanted! You might even have to start again. Fortunately I learned from my aluminum/acrylic experience. The wood in this case is pink ivory. The other thing to watch is when wet sanding or using a polishing compound that creates a black slurry is to not stain the wood! If you look carefully you will see that the pores of the pink ivory are darkened. At one point I thought it was going to be ruined but I managed to clean it up to I hope make it passable.
 

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That turned out beautiful! I tried it once but wasn't really careful and turned the edges of the wood dark from the heat. Yours looks great! I might try it again now!
 
Heat is definitely your enemy when it comes to turning aluminum. You have to persuade yourself to take frequent breaks to let things cool. Judging when to take a break I guess only comes with some experience. Better more breaks than risk a failure. When pen turning it is too easy to want to get a result fairly quickly but learning patience will always pay in the end. That is coming from someone who can easily be impatient and I have mistakes to prove it :).
 
Luckily, the darkened pores look pretty natural and most people would never know it wasn't supposed to look that way
 
That is what I was hoping. We are all our own worst critic :). When I was finishing it on the lathe I was convinced it was toast but a little clean-up work appears to have saved it! Next time I will attempt to seal the wood to try and protect it. It might be prudent to use close grained woods.
 
Very nice Graham. As far as closing the pours of the wood before sanding and finishing I was thinking the same thing. I have used Thin CA when sanding contrasting woods, and have not considered thinned down Lacquer or shellac. Are there reasons using those two over CA?
 
TDahl said:
Very nice Graham. As far as closing the pours of the wood before sanding and finishing I was thinking the same thing. I have used Thin CA when sanding contrasting woods, and have not considered thinned down Lacquer or shellac. Are there reasons using those two over CA?
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I liked the lacquer because it was a softer material that sanded away with the wood easier. CA tends to clog up my sandpaper and takes longer to remove the outer layer.
 
Haven't used CA as a sealant but can see how it might work. My only experience is with shellac which is recognized as sanding sealer. I dilute it with methyl alcohol (⅓ methanol to ⅔ shellac) so that it dries very quickly with the lathe spinning. It means that you might have to apply several coats but overall I find it is fastest. Also, by applying diluted you get very thin layers which are easy to remove. But don't get too aggressive with the sanding or you will be applying it again! I sometimes use the diluted shellac as a final finish on some of my segmented bowls.
 
Of course I should have mentioned that I buy the pre-made Zinsser shellac in a tin. I think that it is a 2# cut. My dilution formula is simply from experimenting. You might find a different formulation works better for you.
 
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