Trinket pot

Hi all,
I decided that instead of making another pen I'd have a go at another needle pot, well that was what it was supposed to be, but it came out a bit shorter than I intended so I'm calling it a trinket pot.

Just as a reminder, here is the needle pot that I made recently. The leave design is done with pyrography and it's coloured with sharpie markers. The finish was done with CA, better known as superglue.

Anyway, I enjoyed making this needle pot so I made another with a different design which again was done with pyrography. One of the main reasons for doing another needle pot was to experiment with a different finish. Super glue or CA as it is known in wood turning circles has been a firm favourite, especially with pen turners, for a number of years. However, more recently its popularity began to decrease in favour of other finishes like melamine. I won't go into the reasons why, but if there is a better alternative to CA then I'd want to use it.

So with this in mind, I turned a new needle pot and then burnt on my pyrography design. I finished the lid using a gloss melamine spray and finished the body with CA. Here is a picture of the finished pot.

It's a fine little pot even though I do say so myself, but it did have its problems when it came to the finishing. So far I'm not convinced about either finish and here are the reasons why.

First the melamine finish.
I used this on the lid, spaying it in a cardboard box so that the spray didn't go every where. I had the door to the workshop and two windows open but it was still a dire process. It was a case of spraying one side of the lid and then beating a hasty retreat to a place more friendly, in this case it was the garden. After waiting a decent period, I went back in, turned the lid around and then sprayed it from the other side. This process was repeat four times in total to make sure it got a good coating. The fumes from this finish are very strong so I was not happy with the process at all.

The CA finish.
I put five coats of thin viscosity CA on the body and all was going well until I gave it a coat of medium CA. I had intended on giving it three coats of medium CA, but after the first I noticed a white bloom in a large area of the pot. This wasn't what I expected so decided to go no further with the CA. I put the lid on the pot a burnished them both with burnishing cream. I was hopeful that this would get rid of the white bloom and I'm pleased to say that it did.

It seems that using CA for finishing is a bit of a lottery, most of the time it comes out great, but often it doesn't. I don't like the fumes CA gives off and there is always the danger of sticking parts of one's anatomy together, or even worse, sticking a part of one's anatomy to the lathe.

My conclusions are that I will rarely use CA again for a finish due to its unpredictability and, for the time being at least, I will use the melamine spray. I think the melamine itself is okay, it is the spraying that is the big issue, so I'm going to investigate the wipe on type of melamine and I will let you know how I get on.

My next project is a T light holder, decorated with pyrography and coloured with the new toy I had for my birthday. I can't wait to try it out.

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