Thursday, July 10, 2008

A Glimpse into the Future

I've started working on a new segmented pen. There isn't much to look at right now, but I can give you an idea of what it will look like.

Prior to finishing my last segmented pen, I cut several hundred segments with 22.5 degree angles to create a few more pens with eight segment layers. Having these pieces of Maple, Walnut and Jatoba, I thought it would be a nice way to get a good visual of what some different designs could be. Kind of like a rough sketch in 3-D.

I didn’t want to get into gluing anything and commit myself to a design I didn’t fully like, so I carefully stacked my segments and let gravity hold everything together for me. I figured this method would let me quickly see, physically, what I thought I was seeing in my head. It would also be much less time intensive than gluing a full blank together to flesh out the complete idea. Each design I have put together is the full size of a Jr. Gent II cap.

After stacking a design and taking a couple pictures from different angles I took apart what I had done and designed another. It was after I had six or eight of these designs that I thought I would put together a blog series to show how these segmented pens would look from design to completed pen.

A couple of the designs I’ve come up with include all three species that I had prepped. This design I'm working on now is one I’ve been thinking about for a while. With the light color of the Maple separating the Walnut and Jatoba diamond patterns; it reminds me of an argyle sock.

Currently I have the first of three glue-up phases completed.

No comments: