Thread: Painful Pepper Grinders

Unusual materials and special orders will be the death of me.

The first was a pair of pepper grinders for my son living in Seattle USA. He wanted some darker Aus figured timber plus some aluminium bands. He also wanted black/white bands to distinguish between the salt and pepper grinders. I sent him a sketch of a simple shape with a simple band of aluminium in the centre and a stripe of colour. He said Ok but commented the more metal the better.

I had some nice lumps of Coolabah I scored at a fireplace stash at one of my stops whilst travelling and decided to use a nice branch fork for the blanks. I then used some aluminium powder to cast the aluminium with some white/black bands. I used casting epoxy but didn't use enough white pigment so had to recast those bands. Unfortunately I also used an aluminium powder that doesn't shine much when cast, so proceeded to remove some of the cast aluminium and use the powder with thin CA and returned that makes it mottled but brighter. I had to do this a few times as sometimes I didn't go deep enough with the refill.

Anyway after doing the aluminium many times I gave it a good coating of NCL finish and produced these.



When I sent him some photos though, he said, hmm too much metal I think . So I proposed to cut off the bottom section of aluminium from the cap and the top section of the bottom. Relatively easy to do theoretically, just cut them off and do a bit of reshaping on the tops. Yeh right, always easier said than done . But after some more work and finishing this was the result. Unfortunately the amount of aluminium in those sections removed was different in the black to the white, so they are now slightly different heights, can only hope he is ok with them.




Next was a pair from the bark from the Grey Ironbark tree I scored in Melbourne. I stabilised the bark and then cast it with some epoxy with red translucent dye to fill some voids. I also cast black/white epoxy into holes I drilled into the top sections. It turned Ok but sanded very unevenly due to the inconsistent nature of the material. Good old butterfingers also dropped them a few times breaking bits off that then had to be rejoined. I had to spray them with many many layers of NCL to try and overcome the uneven surface but the resultant finish is still far from perfect. Even though I spent a lot of time on them I am going to have to sell them cheap, as if anyone drops them they will explode, plus I'm not really happy with finish.




Next is one made from Foxtail Palm blank I had. This turned Ok but the good grain disappeared quickly into some blotchy stuff. This in turn sanded at 4x the rate of the other, even though stabilised, so the grinder is someone egg shaped . It also seemed to absorb the NCL finish and took many coats to gain a decent surface. Due to the shine I had problems photographing.



You can see why this stuff is often sold as Black Palm.


Cheers