I found some pieces that made my head spin. I went down a rabbit hole and found this -
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Pretty interesting,
Have you seen some of the cast and turned Items. I saw a bowl made from plastic gummy bears floated in clear resin. Kind of looked like a children’s slaughter bowl.
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You really put the “laugh” in slaughter…
A while back one of our members was gluing hundreds of sheets of origami papers of varying colors together to make pen blanks from. I believe he told me that a certain group of customers were willing to pay “big bucks” for them. He had a homemade press which he was using to press the glue from the paper. I think he said he had a dryer to work on them, too.
I’ve seen volored pencils glued together and turned, mostly into drop spindles, but I’ve seen a couple of ambitious folks who did bowls, too.
Here’s where I noped right out of that story:
After three months of drying time, he put the first block on the lathe and began to rough out the shape. He quickly discovered that the glue had not dried.
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Perhaps if you were only turning pens the drying time wouldn’t be so long if you cut the glue up into blanks before drying. Maybe there is a different glue that would set quicker, too.
Seems like a long time to wait for something to turn when there are so many beautiful woods and acrylics to turn.
Probably not an issue of drying time and more likely that the particular glue needed an element to dry it didn’t receive (air, moisture, etc…)
If someone were to try this, I would suggest using urea formaldehyde, liquid resin glue. These come in two parts and are typically used in veneering with vacuum presses. They do not require any outside catalyst to cure such as wood glue (pva) which really requires air to dry. With the layers described the inner layers would be as well sealed from air as if they were still in the original container.
You can also find a good cheap hand vaccumm press for clamping these;