King Snake Pen
Introduction: King Snake Pen
The photo shows front, side, and back view of a pen which is inspired by the Scarlet King Snake, indigenous in Florida where I grew up. My hope was that the red, black and yellow bands would be as visually striking in a pen as they are on the snake that inspired the design. The additional design element of arranging the colors as nested chevrons rather than as straight bands takes advantage of the way the curvature of the pen exposes different paths through the laminations turning adjacent layers into parabolas on the sides while keeping sharp points on top and bottom.
Of course, these techniques lend themselves to any number of inspirational sources that can be modeled with available colors of wood. The main thing is to make shapes that can be clamped or held together securely for gluing. The chevron pattern used here holds tight under pressure. Trying to glue dozens of hexagons or diamond shapes together, for example, would be a much higher degree of difficulty.
The pen laminations shown are assembled from 1/8" maple, cherry, wenge and paduk woods that have been cut on a Glowforge laser cutter.
Supplies
The wood was purchased from Ocooch Hardwoods who specialize in project-ready woods for laser cutting.
The pen kit is the Atlas Black Titanium from Woodcraft, but any pen kit would work. After lamination, the finished blank is 1 inch square so it is large enough for anything from a Slimline to a big Cigar pen.
Glue can be regular wood glue, cyanoacrylate, or anything that bonds wood well and has a minute or so of open time. I was able to use thin CA glue and activator for this project since the pieces were laser-cut and fit perfectly. A thicker gap-filling CA glue might be needed if the pieces are cut by hand or sanded after cutting. Just bear in mind that this helps make up only for minor occasional gaps and will show up as a wider and uneven seam in the finished pen.
Of course, there's the laser. Anything capable of cutting the thickness of wood stock you want to use is fine. Mine is a Glowforge so I could have used up to 1/4 inch wood for faster assembly, but thinner stock better emulated the snake scale look I was going for.
I used some dark veneer between the laminations. These provide structural strength because the stacked butt joints are fairly weak. 668
The dark veneer colors used here provide boundary lines between the layers.
Clamps. Lots of clamps.
Step 1: Laser Cutting the Workpieces
This should be the smallest section, right? Turns out there are a few helpful hints to pass along. I'll refer to the image shown and have attached the SVG cutfile for viewing in your favorite vector renderer if you prefer that.
The strategies I'll explain here overcome two issues with thin wood stock: it curls, and it scorches easily.
To help minimize scorching and keep the kerf as small as possible, the cutfiles have been designed so that the laser will never traverse the same line twice.
The problem with the wood curling is that any piece that falls to the print bed before it is completely cut may lose focus and not cut through completely on subsequent passes. The design intent is to not free any piece to fall down to the bed that still has incomplete interior cuts. In other words, cut from the inside out.
In this design that is accomplished following this cut order:
1. The green lines that make up the chevron outlines.
2. The red lines that free the chevrons to fall.
3. The purple lines to free the end pieces.
4. Finally, cut the outer frame if one is to be used. (These come in handy for sanding later.)
The yellow boxes are for the veneers.
The SVG file contains vertical and horizontal versions of the design as a convenience. Use the one oriented parallel to the wood that will be cut and delete the other.
Step 2: Assembling the Layers
Once the pieces are cut, it's time to assemble the layers. The first photo shows them in dry-fit. At this point I knew some of the bottom portion (the right-most piece in the photo) of the blank would be kept so I wanted to sandwich the colors vertically in the same pattern as horizontally - paduk at the dead center, with wenge on either side, then the maple/cherry.
The design cuts the pieces to 1 inch wide and the idea is to get as close as possible to an exactly square blank. This is true even when making a slimline pen where only 4 or 5 layers get used, because it is going to be important later to drill the hole through the center of a design that varies vertically as well as horizontally. 215