Spoon progress

2013-11-17 17.01.13

Four attempts of  “cutting out” from left to right: Band saw, hatchet, knife and gouges. By far I have the most control with the gouges, and now that I have better gouges I can make a fair amount of progress in a short time, but it’s still a very slow process.

The knife lead to a more smooth process, though still very very slowly, though this was before I had managed to get the knife sharpened properly!

The hatchet was a pretty good option, reasonably fast, reasonably accurate, and it leaves the edges choppy, which makes it easier to carve it later into the final shape.

And by far the fastest is the bandsaw. That took about 3 minutes. But it wasn’t as accurate and and it will be harder to carve I suspect, though I haven’t tried yet.

 

Spoon progress – hatchets help

So today I took out the hatchet, also some leather to protect my leg, and more puncture proof gloves. And it helped a great deal. I actually ended up using the side of the garden box as a steadying surface, with the leather protecting it. I managed to get off most of the wood, now I need to make some decisions regarding the bowl and the handle.

2013-10-20 19.55.50

Spoon progress

So I got some cherry turning wood from woodcraft, and used a terribly dull band saw to cut it in half (See blackening on the back).

Then I drew on the shape I wanted to rough out:

2013-10-19 15.12.44

Then using a wood carving knife from my deceased grandfather (Along with his sharpening stone) I started to rough it out. This didn’t go so well, so I switched to my Niji set which are way too small for wood this dense, but I did eventually make some progress. And along the way I snapped one v-blade and pretty much dulled all the gouges, and somewhat successfully resharpened them. After about 2 hours of work I ended up with this:

2013-10-19 18.21.36 2013-10-19 18.21.43

So I asked around and was told of the marvels of hatchets for roughing out work. So I went to sears and got a sportsman’s axe We’ll see how that performs tomorrow. I’m a little scared it’s going to take off way too much wood. I also got a new pair of leather gloves as apparently mechanics gloves don’t have leather in the spots where I keep stabbing myself. (Which includes my right thigh, the new gloves won’t help with that)