Thread: Carving Tools: Couple of Questions

Originally Posted by Luke Maddux

I've ordered Mary May's book, "Carving the Acanthus Leaf". This isn't a motif in which I have a tremendous amount of interest, but the book is well reviewed, and I think that it offers a lot of learning opportunity. I'll probably start by buying the tools for the respective projects in the book and eventually get more as I progress through the projects. When I feel like I've reached a point in the book where I'm ready to step outside it, I'll buy the tools appropriate for the Newport shell, the Ball and Claw, etc.

This will be the closest thing I've ever done to taking a class, but I think that I need it for this skill. I've mentioned this in posts before, but I'm not even really sure that I can do this... like EVER. I've never been great at drawing things, and that's half the battle with carving.

Hi Luke
my first carving project was a convex scallop shell, one of Mary's on-line lessons, that requires just 5 tools -- a 22mm #1, a 14mm and 18mm #3, and a 3mm and 6mm 60 degree V chisel.
In terms of drawing the shape, it's amazing what can be achieved with a photo copier (or scanner and printer) and pencil carbon paper. You just trace the shape you want to carve onto the wood.

Originally Posted by Luke Maddux

This will be the closest thing I've ever done to taking a class, but I think that I need it for this skill. I've mentioned this in posts before, but I'm not even really sure that I can do this... like EVER. I've never been great at drawing things, and that's half the battle with carving.

But we shall see...

I'll post a progress report some day. In the meantime thanks for the help and if anyone thinks of anything more to offer let me know!

Well, here’s two things to think about.
Firstly, carving is an easy skill to master. I know that sounds improbable, especially when you see so many people try and fail, but it is. To reveal how easy it is there are three things you must get right - properly right. The three things are
1. Very sharp - unbelievably sharp - carving tools
2. A good carving timber. Dedicated carving timbers are soft yet stiff.
3. An effective way to hold your work. You need to hold it securely yet be able to always present it at the right angle.
Most people don’t get these three things sorted before they start, so of course they are doomed to fail. Usually they don’t bother sourcing a dedicated carving timber so they try to chop away at a piece of pine in a woodworking vice - an experience so awful that almost no one could make a succes of it.

I suggest get some Jelutong. It’s probably the softest carving timber that can still hold good detail. Beginners should use soft timber - almost all the skills you need for carving (3d visualisation, proper hand movements, tool selection etc) are exactly the same whether the timber is soft or hard. Remove the effort of pushing tools into hard wood and you can concentrate on the technicalities.

Don’t use a soft timber like western red cedar though. It’s too splitty/stringy in the hard bits and spongy in the soft bits.

Avoid crumbly timbers. Good carving timbers are soft but still stiff - in fact they will crackle as your blade slices through them. I can’t advise further because I don’t know what you can access where you are.

Secondly, on the drawing thing.

Take a look at a post of mine about using your iPad or phone as a Camera-Lucida for layout lines
Useful ap for layout lines in carving

really, though, you should rethink self-beliefs like that you can’t draw.

For 50 years I told myself I couldn’t draw and every time I sat down to try I proved that was right.

Eventually I needed to draw so badly that I decided to just do it, but persist way beyond the point at which I had previously been discouraged into stopping, and see what happened.

I figured I would just keep at it, and the only thing that was important was that I was making marks on paper - without making judgements on how good they were.

That’s the hard bit- in the early period don’t make judgements, just understand that those awful squiggles are a necessary part of the learning experience.

I figured it would take weeks, or months, for some germ of ability to show through.

In fact, it only took a day or two to get to the point where I was happy with the result.

At that point I wasn’t doing masterworks - just simple line drawings of birds and fish and bits of people. Usually from an illustration, but within a few more hours from memory.

I now consider myself a capable but unimaginative and not particularly artistic drawer, which is ok by me.

The funny thing is I still don’t like doing it. The strong feelings of self doubt and inadequacy that I had associated with my ‘inability to draw’ have persisted long after the proof to the contrary, so I’m still tense and conflicted when I sketch.

Cheers
Arron

Well the work holding isn't a problem. I have a great workbench with a lot of options.

The sharpness thing with regard to carving tools is a bit of a mystery to me. I don't know any serious carvers in person, and the few I hear from on here tend to make comments like "there's sharp, then there's 'carving' sharp". A big part of me wants to raise an eyebrow and dismiss that in a manner similar to how I dismiss the whole "my wood is harder than your wood" commentary, i.e. just as another sub-group of woodworkers having their "thing" that they tout, but another part of me finds myself drawn back to a feeling I haven't had in a while, which is one of "are my tools as sharp as they should be".

I know I can get a plane iron sharp enough to plane highly figured wood against the grain at shaving thicknesses around a thousandth of an inch, and that's without stropping. The last time I just flat out blew it sharpening a plane iron or a chisel was years ago. I can get a profiled moulding plane just as sharp. I consider myself to be a very pedantic sharpener with fairly over-the-top attention to detail, and, from what I can tell, my tools are as sharp or moreso than anyone I know.

The carving tools I have (yeah, I've got a couple already. I've carved some spoons.) are stropped regularly, possibly obsessively, before, during, and after any carving, and I think they cut great. I've never felt like I was lacking control or that the tool was any more difficult to push than the day I bought it. I don't really have anyone's tools to compare them to though. If I get a Pfeil tool out of the package from the factory, strop it on the green compound, and then set to work, is that the level of "unbelievably" sharp you're talking about? In other words, what is my baseline when it comes to keeping carving tools sharp?

I have quite a lot of Queensland White Beech here with me in Seattle. I also have around a cubic meter of Australian Red Cedar. I don't really want to hack up all of my imported stock for practice, but I may end up using some of it. Would you consider those two to be good woods to learn on? My understanding is that White Beech is among the best carving woods in Aus and can hold its own against anything in the world.

I don't think I'll be able to source Jelutong. That's one I've never seen or heard mentioned in the states. I'm not sure it makes it this way very often, but I could be wrong.

I hear you on the drawing thing, and I'm sure you're right. Aside from developing a taste for beetroot (wretched stuff...), there have been few things in this world that I have been completely unable to at least KIND OF get a handle on with some perseverance, so I'll figure that one out eventually.

Thanks a lot for all of the advice.

Cheers,
Luke

I’m sure your sharpening skills will be more then adequate. The way the average Pfeil comes from the factory - that’s a pretty good baseline. If you can deliver that when you need it then you will be good to go.

On timber,

I’ve tried carving red cedar a bit and thought it was mediocre. Spongy/stringy.

The white beech is probably a good to start. It’s a bit more variable then Jelutong in terms of hardness, and tends to be a bit fuzzy after sanding, but for learning it’s good.

i bought some bass (limewood) once, and it was very good to carve - but just too expensive here to be serious about. Maybe it’s affordable in the US.

otherwise, I don’t know much about what is available to you.

Fwiw, something carved in Jelutong or whitebeech would be too soft for genuine ornamental carving as it won’t stand up to the continual knocks that furniture gets in daily use. I’m just recommending these for the learning process.

Long-term, ornamental carving is obviously done on the underlying furniture timber, so when you have gained some experience it will be a case of moving on to mahogany, walnut, oak, cherry or whatever else local fine furniture is made from.

You are right about beetroot.

The truth is that in the old days when a carver would be doing a certain pattern every day for a while & then might alternate with a few different patterns after a while - he certainly would want tools that fitted the profiles of his carving exactly - he needed to work fast & super efficiently !

BUT as a beginner it would be mad to buy more than half a dozen chisels & gouges , buy the highest quality is a good rule.
Then with that selection you can carve many different profiles , you do not need the exact size & shape of gouge to cut a given convex OR concave shape, instead it can be made with a very small but carefully chosen selection.
Then when you repeatedly really feel the need to get a new shape - then buy it.
Experience in carving will teach you what you need & want to carve.

Originally Posted by Arron

.......I’ve tried carving red cedar a bit and thought it was mediocre. Spongy/stringy.

The white beech is probably a good to start. It’s a bit more variable then Jelutong in terms of hardness, and tends to be a bit fuzzy after sanding, but for learning it’s good......

Arron, Toona is a very variable wood, as I'm sure you're aware. Most of what you are likely to get now is as you described, unfortunately, but if you can get 'good' old-growth, dense stuff, it can be pretty good to carve, cutting crisply & taking good detail. Elvin Harvey, who was no mean carver, used a lot of it in his day. He used to recommended White Beech for carving, both relief & in the round. Again, you need to be choosy but the choice is much more limited than it once was, so good luck finding a really good piece. I think I have a bit of the W.B. Luke took home with him & I'd rate it pretty good for carving, but not brilliant. I've got a few boards from another source & I'd rate them "poor". I used some of the latter material to make a small cabinet, and it worked well enough, soft, but nowhere near as soft as Toona. Looked a bit bland, but polished up very nicely & has a subtle, fine fiddleback figure which enhances it a bit.

Basswood/Linden is what Grinling Gibbons favoured, and he certainly managed to get it to hold 'detail'! It was pretty freely available in Eastern US & Canada when I lived there, but it may no longer be, & Seattle is a long ways from the east.....

Cheers,

Luke: if you are in Seattle, you are maybe 4-5 days away from the best carving wood in the USA: Northern basswood. I, and many woodcarvers I know, buy basswood from Heinecke Heinecke Wood Products The wood holds detail well, has no hard/soft/hard/soft/... grain structure and is the preferred wood by most good carvers in the US.

Claude

Basswood from Heineke is just about the gold standard for detailed carvings in North America.
They know where to source the best of the best.

Western Red Cedar is never considered "mediocre", once you learn your woods.
It is used for the massive carvings common to the Pacific Northwest native community (and many others, like myself).
WRC cannot hold detail so don't expect miracles. Use Jelutong or Camphor Laurel instead.

Robson,

When he said Red Cedar was mediocre, he was talking about Australian Red Cedar. It's a very soft member of the mahogany family. Probably the foremost cabinet wood of the colonial period in mainland Australia.

What are your thoughts on Redwood, Sequioa, or any of the other conifers of the Pacific Northwest?

Cheers,
Luke

I've seen pictures of the Australian Red Cedar. Color that we can only dream about.
Did not know that the wood has poor mechanical properties.

I live in the ICH (Interior Cedar-Hemlock) biogeoclimatic zone. Not as wet as the outer coast but the western red cedar is all around me.
I really enjoy carving both Yellow Cedar (Chamycyparis nootkatensis) and the Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata).
You just have to learn to ignore any hope for carved details. Any ring counts in the 15-40/inch will be good.
Most Pacific Northwest native carvings reflect this lack of fine detail.
For detail, alder and birch are the most common local selections.

That ring count parameter appears to apply to the pines, spruces and firs, as well.
I would very much like to try carving red wood & sequoia.
Given the similarities in the wood anatomy, I'm sure they would be a lot like WRC.

Originally Posted by Robson Valley

I've seen pictures of the Australian Red Cedar. Color that we can only dream about.
Did not know that the wood has poor mechanical properties.

I don't think I'd go as far as to call it poor. I can't speak from the POV of a person with decades of experience, but I know that in my time in Aus it had become difficult to find quality examples of it. It's a fast growing, native tree when you plant it in an open area, so it's been grown outside its favored environment for long enough that there's an abundance of the "second generation" stuff about, as well as one notable "impostor" species, and, as a result, it's lost some of its prestige. In the early days of English colonization, it was known as "Red Gold", and if you do a bit of Googling you'll see that it's' perfectly capable of being carved with detail and used in the finest quality cabinet work when you have a decent (forest grown) piece of it.

Anyway, that aside, thanks for the heads up on what to look for in the PNW.

Cheers,
Luke

Before we go any further in this discussion i should point out that I judged the timbers I mentioned in terms of;

Their usefulness to a beginner, who is naturally trying to stack the odds of success in his favour.

Their usefulness for ornamental carving.

‘Ornamental carving’ is the sub genre of carving which involves adding carved surface detail to fine furniture. Naturally, the main selection criteria for the timber is its usefulness as a fine cabinetmaking timber, and it’s suitability for carving is a distant second. So if you are making a cedar table, you end up carving cedar, no choice there. And if you are a half-competent carver you will do a fine job too, after all, you can carve anything in any timber you want if you are so motivated. My point is that it may not have been the best timber to get a user up to speed quickly without succumbing to frustration.

Again, the selection of timber for other genres of carving may be quite different. If carving totem poles, I’d be looking for something cheap and very weather resistant. Then I would think about it’s carving attributes. I’d probably use an old power pole, I think.

Once the beginner has learnt the basics using a soft timber, it’s time to move on to a cabinet timber. After all, no-one ever made a dining table out of Jelutong, white beech or basswood. FWIW, the timbers that I find best combine qualities for both carving and cabinetmaking are mahogany and teak. Good, old growth mahogany is a dream.

All very good points, Arron & well-said, but I wouldn't dismiss Gmelina ('White Beech') as too soft for furniture. Like any wood, it's variable, so perhaps I've just been lucky and struck denser stuff - it came mostly from higher altitudes, so like Toona, the cooler the climate, the denser the wood, perhaps?? I've used it for furniture and would rate it as fair to good to work, & certainly a lot tougher than most of the Toona you're likely to encounter nowadays. It was valued for boat decking, but I suppose that was primarily for its weather resistance. My main objection would be that it's a bit too bland for anything fancy.

Originally Posted by Arron

...... FWIW, the timbers that I find best combine qualities for both carving and cabinetmaking are mahogany and teak. Good, old growth mahogany is a dream.....

Amen to the Mahogany - it wasn't known as the king of cabinet woods for nothing! But there are a lot of close seconds, like Qld Maple and Black Walnut, and many more, I'm sure. So many woods, so little time.......

Cheers,