Thread: Egg and Dart Moulding

Nice one mate
gotta love bunnings for carving wood

I guessed that you worked from left to right. The depth of relief became deeper as you became bolder(?) and more confident. I'd be happy to wrap the RH end work around a painting. I use a depth gauge to try (!!) to keep things even. On my vernier caliper, there's a spine or stem that slides out of the skinny end when I open the jaws. The extension matches the reading for the width of the jaw gap. Quite useful.

Did you finish each egg & dart before moving on? I ask as I wonder if doing all the eggs then all the darts (whatever)
would have evened out the appearance. I'm carving a turtle, the body is approx 60cm x 40cm x 12cm. I've been sort of working on the upper and lower scale patterns at random = some carving here, some carving there. Next with the depth gauge, I've amazed myself by getting the whole thing to look quite even.

NZ - Thanks for the comments, I am always surprised when Bunnings turns out to be useful for something...

RV - I did in fact carve each subcomponent first for the whole line, if that makes sense. You may see the pencil marks where I stepped off the repetitive divisions (which from memory are equal to the radius of the ovolo). After that I cut all the left hand stop cuts for the egg, then the right hand stop cuts, then carved each egg 'in the round' then started with the dart components and so on. I did this because the book said to but I can see how it minimises on tool changes and helps with consistency and efficiency (I guess they used to do miles of this stuff so saving a couple of seconds here and there adds up).

I wouldn't describe the process of getting bolder with each attempt but more a case of slowly discovering how the tool has to be moved to give the shape you visualise/desire, sort of an 'aha' process. Whilst the book describes each step there is necessarily a lot of fine detail that can't be written down and it is this detail that I discover by slowly doing. Chris doesn't have a video of this particular moulding so unfortunately I wasn't able to watch someone carve it - that always makes it a lot easier, for me at least. He does have a complete video of a waterleaf moulding and I would like to have a go at that but it requires a different cross section (an astragal or something like that) and the hardware store didn't stock any and I don't have the means to create it myself. I'll keep looking though.

Will you share photos of the turtle with us?

Cheers

Derek

Howdy Yxoc,

Very nice....good symmetry.



Buck.

Buck,
Thanks for the kind words and welcome to the forums.

Derek