The Carving Class is winding down...

The WoodCarving class taught by Dennis Patchett ended this week - it was so much fun that we added one extra class to the schedule. Here's one of his linenfold panels, he probably whipped this up in an afternoon!

There was definitely a nice vibe in the shop, with everyone in their own zone. 

Look what John made!

One of the nicest things about this class is that Dennis brought a tool chest full of his amazing chisels -  so everyone had a chance to use tools that they might only see in specialty catalogs.

And by the end of class, everyone thoroughly understood how to use this buffing wheel. 

Mike was by far the most productive carver, coming up with all of these designs during the class. 

M is for.... ? 

He's an amazing carver.

Here are some random shots of everyone working.

They make it look easy, right? Well - truth is - it's incredibly hard to do, as you really have to develop an "eye" to see what to leave and what to cut away. The good news is - by the end of this class, their eyes were getting much more developed. 

Even though this video is in Italian, you'll get the idea of what's involved in carving something like the panel shown below. 

The mania of perfection -inset pulls, carved fronts and a fear of commitment...

It's not often that I get so obsessed about something.  I've been screwing around with "the perfect" drawer front for a dresser I've been working on, not able to decide what I want to carve on the drawer fronts. Spending some time in Hawaii recently has my head filled with visions of tribal artwork, and I've been playing around with designs for weeks. Ugh, I've always regarded a carving design like marriage - once you commit, you're committed, right? 

So I've been having appropriate fear of commitment feelings with these drawer fronts. 

I'm not a huge fan of hardware in drawer fronts - I feel like knobs or pulls distract from the piece. Or - at least - they distract me. I decided to play around with an inset pull, to see if I liked the effect on these drawer fronts. 

Inset pulls utilize the face of the drawer to create a recess, eliminating the need for a knob. I grabbed a piece of scrap - to test a idea I've had rolling around in my head. 

I drew a few lines on the scrap, the same size was the actual drawer face,  

and then went to the mortiser. I want this inset pull to be diamond-shaped, so I rotated the 3/4" mortising bit

to 45 degrees. 

All lined up -

and drilled. 

You need two different router bits to complete the pull - a cove bit for the back of the pull,

which makes this cut. 

And a small roundover for the front. 

 Which gives you this result. 

 I've rounded over the top edges of the diamond, but the bearing on the router bit doesn't really allow the bit to get too close to the corners. Still - I could envision what the drawer face was going to look like - so I decided to try again, this time with an actual piece of oak, not scrap.

I cut a small piece,. 

and went through the same process.

Practice really does make perfect.

Rounded over and waiting to the corners to be squared by hand.

Yup, that's pretty much what I could see in my head. I wonder if other woodworkers have visions of things before they actually make them. 

Finally - my goal is to carve a small area around those inset pulls - just a simple set of triangles, sort of randomly placed. My mind kept pulling me back to some simple tribal design, almost as if these triangles were carved with a simple pocketknife, a little crude and imperfect.

I cut some small triangles out of masonite, and started playing with their placement. 

Once I was satisfied with the layout, I drew directly on the wood. 

The carving has commenced! 

Next time I write about this, I hope to be able to show some pictures of the finished piece. I'm ready to move onto the next project!

The Secret of Trees

What a terrific little video! 

Shake your (Dj)Bouti....

Once you get a catchy song in your head, it's hard to get it out. Right? 

Shake, shake, shake....

That has nothing whatsoever with this post. 

When someone brought this hand-carved table to my shop for repair, and told me it was from Djbouti, my head started playing an endless loop of this song inside. When you're trapped working in a shop all day, it's easy to get silly about stuff like this; I make no apologies for this.

The good news? What a cool table - carved from a SOLID LOG - the top and base are all one piece. Can you imagine the skill it takes to carve this from one log? 

There was one slight problem - Djbouti is way more humid than Las Vegas, and when the table was transported here - it started losing moisture. 

Within a month, huge cracks started developing. 

In fact, one whole area broke off.

This table needed some TLC.

We had a discussion about the table - and the chance that - given its construction and the moisture content of the log, this table was probably going to continue cracking.

Our best remedy was to separate the base from the top. The owner of the table decided that he would put a glass top on the base, which would probably remain stable and not crack any more. 

And the top? I would try to repair it - and turn it into a wall piece. 

I pulled out a thin kerf flexible saw and separated the top from the base. I rocked it with my wood-awesome-ness, because - honestly, you can't even tell the table top was once attached!  The base actually looks better separated!  

I touched up the tops of the three elephant trunks with a bit of sandpaper, testing the three points for "flatness" on my table saw top. Once it was perfectly flat, I stained the wood to match the rest.  Phase one - completed!

The table top  - now that's another story! It was in horrible shape - in fact, it's not very often that I say this - but I wasn't even sure I was going to be able to restore it. Then I remembered - a while back, my buddy Eddie gave me a set of burn-in shellac sticks. 

And a burn-in knife. 

Truth be told - I had to pull up a video on YouTube to see how these are supposed to be used. I think I learned about these in college, a hundred years ago. 

One of the really helpful tips I learned was that the knife - if it's never been used - needs a little TLC. I lightly touched up the edges of it on some 400 grit paper, to eliminate any burrs. 

The set of burn-in sticks supply you with just about every color you'll need for a repair. And the good news is - you can mix them together to create custom colors. 



Basically, you plug in the knife until it heats up, and then melt a dab of the shellac onto the blade. I found it easiest to to this while the blade was flat, so I could mix the colors together onto it - like a small palette. 

Turn the knife sideways and the shellac drips down onto the tip of the knife, where you can direct the flow where you want it. They recommend that you use a shade to match the lightest color of the area you're repairing - but when I did that, it was too light and didn't match well at all. 



A piece of blue tape acted like a dam, stopping the flow of shellac at the edge.

When the shellac cooled, I peeled off the tape and worked on smoothing out the shellac. 

It took a few sessions to fill these cracks with the correct color - but the end result was WAY worth it.

 You can barely spot the cracks in the wood.

  Seriously - can you see them?

I don't often do repairs like this one, and I find them to be very stressful! I did a little dance around the woodshop (Shake, shake, shake....) when this repair was complete!