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Chop chop

Baby blanket chestWoodcarvingWoodworking

So V-tool work done, time for the vertical gouge chops that make up the design on the box. After ten minutes of sharpening and stoning and stropping of course.

Chops one and two. I kindof wanted this to be more pointy at the top, but I didn’t have a gouge of the right curvature and size. Anyway, do this for all the boards...

Yes, you need the Peltors. Small shed, loud echos. On to the next gouge and chops three through six…

Yeah, the size of that central lobe looks a bit off. Well, we’ll see. Why the clamps and greaseproof paper? Because on a few gouge chops, the top later of the oak fractured (I bet Peter Follansbee doesn’t have to put up with this), and out came one of the more used tools in the shed…

How often is it used?… Read the rest

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Resin results and carving again

Baby blanket chestDesk ShelfWoodcarving
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Woodworking

So the resin tests came out pretty damn good. The idea of putting the reflector under the resin worked quite well, and most of the colours came out well (the crimson guitars stains didn’t really pop but that was more down to the dark background – the way the red especially looked over the reflector suggests it’d be lovely over poplar).

Crimson guitars stains in walnut

Calum picked out a few he liked as well (the ones with crosses beside them in pen). So now I’m just picking out designs to do for the various parts of the desk, shelves and sides. I need to print a few out and find some transfer paper, then some will be done by inlay and some with resin and some with a mix.… Read the rest

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Testing resin pigments

Desk ShelfWoodworking

So, like I said last time, there’s going to be some resin in the desk shelves for Calum. Because, you know seven year old clients, they’re all about the bright colours. And the North Atlantic. So, onto ebay and ordered 3kg of clear resin (I won’t need that much, but I want to do other stuff too…) and then pigments… well, Peter Brown had a “using household things for resin pigments” so I thought I’d try lidl acrylic and tempura paints and some other stuff…

And I also was thinking walnut is dark so any resin is going to look like it’s in a hole in the ground, but there’ll be an LED light above the walnut shelf, so what if I had a reflector under the resin? So I got some of the one-way reflective window film as well…

So I had some offcuts and scraps of walnut and poplar from the sides and desk and I routed out a few pockets in it, put that window film into half of them…

…and then just started making up small batches of acrylic (around 100-150g per batch) and mixing in pigments and then pouring into four pockets so I could see each pigment in both woods, with and without the reflector.… Read the rest

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