Home / Tag "woodcarving"

Damn dinosaurs

Was watching Conkers Live this week and Stewart Furini was demonstrating spiralling and texturing (something I’d like to have tooling to do more of…) but at one point during the demo, he’d finished some spiralling and had painted and sanded back the piece and this was the result:

It was quite striking at the time and reminded me of something and it took a few minutes to place it:

I don’t have a spiralling tool but I do have carving tools. So I grabbed a blank…

It’s an odd shape, you’re looking at the bottom of the bowl here – I wanted it to fit my hand and to be a little closed over (turned out, it’s a lot closed over). Printed out the scratch marks from a jpg on the web…

Cut those out with a sharp knife, then put cellotape over the sheet and stuck it to the blank, then cut along the edges of the scratches through the cellotape and tidied up afterwards.… Read the rest

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Ah for feck’s sakes…

I only just finished digging that sodding thing out!

*sigh*

And I’ve not been getting much done in there thanks to subzero temperatures and public transport making the work commute into anything up to a six-hour-a-day nightmare (yes, a foot of snow won’t slow down Canada, but Canada spends more on their snow clearing hardware and people than we spend on Varadkar’s Strategic Communications Spin Unit…). Mostly I’ve been putting together new tools for some things I’d like to try, namely stringing and carved arcading. So for the stringing, I already have the dead fancy radius cutter from lie nielson (probably the most bling tool I own), and a small perspex scrap to give it a pivot point when working on some of the usual designs:

But I haven’t got a straight line cutter because I figured I should be able to make one, they’re basically a marking gauge, see the lie nielson one:

Fancy, but basically just a marking gauge.… Read the rest

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More small jobs and practice…

All small jobs today in the shed. Well. Was a bit chilly.

And it was colder before I turned on the heater. Not going to get much better before the end of next week either 🙁 Onwards…

Got my new japanese saw bench hook finished:

Spare offcuts of walnut and plywood, with 19mm dowels from woodies (if you’re in the US, woodies is what Lowe’s would be if they dropped their timber standards significantly and jacked up their prices by 50%). The dowels drop into the bench dog holes:

In theory this would work on any set of two holes, but it turns out there’s just enough variation in spacing that it only works for this pair 🙁 Next time I build a workbench, I’ll be a lot more precise with a few things and dog hole placement is one of them.… Read the rest

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