Finished dragon carving
Whew! This is truly like running a marathon. I think I made it past the “wall” and I’ve reached that runner’s high! I have gotten over that half-way point with about 5 or 6 more 1/2 hour segments to go before the entire Dragon and Acanthus Carving video is edited and fully up on the site. I think it will be close to 8 hours of edited video when completely finished.
I have to say that those of you who have endured through this video alongside me – throwing me bottles of water – rooting me on – thank you! Those of you who have sat through the scraping of the tool, over and over and over – you are truly a tough group of people!
I am curious… has this video helped anybody’s insomnia?? It has certainly helped mine!
Mary,
I have been viewing the carving process and working at cutting out the template for this project. When you are carving and making a video, can you show how you feel a gouge getting dull and how you touch it up? I don’t mean re-sharpening but do you use a strop and rouge or a 6000, 8000 grit water stone and how you go about “touching up” an edge during the carving process? Do you ever use a felt wheel with rouge? I would appreciate seeing this information.
Thanks, Doug Culver
Well, I will try to explain my thoughts on when I need to sharpen tools or just touch them up. Generally when I am roughing out my carving with a mallet, I don’t worry too much about touching the tools up, unless they get to a point where the end of the tools gets roughed up and I can really notice that it is just struggling through the wood. In other words, the mallet will help the gouge get the job done. This technique works amazingly well with harder woods. Softer woods will tend to rip out if the tool gets dull. Obviously it is best to keep the tools sharp for all carving, but this is probably the only time that you can sort of get away with a not-so-sharp tool – if you must…
Pushing the tools through the wood is another story. The best thing to do is to start with a very sharp gouge, so you know how is SHOULD feel to cut through the wood. As you continue to carve you can tell the sharpness by the following:
– you can just feel and sense that it is more difficult to push through the wood
– you might notice that when you try to cut across the grain, the wood tears and splinters
– you may notice little scratch marks in the wood surface
Generally I choose whether to put it to a stone or a strop by how rough the edge gets. If it just starts to feel slightly more difficult to push through the wood, but there is no real roughness along the edge of the tool, I can simply put it to a strop. If there are small nicks that cannot be removed with the strop, that is when I take it to a 1200 grit or 8000 grit stone – depending on how deep these “nicks” are. In other words, how much metal do I need to remove to get the edge clean and sharp again.
I tend to stay away from felt wheels because it can easily round off the corners and I love my fishtail goues with sharp corners. Just be careful because it can also round over the back side of the tool. I have just noticed that it generally softens and rounds the edges and corners of the gouge and leaves it somewhat undefined. If you can control this on your felt wheel, then go for it! I know professional woodcarvers who only use a felt wheel to sharpen their tools, but they also buy all new tools every few years – I love my tools too much to do that! Plus that’s quite an investment.
A good rule of thumb while you are carving is simply strop your gouge on the leather strop about every 1/2 hour of use. This is such a vague “rule” because there are way too many variables involved (hardness of wood, mallet use vs pushing through, etc). But if you have any question of whether you should strop, then strop. It certainly won’t hurt it, and it may make things work a little easier.