Really enjoyed . Now can make armour for knights that ive been playing with. Filled 2 sheets of 6 x 12 basswood with the different cuts . Makes life easyer to see how they are done. Thanks
Ps tried cuting down to a thinner board was 3/8 inch took it to a bit less than a 1/4 inch tried to steam the wood to see if i could shape it after the carving was done . Did not work cracked at the cuts thought it might but worth the try . Will shape the wood first then carve.
The next question would be can you use a clay or some type of pad to hold the wood firm after bending it . Ive been using a heavy foam but still a bit wobble. . Not sure where this is going but have a few ideas . If nothing else it fun trying different things.
Some thoughts on using the patterns. I enlarged the patterns to 200% and made several copies of each half. What I wanted to do was to lay the mirror on the back of each mirror half so that I could position the mirror comfortably with a reasonable amount of wood between the edge of the mirror and the edge of the wood. Then trace around the mirror ready to cut the recess. I did this with the V chisel and flat chisel. I advise other makers to take some time to figure out what is happening here with these patterns back to back. I made several copies and lay one over top of the other taking time to align and trace the whole pattern on both halves. Don't get in a rush here – take time to get it figured out. Just saying as I messed up a couple of times.
OK I have made good progress with this project as I have the whole shape both sides roughed out and will be working on the smoothing and adding the grooves that wrap around the various parts. One thing I did find out is that the mirrors come in various styles. Michael's does not always carry all the styles. I started with a flat backed set of mirrors which were too small. When back a and could only find the 5" dia mirrors with a profiled edge. I just made the recess a little deeper
Hi Ian, Thanks for that information about the mirrors. Sometimes these mirrors will need to be purchased online from a specialty shop, and then you can have them custom cut to the exact size you want.
I'm curious about grain considerations in your glue--up, even most of your cuts will cross-grain, right? Were any of the blanks edge-laminated in order to get a large enough piece to cut out the radius, especially for the four pieces at the front of the piece?
They were all laminated in the same direction - as simple as it could get. When I carved all the flutes, they were mostly across the end grain at the outer edge of the shell (start of the flute cut) and as the flutes curved towards the center fleur de lis design, the cuts were more along the flatter grain. The nice part about this was that no cuts on the flutes were against the grain. Carving across the end grain works fine, as long as you have very sharp gouges. The only part where I really had to consider grain direction was the Fleur de Lis, but that was simply like carving a regular fleur de lis design across a flat board. The biggest challenge there was carving it inside a bowl. The walls of the shell sometimes got in the way of accessing certain areas.
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