Many Mini Santas

Christmas time is a-commin', so I'm starting to stock up on Santas. First up is my 2009 ornament. I try to do a different style of ornament every year. I'll do some of the old ones as well, but I introduce a new one annually.

These guys are carved from 1.5"x1.5"x4" basswood. They are carved "on the corner". that is, they are carved so that the nose is formed from a corner of the block. This is a technique to make getting the curvature of the face easier.

This year I'm also doing a limited edition of 5 sets of 5 different Santa miniatures. This Old World Santa will be the first figure in the sets. These are MINIATURES! They are carved from a 1"x1"x3" block of basswood and are NOT carved on the corner.

Minis are a lot of fun to do. Some people do this size of carving all the time. I tease Tom H all the time about how his carvings are so small I have a hard time seeing them, much less carving at that scale. And Don Mertz, The Woodbee Carver, has a whole "line" of carvings he calls Whittle Folk that are all about this size. This, however, is my first major foray into carving this small. I had to go out and buy some +3 reading glasses just to be able to see what I was doing! Gettin' old is hell, let me tell ya.

The knife is a Ralph E. Long Model WH-9 that I've modified to fit my druthers. The blade is about 1" long, and the point originally continued on up which put the tip of the knife about 3/16ths of an inch above the back of the blade where it joins the handle. That put the tip too high for me to use comfortably, so I took a diamond hone to it. I brought the point back down to where it is even with the back of the blade. This is one rockin' miniature knife!

I'm not real pleased with a couple of these guys. A couple of them are probably going to get recarved before long. Eyes at this scale are a real b. . . . . . challenge.

This next bunch was inspired by Don Mertz, again! He calls them Pin Heads because they are carved from the old-fashioned clothes pins that you can get from Hobby Lobby. I saw his, and I just HAD to try it!

I think the pins are made from beech, but I'm not totally sure. The ones I have are almost as easy to carve as basswood, but the wood is darker and has some dark spots in it. These pins are about 9/16" in diameter. Talk about a challenge! Especially the eyes! Never mind carving them, painting them is the real killer. If you click on the picture you'll see that the eyes on the two red-and-whites on the right are pretty wonky. I either need to make the eyes bigger or get a smaller toothpick (that being what I use to paint the eyes).

If you are interested in talking to Ralph about his knives, his email addy is RELDPL@embarqmail.com

And now for something completely different:

This woodspirit is carved from a birch dowel 1.5" in diameter by 6" long. I'm working on a step-by-step that will appear on this blog real soon now.

Until then, let the chips fly!

Do You Need a Gouge?

Kari Hultman over on The Village Carpenter blog tweeted a question to me asking if I ever use gouges, saying that she had trouble figuring out how to make certain cuts with a knife.

Well, Kari, join the club!

No, I don't use gouges, and sometimes I have a lot of trouble figuring out how to make a cut. It involves a lot of twisting and turning the piece and seeing if the blade will fit and still have enough room to move. All the cuts are easier if you use a slicing action.

The absolute best woodcarving video I've ever seen regarding how to make the various knife cuts is "Figure Carving Scandinavian Style with Harley Refsal". If you want something for free, check out Arleen's videos or Gene Messer's videos on YouTube. Both are excellent carvers and instructors, and both are primarily knife carvers. I spend time watching them when I should be carving!

So, you don't really need gouges to do hand-held carving, but you may sometimes compromise a little on the final look of the piece. Frankly, I think the knife "compromise" looks just as good as a gouge cut.

So, until next time, let the chips fly!

Pocket Knife Mods & Minis

OK, between Arleen's pocket knives and Don Mertz' Tinker Knives I decided I had to modify some pocket knives for carving. Yeah, I'm a knife freak. Any excuse to have another knife to play with is good.

So I went looking for a nice, cheap 3-blade stockman to experiment on. I found it at Sportsman's Warehouse: a Chinese-made stockman under the Winchester brand.

For a $15 knife this one is pretty good. Nice bone handle (or at least it looks like bone); fit and finish are a lot better than I would have expected for a knife of this price. While information on this knife is scant, I suspect that the steel is 420HC. In spite of the bad rap it has among the knife snobs, it's not a bad steel. It's capable of being hardened to a 57 on the Rockwell C scale (HRC57 or 57RC), which is about the minimum hardness you want in a carving knife. By the way, don't fall for the hoary old salesman's pitch that a knife holds an edge for a long time is also easy to resharpen. The knife that holds its edge a long time does so because the steel is hard. Hard steel is tough to resharpen. Period. End of story.

In any case 420HC has the compromise of being hard enough to give decent service without being too dificult to resharpen. Now, when you think about it, about the only time you should sharpen a carving knife is when you do physical damage to the blade. Normally stropping the blade about every half-hour or so during use should be about all the sharpening you need to do. I have some knives I haven't taken a stone to in almost two years.

To make a long story short (too late!) I wasn't too worried about the steel. I was more worried about the springs: that they were strong enough to keep the blades from closing too easily. Keep in mind that 99% of 3-blade stockman knives have no locking blades. Now since I never saw a locking blade knife until I was out of college, I know how to use a slipjoint knife safely. Slipjoints may not be a good choice for a knife novice. Nah, strike that. I was 8 years old when I got my first knife, and it was a slipjoint. I never had the knife close on my fingers (came close a couple of times; the accellerated heartbeat reminded me not to do that again). Become acquainted with the knife, opening and closing it until your fingers hurt. Then take small cuts and never try to force the blade through the wood. You'll be fine.

The blades you see in the photo above are not how they came from the factory. I used Arleen's method of sharpening to regrind the blades. Like virtually every factory knife that wasn't made in Scandinavia, the blades had a secondary bevel. I used 5" sanding disks in an electric drill to grind the sides of the blades to as near a straight line as I could get from the back of the knife to the edge. I started with 220-grit wet-dry sandpaper to do the main grinding, holding the blade to the sandpaper for a couple of seconds, the dipping the blade in a cup of ice water to keep the steel from overheating, then grinding again. I did this until the secondary bevel was gone. Then I sanded each blade with 400-grit, then 800-grit to take the scratches out. I finished off by stropping. I made the strop from a 5" circle cut from the back of a pad of yellow paper, used spray adhesive to mount it to the sanding pad, and loaded it with green polishing compound. I was able to get a very high polish on all the blades.

Then I got out the Dremel. With a grinding stone. The single blade on the left was a rather exaggerated spey pattern. I have come to really like the big sweep/sharp point profile, so I modified the blade to that profile. Touch blade to stone, dip blade in ice water, and repeat. At 30,000 rpm even that method doesn't take long. The shorter blade on the right started out as a sheepsfoot pattern. I'm slowly working it into a Wharncliffe. I left the main clip blade the same profile, though at 2.5" it is longer than I like. Once I get the Wharncliffe profile where I want it, I'll probably work on shortening the clip blade.

One more thing before I tell you the results so far, if you choose to do this, expect to have the blade edge roll on you the first time you use it. That's because the steel isn't hard enough to support the scandi-type edge at such an acute angle. A couple of good stroppings will put enough of a micro bevel on it so that the edge won't roll.

So, how did it work? I used the ex-spey blade to do these two 3" tall Santas. In case you can't tell, one of them isn't finished. The knife worked like a champ! It's not a Ralph Long knife, but it's usable.

I gotta tell ya, carving these little guys scares the peewaddin outa me! (That was a phrase of my mother's, a genteel Southern lady by all accounts; if someone could tell me what "peewaddin" is (come on, Thomp, Tom, Gene), I'd greatly appreciate it.) Not because I'm afraid I'll get cut. Got over that a LONG time ago, but because taking off a 5-thousandths of an inch shaving (yes, I measured; I'm an engineer; get over it) in the wrong place could be enough to convert a nice little miniature into fire . . . . um, kindling. Maybe once I've done 1000 of them, like Tom, I'll get over bein' afeerd.

Until next time, let the chips fly!

A Tale of Two Santas -- Continued

OK, I'm not sure whether Blogger is behaving itself better tonight or not, but here goes.

These are some in-process photos I took of the second Santa you saw yesterday. For the most part I'm going to let the photos speak for themselves. If you have any questions about any of them, just leave a comment, and I'll do my best to answer.

Now this last photo is to show the versatility of the Long knife. I carve both of these Santas, one 3" tall and one 6" tall, using only the Long knife. I'll have more about the little guy later. Until then, let the chips fly!

A Tale of Two Santas, or Practice Makes . . . um . . . Better

I was talking with Don Mertz, The Woodbee Carver, about the shortcomings of my Old World Santa, the guy on the left with the lantern and the staff. It started out with a discussion of how to make a normally sober-sided old world Santa into a smiling Santa. I worked that out with Don's help and carved the guy on the left. I wasn't satisfied with the hands and arms. I always carve the hands too small. Don advised me to jump right in and carve another OWS and consiously try to make the hands too big. Thus, the guy on the right. This was my first attempt at doing hands with fingers. Turned out OK, I think. Hands still aren't big enough, but I'm getting there.

I learned something else while doing the second OWS. Actually I knew it all along, I just had never made it happen before. Compare the two profiles, particularly the nose and below. The first guy, on the left, I did as I have done all of my figures before: I made a straight, deep cut into the corner of the block to define the bottom of the nose. As I have mentioned before the face in profile should have approximately half of the nose behind where the filtrum (goove in the middle of the upper lip) and the septum (division between the two nostrils) meet. You can clearly see that this does not occur in OWS #1 due to the way I started the nose. On OWS #2, instead of cutting straight back, I cut into the corner less deeply and rocked the blade from side to side making deeper cuts on either side of the corner. This allows for the establishment of the dental mound prior to any detail carving and makes proper placement of the nose easier.

I had intended to make this post longer, with in-process photos, but Blogger is acting hinky, so I'll post what I have now and continue the post tomorrow.

Meantime, let the chips fly!

Magical Knives, or Wish in One Hand . . . .

Back a couple of weeks ago on "Beginner's Carving Corner and Beyond", Tom Hines asked the musical question, "Does anyone have any magical knives?" Or something similar. I responded that I had a box full of magical knives, whereupon he responded with another post laying out a list of qualities that a magical knife might have. He must have been reading my mind!

As background for all this, let me start up the Wayback Machine and take you back in time about 15 years. This happened in Albuquerque. It was a lovely spring day, and I made the ill-considered decision to take my wife with me to an outdoors carving show on the University of New Mexico campus. There were a lot of excellent carvers there, but I only remember one. He was in his mid-thirties, I'd guess, and was a wonderful carver. We complemented his work, and I asked him what kind of knives he used. He snapped open a beat-up leather pouch on his belt and pulled out an old Buck Folding Hunter. The original 4-inch blade had been sharpened down to a little less than half that size. It was now an odd shape that I couldn't begin to describe. "This is it," he said. "This is the only knife I use. It does everything I need it to do." That was his magic knife. We'll come back to him a little later.

These are the first of my magical knives.They are called "Harley" knives. They are made and sold by Del Stubbs of Pinewood Forge. They start off life as a Frost's Pattern #122 from Sweden. Del takes them and regrinds the blade from a 20 degree angle down to a 12 degree angle. They are made specifically for Scandinavian Flat Plane carving in basswood and are named after Harley Refsal, probably the foremost practitioner of SFP carving on the North American Continent. For their purpose these knives are truly magical. They drift through basswood with hardly any drag at all. But don't use them to pry and don't use them on anything harder than butternut. Those edges will kink at the least excuse. I know! But for carving Uncle Ira up there, they are worth their weight in gold.

These are a couple of knives made by Carl Johnson. They are magical because they allow me to carve Celtic knots without a scroll saw. All I have to do is drill a 1/8" diameter hole, and I'm off to the races. They are not so magical for removing large amounts of wood, however. Sorry, Carl.

Here's another pair of Del Stubbs knives that I consider magical. These are his regular sloyd and his short sloyd. He also makes a straight sloyd, a skinny sloyd and an extra long sloyd. I wish he'd quit coming up with new knives. I already have a drawer with nothing but his knives in it. If he makes any more, I'm going to have to clean out another drawer for the overflow! These knives are sharp and pointy without being delicate. They are perfect for wood spirits and spoons.

Now here is my latest magical knife. It's made by Ralph E. Long and is called the WH-8. I was introduced to this knife by Don Mertz, the Woodbee Carver. After seeing the post where he used this knife alone to carve a very detailed pirate, I had to give it a try. I carved that Santa using only the Long knife. The blade is whisper thin. I measured 58-thousands of an inch thick at the handle and tapers to nothing at the edge and the point. If the Harley knives drift through basswood, this Long knife (I LOVE saying that!) falls through it. And like the Harley knives, don't twist, don't flick, don't pry! But the shape of the blade is what makes it magical. I could do things with this knife I didn't think were possible. It excells at getting into tight spots. Plus the curvature of the blade keeps the heel of the edge out of the way when you are using the point, and keeps the point out of the way when you are using the heel. A wonderful knife -- as long as you don't try to use it on maple.

Well, I promised you that we'd come back to that New Mexico carver with the Buck Folding Hunter, and here we are. Remember I said I'd made an ill-considered decision to bring my wife along to the carving show? Ever since that day, about every three weeks on average, she says to me, "Why do you need all these knives? Why can't you do like that guy in New Mexico and just use one knife?"

Within the answer to that question lies the point of this whole ramble. You can be a one-knife carver if all you do is one style of carving. If you want to do SFP and wood spirits and spoons and Welsh lovespoons and want to do them with the minimum amount of frustration, you need more than one knife. Because there is no one, magical, do-all knife.

So indulge yourselves. Go out and buy 20 or 30 knives. You'll feel better!

Until next time, let the chips fly!

Of Faces. And Hair. And Hair on Faces.

So, here we are again talking about faces. Faces are endlessly fascinating. Human beings are, for one reason or another, hardwired to see faces in the most simplistic forms, i.e., :). This gives the carver virtually unlimited license in how to do them. And with all that I still find myself qvetsching about stuff I do.

I'm going to show you two similar Santa busts. (I REALLY have to start remembering to take photos during the WHOLE process of carving.) The first is one I did a couple of months ago.

Now, I'm pretty happy with this guy. The eyes are the most stylized part of his face, but they don't look bad.

This Santa, I've just finished. I'm not so happy with his eyes. Unfortunately I didn't see it until I had painted the piece. (That happens more often than I'd like.)

I know exactly why the eyes don't do it for me. They are too low in the face. In most human faces the eye is farther up on the slope of the eye socket so that the lower eyelid extends deeper into the face than the upper. Also the open eye isn't round enough.

I know. Qvetsch, complain, bitch, and moan! It's not perfect, but it's pretty good, overall.

I don't do this to elicit sympathy. "Ach, Bobby, Bobby. 'Tis nae s'bad." (I must be channeling John!) I do it to show other carvers (you, maybe?) that such things are not fatal flaws. I have no doubt that this guy will sell just as fast as the first one did.

But here I would like to get your opinions on the beard. The beard on the first Santa I did with my knife. On the second Santa I textured the beard with a small gouge. Which of the two do you like better? Please leave a comment to let me know what you think.

As one last illustration of my inability to see things before they're painted, I offer a mini-mask I did.

The mouth is great. The nose and chin, I'm happy with. I considered this to be the best face I've ever done. Until I started painting in the pupils. One eye is higher than the other. D'oh!

Oh, well. It probably is still the best face I've ever done. So far.

So I hope I've helped some of you to understand that perfection is not required. You can always change it on the next one!

Until next time, let the chips fly!