A (rare these days) workday evening half-hour in the shed, so onto the side panels.
End vice, does’ foot, holdfast, all the hold-it-down-on-a-flat-surface tools I have and it still jumps about if I’m carving towards the edge of the bench. Now I know why Peter Follansbee nails his work down to a large pine board before carving.
The joys of having a lot of good material and elbow room 😀
Still, the new gouges did well enough, the carving was a bit easier than before. One didn’t hold its edge too well though; I might have burned the steel on that one. I’ll have to take it back to the stones and rehone this weekend. For now, well, no point sharpening a dozen gouges if you only ever use one.
Also, new toy:
Someone recommended chip carving a while back when I was looking for decorative elements to add to a piece to distract from the terrible joinery and crappy finishing; it’s taken this long to get a knife for it. Nice knife handle actually; we’ll see how it holds up in use. Sanded off that awful varnish finish and dipped it in BLO, and on the way home today stopped off in Goughs and picked up some lime blanks (sod it, I’m not trying to chip-carve oak the first time out).
Doubt I’ll get a lot of time into this for the next while, but it’ll be a fun new thing for all that free time I have just kicking about 😀
Tags: chip-carving, limewood, oak
I would love to see more, hear more about that journal in the picture.
It’s a bit of a disappointing story, it’s a rough-paper notebook I bought in TK Maxx (a discount store over here, it’s named TJ Maxx in the US). Looks a bit like Lokta paper only more cottony. Soft cover but not leather, it’s like thick soft card with a thin outer coating glued on. Annoyingly I’ve never found another. I use it for sketches and ideas and stick photos of completed projects in it. It’s about half full – I’m looking for the next one at the moment.