Carver's Vise

After my back injury this fall I can no longer work standing up or sitting while bending over a workbench other than for very limited periods of time. Today I woke up in pain after working that way too many times over the last few weeks while carving so I stopped doing it and made myself a carver's tilting vise. Now I can sit upright with my spine firmly against the back support.

Many carvers who make relief panels work on a tilting carving vise. I think this position allows much more accurate carving on miniature furniture panels as you can see what you are doing, the work is much closer to your eyes. It is also easier to take delicate cuts. There are a lot of nice vises of that type available but have I just spent all my money buying gouges so I decided to adapt the tilting vise I use with my mill/drill press into a carving vise.

The carvings are mounted onto a base that clamps into the vise. I used a square block so it is easy to rotate 90 degrees at a time. Later on I will make a round shaft system that will let me rotate the work 360 degrees so I can always achieve a good cutting angle that is easy on my hands, arms and shoulders.

The traditional way to mount small carvings to a backer is to glue a piece of cardboard or paper between the carving and the backer board. When done carving you carefully split the layer of paper. Use only a water based glue for this method, hide glue, Elmer's, etc as you want to be able to get the paper off your carved piece.

I am using double back tape to hold my practice pieces to the support board. For the moment it is carpet tape, not the best choice but my order of double faced, crepe paper tape has not yet arrived. It used to be easy to buy double faced masking tape in hardware stores but now it has become a special order item. This old fashioned masking tape is made with paper making it easy to split the piece off the backer. I also use it for other purposes such as sticking things together for drilling or pin routing.

The support base on which you mount the carving pieces needs to be wide enough so you can place your palms and wrist on it for controlled (and comfortable) carving moves such as cutting curves.

My new system makes it easy to use a magnifying lamp for seeing extra fine details. Or I can get comfortably close when wearing a headpiece magnifier. Height adjustment for comfortable carving is achieved with my adjustable drafting chair. I screwed my vise to a plywood board to make it portable. That wood base can be clamped to other work surfaces if I want to work some place other than in my workshop. In my workshop I have it screwed down to the workbench.

Notice how many times I used the word comfortable in this posting? Can you tell I was hurting like crazy? I am still limited in how much time I can spend sitting upright but the new vise increases that amount of time as I not bent over the table.

muddler

I bought a muddler today at the local grocery supply store. It is a wooden tool that bar tenders use to crush up things like mint and other herbs for putting in mixed drinks. I am going to use it for a mallet to tap my small carving tools. I could have made myself a small mallet but the price was excellent and it fit my hands nicely. If the weight seems to be too light (I think it is just right as is) then I will drill a hole at the top end and stuff in some lead and put a wood plug into that hole.

Muddler sounds like a good name for me at the moment, at least my brain is feeling rather muddled with trying to sort out what is working for tools used for carving high quality miniature scaled furniture and what is not working. What is not working is the length of the gouges I have, I need to be closer to the work so I can see what I am doing and have better control.

I was having trouble finding good quality palm held, short gouges in the USA but that problem hopefully resolved itself today. It turned out to be a matter of language. Tools are not infrequently called by different names in different countries and that was the case this time around. See the photo and link below for my new supplier in the USA.

toolsforwoodworking.com
I sure wish I could transport myself for a few days of shopping to this Brooklyn New York store and drool over all the Ashley Iles "Block Cutting" Palm Gouges they carry. Block cutting as in cutting wood blocks for hand carved prints. I have ordered some of the 1/6th straight gouges. If you buy six you will get a 10 percent discount on the order which is a nice bonus. I really wanted 1 mm wide palm gouges but these should work for me.

Ashley Iles is a highly regarded maker of carving and turning tools. I should get them in a week to 10 days, like a kid waiting for Christmas I am very excited over it. I have a feeling more sizes of them will turn up on my wish list for Santa this next Christmas and my birthday wish list too. Now at last I have a real reason to go to New York City...a great woodworking tool store.

Comfort Grip for small tools

I have some new carving gouges that are great but the very narrow, grooved steel was very painful to my fingers to hold down near the tips. Not only did the grooves dig into my flesh but the diameter was just too small leading to muscle pain as well.

So I came up with an easy solution that required no modification to the gouges. I used heat shrink tubing over most of the steel below the wood handles except for the area I needed clear for functional carving action. I put on three layers of heat shrink to increase the diameter and now have a secure, cushioned grip that is not so sticky that I can't rotate the tools as needed.

If I wanted to I could use this method to color code my carving tools as heat shrink comes in a variety of colors. I can purchase red, yellow, black, blue and green tubing as well as the clear. Heat shrink tubing is available in a variety of diameters as well. You can purchase it from hardware and electronics stores.

I will have to remember this method of putting comfort grips on other small tools. It is easy to remove with a sharp knife and leaves no sticky residue behind unlike wrapping a handle with tape.

Cherry spoon finished!

My little spoon is done! If you click on the photo to enlarge it you will see how perfect the grain of the Flowering Cherry tree branch was for the project. Such a lovely piece of wood. The final carving and finish work is done with the edge of the knife using a scraping motion that goes with the grain direction. Shearing the wood leaves a smoother finish than sanding.

Time to get back to carving practice with pear wood and some medieval designs.

Tiny Texture Punch

A number of 17th Century, carved wood, furniture pieces have decorative shapes punched in as part of the carving designs. They also have background punching that flattens and enhances raised details.

I can make the background checkering pattern punches without too much trouble by turning nails and such into punches. I begin by heat treating to soften the metal so it can then be shaped with a jewelers saw and triangular shaped metal files. Next I heat treat again to harden them. But trying to make a nicely shaped, decorative design punch proved to be a lot more difficult. It is one thing to file these shapes accurately at 1:1 scale and quite another thing to do it at 1:12 scale. Small sized screw driver tips have proved to be an easy solution to the problem.

How hard you strike the punch determines the width of the design or you can grind the tip flatter for larger punches that need a shallow depth. I have touched up the punch in the photo above with a diamond needle file to sharpen the edges for crisper detailing.

Do remember that you need the punched detail to be understandable with the naked eye. So keep it simple enough in form and large enough in size to see it.

Tool box tip

Pencils and erasers are important carving tools. As you carve down into layers you will need to sketch in lines again and again as you lose them to the carving process.

The erasers that come on the ends of pencils will smear the graphite into a greasy mess on the surface of wood. A vinyl eraser removes it cleanly and also takes off fingerprint smudges too.

You can find these erasers most places pencils are sold. The larger vinyl erasers can be found in office supply stores in the aisle where the drafting tools are located.

An informative video clip from a famous European carver Chris Pye, who is making a Green Man. He shows how to to accurately replace lost carving lines as you work.

Cherry spoon

A miniature spoon made from a freshly cut branch of Flowering Cherry.

Driving along the street yesterday I saw a pile of branches sitting by the road waiting for the yard waste recycling pickup day. The branches are green wood, they were only cut a few days ago.

I have been following some articles on carving full sized spoons. They all say to work the wood when it is freshly cut as it easy to carve then. And so it is....
At this small size there seems to be no danger of splitting while drying. The surface is rapidly drying as the carving is being done.

Most of the work was done with a knife. I only used a gouge to scoop out some of the bowl material. I did the basic carving last night and after air drying all day I did the finish sanding tonight. You can't sand a wet surface without getting a lot of fuzz. I used a diamond coated, ball shaped, burr to help sand inside the bowl.

The Flowering Cherry branch was very fine grained. It does leave some pink color near the bark when peeling it and also some pink by the pith when I split the branch. But most of that fades away as the surface air drys. Any kind of species of fruit tree pruning should work for making a miniature spoon. But the base of the branch needs to large enough in diameter the spoon fist onto one half of the diameter plus some extra as you have to avoid the pithy center.

Time to get out the magnifying lenses and do the final touch up on my spoon. You all know by now that the macro photography reveals all the flaws, tiny things you can't see without high magnification. The transition between handle and spoon is too thick, overall the spoon needs more to be thinner, more delicate looking. Chunky looking miniatures are rarely going to work in a miniature setting other than a child's dollhouse.

Get out your pruning tools and head outdoors!

salvaging wood

I try to purchase used equipment when I can find it. Not only is it budget friendly it is also Mother Earth friendly. I had been wanting a larger wood worker's vise and a work bench with bench dogs that would stand up to wood planing and mallet hammering action. I did not want to make a proper cabinet maker's workbench as I am somewhat of a gypsy and would hate to leave such a thing behind if I moved. But this Sunday I hit the jackpot, for $50.00 I now have my vise and a suitable workbench as well as a decent shooting board.

I was also able to purchase for an affordable price from the same source two older Stanley wood planes. I currently have an 8 year old boy coming to my workshop on Saturdays for lessons in basic woodworking with hand tools. My shop has more power tools than traditional woodworking tools so I felt I was lacking in my ability to give him the experiences he needs. The lessons are of course the perfect justification for me to purchase a few new tool treasures.

3/4" thick Cherry plank before planing

Cherry plank after planing

A wood plane is a tactile joy to use, it feels so good to glide along slicing away at a board to reveal the hidden beauty under a rough surface. On the workbench in the photo above you can see some odds and ends of lumber I got for free from a local cabinet shop. Local sources such as this are a treasure in terms of saving money, saving trees and making new friends as well. Plus there is that feeling of discovering buried treasure. What looks to one person like a piece of kindling reveals itself to be fine grain, quarter sawed Cherry, just perfect for making miniature furniture!

So this past weekend I got to play with other people's discards and learn about the characteristics of carving in miniature on maple, cherry, red alder, mahogany, walnut and beech. I also picked up from a neighbor's front yard the prunings from a Flowering Japanese Cherry tree. I thought I would try my hand at making a few things like miniature wooden spoons and other small carved objects from the prunings. All good practice pieces on my way to becoming an artisan carver of miniature furniture.

My workshop wood discards are treasures to my 8 year old student who imagines all kinds of uses and sculptures made out of them.

Celtic Heart

Once a month I get together with a few girlfriends to play with miniatures. We take turns hosting the gathering. This month I hosted the group at my workshop. The projects we choose vary, sometimes we work independently other times someone will suggest a project to share. I offered to show them how to do some miniature sized carvings and since Valentines Day is coming up I chose a heart design from a Dover Publishing book of Celtic Designs.

I had a piece of poplar wood that was cut thin and wide enough to fit the design. I have stained my piece to look like old English Oak for no particular reason other than I felt like it. After I was done carving the piece I cut around the outside edges with a jeweler's saw.

I might turn this project into a necklace or maybe I will put a pin on the back of it. I suspect I suspect it will become a random, surprise gift for someone on Feb. 14th. Maybe my favorite barista will be the one to end up with it.

I used Dockyard brand miniature carving tools for this project. I really like these small scale tools. They come in sets or as individual pieces. The sizes range from 1.5mm up to a 5mm gouge. Click on the photo below too see how tiny they really are.

It is a trick to sharpen a tool that small. The chisels are easy enough to deal with but the gouges used to be a challenge for me. However I just learned a trick that makes it easy. Take a piece of softwood such as pine or basswood and use the gouge to carve a groove into the wood. Each size of gouge gets its own custom groove. Put some honing compound in the groove and use a pull stroke on the gouge to polish the beveled edge at a 20 degree angle. The honing compound quickly brings up a lovely mirror like polished surface and it creates a razor sharp edge. On the side edge of the block turn the chisel over and use the inside curve against the wood to carve a matching shape and use it to burnish the inside edge to remove any burrs left from the honing process.

As you are carving and the carving tools start to feel a bit dull give then a few strokes on the honing block and they will be sharp once again. No need to regrind these tiny tools if you take good care of them.

Swiss Pear

When it rains it pours, no not the Seattle weather, pear wood is pouring into my workshop. Today I went to my local supplier of tools and wood and there in the back was something I have never seen in the store before, Swiss Pear. Not just one board but a whole big tree worth of slabs. I wish I had the funds to buy all of it for future use but at $13.00 a board foot that is not possible. You can see by the photo with the ruler just how fine the grain is and how suitable for miniature furniture it will be.

This lumber is somewhat pink toned in color. That coloration develops as a result of the kiln drying process. Some wood suppliers also call it steamed pear. It is not from steam they inject into the kiln, it is steam created by moisture coming out of the wood as it is drying. From time to time they vent the kiln to let that moisture escape.

Now I don't have to wait 6 months for my firewood pear to dry, I can get started on miniature furniture projects. But first I will make myself a little valentines day gift, a new necklace carved from pear wood. I will take it from the end of the plank where the grain is on the wild side and not so suitable for making miniature furniture. That will be a good test piece to see if it really is easy to carve in any direction of the grain.

Pear Tree Without Partridge

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me a pear tree. This was an old tree that was past its prime, no longer useful for bearing fruit. The Pacific Northwest of the USA, the states of Washington and Oregon, is well know for commercial apple, pear and cherry orchards.

Pear wood is highly prized for use in making miniatures. I have not tried working with it before but have heard its praises sung for years by various artisans. It is said it carves like butter and is easy to work in any direction of grain. The growth rings are fine enough for miniatures.

Last fall I found an advertisement from a person selling fruit wood for firewood. Among the items listed was pear wood. Several months later I now finally have some pear wood logs. They were fairly expensive to purchase. I have a long ways to go before this pear wood will exit my workshop as hand crafted, hand carved, miniature furniture.

I have a lot of sawing to do to get it cut into planks that will then need to dry for 6 months. I will have to rely on the help of friends as the green logs are too heavy for me to handle alone. After that it will need more sawing, squaring up and planing to become dimensional lumber.

The fact that there are branched trunks will make cutting it up difficult. However there might be some beautiful figured grain at the base of the crotch where the branches originate so it is a bonus to have that on some of the logs. It does mean I can't easily split those logs,they will have to be sawn.

Let us call this an adventure in making miniatures rather than a common sense approach to creating miniature furniture where you order the lumber ready to work with.

Christmas Card

Musical tools

I might have to give this a try to the tune of "Jingle Bells"

It never occurred to me to try making a musical instrument out of my wrenches and use big nails for the percussion sticks. I have a whole drawer full of wrenches and some tubes too. I even have an electronic tuner so I can figure out what key they are.
So easy to make and so sweet sounding.

I guess you just never know what might show up next on this blog in the way of projects to make with tools.

Happy Holiday Season to all of you!

Visit from Santa...

Some women love getting new jewelry for Christmas, I love getting new tools.

My new stocking stuffer tool I just got for Christmas from my friend Don is a little square that has magnets in the base. It is very nice for squaring up tools with steel tops such as the band saw, scroll saw, drill press table etc. But it is also a wonderful jig for squaring up miniature projects. You know those metal boards you use with magnets for assembling things? Yes, it will work great on those for holding tall pieces in upright positions. How cool is that? The measurements are in inches on one side and metrics on the other.
It is marketed by Fast Cap
http://www.fastcap.com/estore/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=9935

Rockler sells them too.
http://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=22118&filter=magnetic%20micro%20square

Glitter Time

Trying to get some glitter houses done for Christmas but life keeps interrupting. I have been helping a friend with some CAD drafting work now and again. Unfortunately I am having to do this from my reclining bed as my back is recovering from a bad strain. Oh the joys of getting older! I had hopes to open my Etsy store in November but it is looking unlikely to do anything with it this year.

As you may have noticed I have not posted anything on my blog for the last two months. In fact I have hardly set foot in my workshop in those two months as I was been working a full time job out of town. But that job is finished (other than being left with a lot of aches and pains) and I will have more time for miniatures when I am able to be on my feet for longer periods of time.

Pixilated vacation

In my last posting I said I had a big project to work on before I got back to making miniatures.

Here she is, let me introduce you to "Pixil" short for word pixilated meaning whimsical and touched in the head by pixies (fairies). Pixilated is probably a very apt descriptive adjective for anyone who makes miniatures or wooden boats ;-).

For the last several weeks I have been having a working vacation in a historic turn of the century workshop located on the waterfront in the little town of Port Hadlock. Pixil was built in 1993 by the North West School of Wooden Boat Building. The school was very kind and let me bring her into their building while I did a paint and varnish job on her.

The boat was built to 1950s plans created by the famous designers John and William Atkins. The design is named "Teach". It is a very good design for teaching boat building with lapstrake planking above the waterline and carvel below the waterline.

Now you might think, yuck I would not want to spend my vacation scraping off old varnish and putting on new. But the truth is there are a great many around the world who would be very envious of my chance to work at the school and be around all the various activities with a group that is seriously devoted to preserving the craft of wooden boat building.

Tonight I am sitting in the boat in Port Townsend, Washinton at the Wooden Boat Festival. Port Townsend is just up the road from the boat school. Port Townsend is one of four historic registered Victorian era seaports in the USA. Great place to come for a vacation!

People from all over the world come here to see this Wooden Boat Festival. The guest lecture at the boat school this morning was by a boat builder from New Zealand. I have come to the festival many times over the years but this is my first time to have a boat in the festival. It is now dark but people are still all around me, a band is playing right in front of me, next to me is a man snuggled into the cockpit of his boat reading a book. We are land docked on trailers but there are many boats in the water that are tied up to the docks.

Sleepless in Seattle

Today we took the bikes along the canal path over to Lake Union and spent the afternoon messing about with boats both big and small. The Center For Wooden Boats always has an open house on July 4th with lots of activities for all ages. There are several houseboat communities along the shores on the way there.

Honestly I was not even thinking about scale models today but there they were despite trying to escape such things for the afternoon. Might as well enjoy them since I was not responsible for making them on a holiday. There has been a pond boat building program at the Center for many years. This year the land just outside the Center got a landscape makeover in which they installed a sail boat pond. How much fun is that? One of the 4th of July activities for kids is building toy boats.

The photos below are of the workshop where the pond sailing program is held. The program is in conjunction with a City of Seattle Alternative, middle school. What a fun way to learn math and science!

Now for something to inspire you to make a marine related miniature scene. The small shed at the Center for Wooden Boats that serves as their boat rental office. I love the oar for a weather vane and the decorative shingle detail.

My favorite boat of the day, a small steam powered launch.

Hole in the middle

A dollhouse builder needs to make holes in the middle of pieces of plywood. There are a number of ways to create this type of opening.

This time I am using a table saw. The method is to lower the saw blade all the way down, place the panel on the tabletop then raise the blade up through the panel to make the cut. There are two variations on this method. The first I am describing is used when the length of the cut is longer than the diameter of the saw blade. The second is when the diameter of the blade is longer than the cut. The methods are almost identical other than how you mark the fence and material and how far up you raise the saw blade.

If the length of the cut is longer than the diameter of the blade
Step one: mark out your opening. You need to put marks out at the outside edges of the piece that correspond to the sides of the opening.

Step two: record on paper or write on the project panel the distance from the outside edge to the edge of the opening for each of the sides.

Step three: mark the saw's fence so you know where to start and stop the cut. To do this raise the blade as high as it can go. Put a mark on your fence that corresponds to the back edge of the blade at the tabletop and also the front edge of the blade.

Step four: adjust the distance from the fence to the cutting tooth to the distance on one of the sides you recorded in step two.

Step five: with the blade fully lowered place your panel on the saw top against the fence. Line up the mark that will be the far edge of the opening with the mark for the back edge of the saw blade.

Step six: Holding down the panel to the table with a push stick slowly raise the table saw blade to full height. Then push the panel forward until the mark at the front of the blade aligns with the mark for the front edge the opening. Turn off the saw and lower the blade. Repeat step six for all the sides of the opening. The corner of the panel will have a small amount of wood at each corner that was not cut through. That is because of the round blade cutting wider underneath that on top of the panel.

Step seven: use a flush cutting hand saw to finish cutting the wood in the corners of the opening. You can get these small, inexpensive, saws at your local hardware store. They are often used for cutting dowels flush to the surface of furniture projects. I have showed the use of this kind of saw before on this blog. Better photos of it here:
Cutting a dollhouse window opening.



If the diameter of the blade is longer than the length of the cut
Step One: mark the center line as well as the outside corners of your opening and place a pencil mark corresponding to those on the outside edge of your piece of material.

Step two: record on paper or write on the project panel the distance from the outside edge to the edge of the opening for each of the sides.

Step three: mark the saw's fence so you know where to start the cut. Put a mark on your fence that corresponds to the center of the blade at the tabletop.

Step four: adjust the distance from the fence to the cutting tooth to the distance on one of the sides you recorded in step two.

Step five: with the blade fully lowered place your panel on the saw top against the fence. Line up the center mark on the fence with the center mark of your opening.

Step six: Holding down the panel to the table with a push stick slowly raise the table saw blade until it cuts through the panel. Keep raising the blade until there is approximately 1/4" or so left before it cuts the distance to the far edges of the length of your opening. The corner of the panel should have a small amount of wood at each corner that was not cut through. That is because of the round blade cutting wider underneath that on top of the panel. Repeat step six for all the sides of the opening.

Step seven: use a flush cutting hand saw to finish cutting the wood in the corners of the opening. You can get these small, inexpensive, saws at your local hardware store. They are often used for cutting dowels flush to the surface of furniture projects.

Sunset Hill

This evening an errand took us up to the top of the bluff in my neighborhood. There is a birdhouse up there that I built in the early 1990s so I stopped by for a quick photo shoot. It is one of the first birdhouses I sold. It has that shabby chic, antique look after spending nearly 20 years out in the rain and wind. I think she looks pretty good. It has sheltered a great many baby birds over the years, there is nest building going on right now for the newest generation.

I am thinking about making a version of this bird house scaled for dollhouses. Would you all like that?

A few blocks away from the birdhouse I came across a perfect glitter house project. I will start making it this summer. It works for both European and American scenes, the Tudor revival era from the 1930s. The house has a lot of interest without being overly fussy. It looks great from all 4 sides, not often I come across a house that does not need a lot of modification. I will make some changes to the picture windows to give them a bit more of an old world feel. Those windows look out to the same view I have from the beach.

I adore the twin gable peaks with the chimney between.

photo break

I have not gone missing, just busy taking photos and writing instructions this week. I need them so I can open my Etsy store for business.

I needed a table for photo shoots where I would not be battling for space with other activities so I built one. Nothing fancy about my table, just some adjustable legs from Ikea that I screwed to a piece of plywood. I added a small scrap piece of pegboard screwed to the back of the table. The pegboard is to hold up a seamless backdrop paper or cloth. The paper has a gentle and invisible curve in the photos. That way you can't tell where the paper ends or begins, no seams or table edges to show in the photo.

My photo backdrop paper is from the art supply store. I am using large paper sheets made for drawing on with pastels. It comes in a wide variety of colors and for less than $2.00 it is a great bargain. I can change backdrop colors in seconds.

All the overhead fluorescent tubes in my workshop are 5,000K bulbs I bought at Lowe's a big home builders store in the USA. 5,000 is a kelvin rating very close to natural sunlight. The photo lamps are also fitted with 5,000k circular fluorescent bulbs. The bulbs I am using are Longstar FE-US-30W/50K. If I were using regular incandescent photo bulbs the LCD screen on the camera could be ruined from the heat of the bulbs being so close to the camera.

I like fluorescent lights for the energy savings and the long life. There is no flickering or noise with the new electronic ballast. My workshop is a giant light therapy room, always bright and sunny even when the weather outside is rainy gloom or when I am working at night.

Home Port

Today is photolog day as I had my camera hooked to my belt loop when I was out for lunch. Click on the photos to enlarge them, they look much more colorful that way.

The marina we live in, I took this photo from the end of the public fishing pier. This view is looking to the south, my workshop is a few blocks south of all the boats.

It has been a very cold and rainy spring, the coldest recorded in Seattle. So no pretty sunny photos for you, this is a reality show today. But my neighbors, the turtles and the duck, found some diluted solar radiation on their pond. I suspect this pond was the home of the lost turtle that wandered into the parking lot at my workshop. A turtle could walk that far in a day or two. We are hoping our young friend who was given the turtle will be accepting of returning the turtle to its natural habitat. I think she has found the turtle to be a rather boring pet so I imagine she will be interested in the project knowing that she can still visit her turtle.

I was feeling a little stir crazy at lunch time today so I hopped on the bicycle and road a short distance up the street. For two dollars you can get a hot dog and sit at a counter with a water front view. The Little Coney burger joint is right next to the marina we live in and it is located in a water front city park with a very nice beach, meadows and wooded hillside. Miles of walking trails and it is at the end of a city wide bicycle trail system. The photo below is also from the end of the pier but looking to the north, that is the beach at the park. The beach continues on around the point.

Looking at the these photos you would not think I lived right in the middle of a major metropolitan city. I can see open space, water, beaches, mountains and trees for miles and miles. There is a miles long wooded bluff buffering us from the city. My little bit of heavenly retreat on the planet earth that has all the conveniences and cultural opportunities of modern urban living. Once in a while we even get warm sunny days!