stuckinthemud
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Everything posted by stuckinthemud
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Palm chisel set is a great way in to carving, heck, its the way I started! Make sure you get a good quality set, sorby, Ashley Isles,Henry Taylor, Flexcut, other English makers are available - personally I'm not so fond of Two Cherries, or Pfeil (Pfeil make excellent gouges though) - you do get what you pay for, so no cheap Asian stuff... When whittling with chisels three points of contact is still essential - hold the chisel like a pen and use the thumb from the hand holding the timber as well - its impossible to slip and impossible to cut yourself.
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One more thing, if you cut yourself you're doing it wrong - blood is nature's way of asking you to use correct technique best way is a short cut executed by levering the knife around the tip of the thumb of the hand holding the timber, you pull the handle toward you. This fulcrum effect exerts massive force and makes a tiny cut, but because you can do this cut very quickly, you can waste away a large amount of timber with perfect control and very quickly. Couple this with a stop-cut (vertical push-cut) and you're away. Do not use gloves - they weaken your hold, make you put in more effort, make you tire more quickly, make the work more likely to slip
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Sloyd with the shorter of the two blades. Absolutely, unequivocally (big word so I must mean it) the finest whittling knife of all - and I HAVE used all the Flexcut tools. Put the rest of the money toward a decent set of pre World War II gouges (that auction site usually has lots) and restore them. The old gouges can be identified by a hammered octagonal tang-end as opposed to the round extruded ends of later stuff. You need the old tools as they are forged from small batch specialist tool steel, so are made from steel of the correct carbon rating.
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Which oil/polish to use on chopping board?
stuckinthemud replied to jamesd's topic in Woodcraft Forum
Sunflower oil works really well, client needs to avoid using detergents to clean it and re-oil every now and then -
what logs have you been chopping today!
stuckinthemud replied to william petts's topic in Firewood forum
Not down here its not! Wish I had a couple of staves -
chainsaw carving set-up on a tight budget
stuckinthemud replied to stuckinthemud's topic in Chainsaw Carving Forum
Thanks both; even the Echo set is too rich for my blood - by occasional I mean only a few times a year - what are the issues with a second-hand saw? Would it be worth getting a second hand Echo/Stihl/other and putting a new carving bar on it? -
Fairly close, especially in the winter when work and family commitments mean I get very little chance to disappear for a few hours, which really restricts me to the Caerphilly/Machen/Cardiff region. In the Summer (I work seasonally) I have much more flexibility and then can travel up to an hour each way, so Monmouth/Bridgend/Brecon are all do-able
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Morning! I occasionally make the odd long-bow and have had some good success foraging for timber (hazel, for example) but finding 2m lengths of clean, straight, not-spiral growth hardwood isn't always easy, especially since I have no machinery of any description. Anyone know of possible suppliers near Cardiff ?
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Evening All, I'm new to this forum and if this subject has been raised before, perhaps someone can push me to the correct thread: I've been carving a while, almost all small-scale, (though I have burned-out a couple of cheap angle grinders carving some oak animals for my kids school with an Arbortech disk). What would you recommend as a budget set-up for occasional chainsaw carving?
