Wednesday, May 13, 2009

An exercise using wood Chisels

Well, I would have liked to head back out to the wood nymph, but it has been raining all day today. I can only imagine what the spongy wood must be like when it is soaked. ( maybe it would carve better!) I didn't want to get wet and my chisels needed a little touching up. So I sharpened up several of the work horses and decided to test them out on a small piece of scrap pine. Nothing fancy, it's just that pine is rather soft, similar to the semi-rotted wood outside. I kept it simple: just a basic feather. I could have cleaned up some of the edges or set the background down a Little better, but it was just to test the sharpness of the chisels. As I was walking around the woods with the cat tonight, I realized the usefulness of Chisels as opposed to Power carving ( chainsaws, dremels, etc...) I could not get an extension cord back that far from the house. And chainsaws are just noisy and perhaps a little overkill on some of the finer detail. Well, It took me a while to carve that simple feather, but with power tools I could have carved it up a little faster. Granted, I'm more familiar with the dremel than the chisels, But I'm trying to change that a little bit at a time. Maybe next time, I'll carve an acantheus leaf.

3 comments:

Bob Tinsley said...

That's one heck of a feather for someone who's just testing the sharpness of his chisels! Maybe you ought to ditch that Dremel and go the way of us galoots. :)

Bob

The Great Ethan Allen said...

you're too kind. I purposefully avoided taking a good picture because it is full of flaws, I still think I'm faster with my Dremel on small projects like this. But the chisels come in handy for removing large chunks of wood. Best of all....NO DUST!

diy said...

I'm trying th other way, ie beginning with power tools.
Whatever you used looks good to me.

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