A collection of articles on carving furniture and architectural elements
Whether you’re sawing, planing or carving, the transfer of muscle power to the tool you’re using is accomplished by the way you are holding the tool. Hand position sounds like some esoteric study by an anatomist, but it’s extremely important when it comes to tool [...]
When I'm carving a ball and claw foot, I use a gauge that includes all the info needed to carve the foot. The information is transferred to the gauge from an original or from a prototype that I’m satisfied with. Most feet I carve [...]
Do you have a special car that you bought that you only use to go out and buy broccoli? Do you have a special refrigerator at home only for the purpose of cooling the broccoli? Of course you don’t. That’s because any old car can [...]
There’s something about wooden planes. There’s something about a really nice piece of clear pine. There’s something about riving out a beautiful piece of red oak. There’s something about turning a blank of year old air dried white birch. There’s something about a real plastered [...]
There can be a lot of drawing involved in the carving process, as some guidelines are needed to set you off on the right track. When copying old work or designing new, the most efficient designs to carve will be ones where the shapes of [...]
The most familiar bunch of furniture that decorative arts people would know as "Chippendale" actually falls under the Rococo style. Chippendale, as well as his contemporaries Mathias Locke, Thomas Johnson and others, appropriated the frilly, organic forms that had been developed in France under the [...]
Being able to rewind the clock and figure out what the first moves a carver made on any given project is tricky to do. The inclination of novices is to draw in the final cuts right away, when that is really the last 5%. The [...]
Most of the work in a carving is getting to the point where you can put in those last cuts that really make or break the appearance of the job. Before then, the work is in making decisions about sizes, shapes, locations, and which tool [...]
