It may be a sin here but being a woodworker for over 35 years, one of the first problems I ran in to heating my house with wood, was taking pieces out of the wood pile that I just couldn't bring myself to through in the stove. At first it was just using dry firewood splits for small stuff, then progressed to sections of logs being squirreled way and now I actively hunt green logs for different kinds of wood carving & woodwork/furniture. Started out doing small spoons, scoops & ladles and quickly moved to hand carved or hewn wood bowls. It's been a long tradition in Scandinavia where it is still going strong and there has been a bit of a revival for some time now. The wood, even upper end hardwoods, works much more easily with simple hand tools when it's green. The bulk of the work is done with a carving axe, and adze, drawknife & gouges. The spoons are done mostly with just one or two carving knives. Always on the hunt for special woods makes it even better. Couple pieces I've done. Piece of Wild Cherry in a Scandinavian style IMG_6127 by Kyle, on Flickr Small trench that came from a small Chestnut Oak in my yard IMG_7174 by Kyle, on Flickr IMG_7180 by Kyle, on Flickr And a Black Cherry bowl done from a particularly troublesome piece of wood. IMG_7639 by Kyle, on Flickr
A thread you might enjoy reading Stuff I find hiding in pieces of old wood And a question you might have an answer for Wood turners here?
Thanks Woodwidow. It's funny, if I remember correctly, that first link is how I found this site a while back. Or maybe how I re-found it.
So I had posted about scoring a good load of Walnut a couple months ago. Completed a couple small carvings from it already. Still trying to get decent pictures of those but it's also a design that I'm keeping off the web for now as I want to enter it into a juried competition or two. It's been quite a while since I've done any substantial work with Walnut, the smell certainly brings me back immediately and I'm loving the way the wood works for what I'm doing. Cut a round and split it in two halves a couple weeks ago to start a large bowl. Finally got to working on it last night, and a bit today. Having let it sit longer than intended after splitting it, it started to check on one end but not too bad. It should all get removed as I progress, I hope. This one being done "bark up" I needed to get rid of the pith section and flatten the bottom to make the layout & roughing work easier. That done, inner bark stripped off and a layout of the rough outlines. A bit of a stall to rework the bevels on the Granfors Bruk Carving Axe. Then on to the adze work. The color & grain is starting to dazzle already! Unfortunately work will be taking up most of my time tomorrow. Hopefully I get some time in on this but we'll see.
Was able to spend a couple more enjoyable hours finishing the roughing out of the interior tonight. I've the feeling my triceps are going to be sore as hell tomorrow. It's a bigun! But really happy with how this is looking so far.
