Not carving but pole latheing

I have just had a fantastic day with the wonderful (Essex based) Robin Fawcett, in his beautiful woodland workspace. Robin is a man that has spent his life working with wood especially the pole lathe. In addition to being a great turner he is also a natural teacher.

So when the opportunity came to spend a day "bashing wood" with him I leapt at the chance.

I decided that I wanted to turn a bowl on the pole lathe, which Robin described later as

"This was fairly ambitious considering Mark hasn't done any turning yet and doesn't have a lathe."  

Robin is a master of the understatement!

The pole lathe is driven by pushing a footplate down with your leg and making the cut, the pole pulls the footplate up ready for the next push down, reversing the direction of the work. This means that the tool has to be pulled back on the return. 

Ie, push down, make cut, remove tool as the work spins backward, push down, replace tool and make another cut. This is a bit like rubbing your tummy and patting your head at the same time, luckily something that I can do.

The pleasure of using the pole lathe is the rythmic motion and sounds and the working closely with the wood using your own energy. That is when you get the hang of it, the novice will hear wood tearing noises and the chattering of the tool as it goes wrong. Robins patient instruction will see you through that though.

I think that we spent as much time laughing as turning

Amazingly after much axing to prepare the wood for the lathe and even

more turning, with interventions from Robin, I had made a birch wood bowl.

If anyone has an interest in working with green wood I can highly recommend Robins training courses.

http://treewright.co.uk/woodworking.php

Coffee spoon

I made this spoon from a scrap of wood, it has the same volume as the measuring spoon that came with a pack of coffee.

 

Birch Ladle

A strange shaped branch gave me the chance to carve a ladle, the wood is birch. Carved with axe and knives.

Seven kuksa

I have be working on carving different styles of kuksa, the first kuksa shows a tooled finish and is not oiled, the others are sanded for smoothness and oiled with food grade linseed oil. Fellow carvers always prefer the tooled finish but I am buyers seem to prefer the sanded finish. I would be very interested to receive comments...

Small kuksa

I have some fresh birch and decided to carve a small kuksa, just right for drinking coffee. 

Birch is the traditional wood for carving kuksas and will eventually turn a warm shade of gold.

Tools, axe and knives.

 

Spoons from Silver Birch

Last week I collected a section of silver birch from my local nature reserve where some of the birch are being felled to allow the heathland to regenerate.

The Birch was very green and prone to tearing at the changes of grain direction but apart from that it was a pleasure you carve, I used this carving session to try differing handle shapes.

Two bowls

Two bowls

Two bowls sitting on silver birch

Walking in my local nature reserve I noticed a silver birch being taken down so I had a chat with the warden and he kindly allowed me to take a branch away.
A week or so later I gathered some tools, froe, axe, large knife and a spoon knife and started work on two bowls.

  
The first step is to split the log into two halves and then start carving with the axe, the axe is used to quickly remove wood and rough out the intended shape. The shape is then refined with the large knife and the spoon knife is used to hollow the bowl.

Although the wood was split into two very similar halves the carving produced two very different bowls, the shape, thickness and curvature comes from working with the wood and not against it.

If you see a duck shaped piece of birch

Hi all


If you see a duck shaped piece of birch it is only to polite to carve it out...

Two tone birch spoon

One of the joys of working with natural materials is the unexpected. In the precious two posts we can see how birch looks when carved. But although I made this spoon from birch it has a two tone colour.

The colour comes from a fungus invading the wood as it starts to rot, the good news is that once worked and dried the wood remains stable and the fungus causes no problems in the future.

The darker wood here is the fungal growth

The spoon was made with a short handle for strength.

Birch Qiaich

Birch Qiaich

I have a lot of local woodland albeit carved in to seperate sections or "reserves". In the woodland we have a lot of beautiful silver birch, I love the way that they glow in sunshine with darker trees supplying a contrasting backdrop. The wood is soft and easy to carve but a bit prone to tearing if knives are not sharp.

My local reserve are clearing their woodland of birch which means there is wood available.

The quaich is a tradtional Scottish drinking cup and was used for drinking whisky or brandy.

This little cup was a pleasure to carve and I will be making more.

First carved spoon

While walking the dog I acquired a branch from a birch tree that was being felled because it was unsafe and leaning over a road.

So the time had come to carve my own spoon. I roughed it out with an old hand axe. Then I started to carve, it soon looked so bad I almost gave up. But by lunch time I had finished carving... almost. The bowl is hard to carve with a normal knife, I asked a fellow canoeist what he used and he lent me a spoon knife and I soon had a spoon :-)

 the spoon is 9" long

Of course it looks less than great to me now but it was a huge amount of fun to make and I am hooked.