How To Carve A Kuksa With Hand Tools - Paul Adamson

greetings my friends how are you doing this is zed from zed outdoors and i hope you're having an awesome day so today i come to see a dear friend of mine paul adamson paul how are you doing i'm doing okay thank you zed so if you know my channel from previously paul made an appearance about what is it about roughly three years ago yeah yeah and we filmed this very subject that you're seeing in this video about three years ago which is how to carve a cooksa now it was one of the very few videos at the time that really covered the entire carving cuxer process in detail and since then that video has done incredibly well it is inspired a whole generation of cooks or carvers and it's helped a lot of people in their cook cell carving journey now if you're not familiar with paul adamson paul adamson is a professional green woodworking instructor who teaches up and down the breadth of the united kingdom his speciality is cooks the carving and spoon carving now in this time i've spent with paul we've actually filmed two previous videos on spoon carving if you haven't seen those videos already there will be a link below in the description taking you to those videos where you can see paul's process for carving a wooden spoon now in this particular video that you're watching what paul is going to be demonstrating is the entire process from raw wood to a finished product for carving a cooksa with hand tools now in the previous video we covered three years ago would it be suffice to say that obviously we're essentially going to be covering a lot of the same things but fast forward three years from there what paul has done he's taught countless people around the country because his speciality is teaching a one-day course in person yeah to groups of between six and eight people uh and a lot of them are absolute beginners always nearly right and then from the beginning of the day up until the end of the day to walk away with a finished cook so so would it be suffice for me to say that in the three years since we filmed that video that you've refined your process even more so very much so i've i've continued to learn as my students have so i look at my cookstos from three years ago in the video that we did and i can see things that you know needed improving and i've improved them and sometimes by accident i'd just be carving away going if this looks a bit better and it doors and it's a bit thinner and a bit nicer and everything's got that little bit tidier i think uh i'm much happier now with my cookies than i was and i really feel that the the tuition that i've been doing for the last three years which has been quite frequent it's been quite intense has really pushed me to to try and be that bit better each time because i've had to be on show yeah to all these people and to try and give them confidence that i know what i'm talking about um so if if you have seen the previous video car i covered with paul on carving cook sir everything is still very much relevant that you covered in there but what's happened since then because you've taught so many people he's continuously refined elements of the entire process to make it a lot more streamlined and a lot more efficient and even with the tools etc and you end up with a cook so in a much more streamlined efficient manner so here's what's going to be happening in the video is the following is number one if you look on the timeline of this video on the timestamp you see sections marked out by youtube and what that is that is for easier reference as you move forward because what this video is is going to be a teaching aid as is the previous videos i've covered with paul so what you can do is refer to this as you're moving forward on different parts of your cooks and carving journey should you go out and actually go and carve and cook some so there's going to be a time stamp along the timeline but it's also going to be a timestamp in the description so you can jump to a specific section of the video straight away without having to intentionally use your kind of mouse to kind of go back and forth so that's number one time stamps at every single section of this video covering the entire process number two there is a link to a page on paul's website now on that page are going to be a myriad of resources there's a lot we learned from the previous tutorial and one of those is people want kind of like more detailed reference guides in terms of tools used styles of cook says etc etc now what paul has very kindly done is on a page on his website down below links are down below on that page is everything we're going to be touching upon in this entire video now a couple of the main things are going to be number one he has a book published a while ago that's done really really well specifically about cooks's now we're actually going to be looking at the book shortly uh as part of this kind of main video so you can get a bit of an insight if you're not familiar with this book and in this book which we're going to cover shortly is everything outlined in detail all the tools use the process etc etc so what i would encourage you to do is treat the book as an accompaniment to this video and the two go together really really well in terms of a comprehensive guide to the whole cooks the carving process so on that page is going to be the opportunity to buy the book for yourself and pull ships out worldwide it's been quite intense for the past few years it's been all over the place it's been quite exciting so every week every week is shipping out all over the world so on that page is going to be a link to the book it's going to be an opportunity to join his email newsletter where he can be kept up to date with everything he has going on because like i said he's a professional teacher teachers up and down the breadth of the united kingdom also on that page you're going to have the opportunity should they still be available to actually buy paul's cooks as one of his cooks's now he makes him it in a very small quantity because he puts a lot more effort and refinement into every cook set that he makes but on that page is going to be an opportunity if they are available should you want to do so to buy one of his cookers and there's also going to be a downloadable template accompanying this video should you want to go out there and carve one yourself so very kindly put that together as well as kind of a reference to some of the tools etc etc but that's going to be a link that one page is going to be a link we're going to reference throughout this entire video so if you hear us referencing the page on his website that's what we want about and that's going to be linked to down below as well as pinned to the top of the comments so without further ado paul we'll get straight into this video the one final thing i will mention is we're forming in quite inclement weather good old british summer beautiful isn't it so we've got quite torrential winds and rain so if you do happen to hear a bit of background noise or whatever that's basically it so i do apologize in advance but we're keeping it real we're filming in a woodland and this is it this is how kind of paul spends a lot of his time carving and his time in general so what we're going to do we're going to get straight into this video the first thing we're going to look at is an examples uh multiple examples of paul's cookers so if you're not familiar with his work you can see up close and personal the kind of work that he does and it also gives paul an opportunity to start introducing the cooks and carving process by looking at the finished cooker and then we're going to get straight into the tutorial so paul with your kind permission we'll get started let's do it so guys i hope you enjoyed the rest of this video where paul adamson is going to be teaching you how to carve a culture with hand tools so paul um are you going to talk us through a selection of your cook sets if you'd like me to yes so where would you like to start where should we start well i'm trying to think what you might have seen last time to be honest um when i was teaching a lot and still do obviously we used to make these sort of cups and not too deep not too wide but you know it's a decent drink it's around 300 milliliters this one and then very simple handle it's quite straight on the top maybe a little bit of refinement and these little things like this have started to creep into even basic cups it's just just bits of shape just things like that this makes it nicer to hold a bit nice to look at and just starting to move away but if you think of a cuxer that's super basic that's it for me nothing fancy at all and uh the coating that you can see is just milk paint um i've used several colors my favorite color is the red one and i've been you know just been sticking to red for the last few years i quite i quite like the the idea of doing things um to a certain standard on a regular basis and and you know using using things that people recognize as something i might have made and i i really like this red color at the moment uh i decided to make a few slightly nicer ones and spend a bit longer so i normally make um five or six cookies at the same time just to for efficiency's sake so i've got all the same tools out for each process i'll be drying them all at the same time and i'll be oiling them and curing them at the same time and that just means trays of things can be moved around and i can save time because it's a long process even if you're quick at this game um it's quite stressful to do that though and at times i like to just think about one culture and just make one special one and i've done it several times this was one i made about two years ago i think now and when i wrote the book and um i'd been to the museum in in one of the museums in norway a lot of the cups were as as nice as well i thought they were lovely and i tried to do something along those lines working with antler a bit more and bone and this is very basic i'm a bit embarrassed to show you actually don't get too close um [Laughter] but um it was more the form it was the the way that things flow and thinness of the walls i noticed a lot but quite thin over there and quite lower so this is the cup that i it's my favorite one i've ever made and i'm definitely going to be making more of them i've tried to bring elements of this into into other cups that i've made this the handle on this one doesn't um come up quite so high but it's got that little sweep i was talking about going on and for a while this was the shape that i thought i was going to stick with and i think a hybrid between those two is going to be the one that i'm i'm going to um make more often so but this is a really highly figured piece of wood um i do still do tree surgery work as well as inspection work and um i got asked to go to a um an emergency tree situation and tree had fallen over on a road and uh so i just went out on my own and contin the tree was like this and i had to fell the rest of it and remove it from the road and there's a sycamore tree and normally i don't get excited about sycamore trees it's handy for bits and bobs a bit tough for spoon carving i quite like it though it's a nice finish but as i was ringing it up and it was about this sort of diameter all this color was just screaming at me and i thought flipping i've got to do something with this so i took a few of the logs home and uh i thought i'd give it a go and i've worked sycamore before as cooks's and found it really hard work well i didn't know what was in for this heart this darker wood is much harder than the already fairly hard wood and yeah quite a challenge to pull this off and i did it two more times afterwards because the logs were so nice i just couldn't resist so there's three of these knocking about quite a simple shape quite big i forget what it was now it's about 400 milliliters this one you can put your whole fist in there um it's quite thin which was some of the one of the things i was trying to replicate more often in my work and yeah the green just does all the work for you really doesn't it's not what you can say i thought it might be overkill to put decoration on but i think it quite fits in quite nicely with these little bits of color very pleased with it actually so um that's one of the last ones i obsessed over so that was a whole day of just sitting there on my own just trying to make it all all nice and perfect with no stresses whatsoever no commitment to make it in a certain timeframe uh so yeah i did lots and lots of these ones with the red milk paint very similar actually to this one because this was what inspired despite the work but there's something about this one that just sits i think it's because it sits lower i just think it's nicer i got obsessed with trying to make them as big as possible you see this is another big one this is over 400 mil and um i wasn't very happy with it because the decoration didn't come out as well as it could have done but it's uh it is what it is so what else can i show you pretty much more of the same um this is something i've been working on recently quite a lot i've done um about three of these now it's based on um just very very loose research and people that turn tend to make a thing called a quash i think it's called and it's basically two handled uh bowl for drinking traditionally i think it was spirits in scotland so you know put you put your whiskey in there have a nice little drink and then pass it on to the next guy in the circle they take it they drink it and you pass it around it's just a nice communal thing to do even though it's not very big you probably see how big it is with my hand there um it's still quite big enough for a healthy glug of spirit so that will keep you going for a while and i actually enjoyed making this more than i have anything for ages it was just so relaxing just to make a new shape not too deep not too clever and i found it actually a lot easier than the quite complicated cooks as i've been making and it brought me back to bowls i used to make bowls i was quite into that about seven or eight years ago and um i uh i made several and thought that that was where i was going to go and then the coxa thing took off so you know this is quite a nice hybrid i think and i get my students to make these now and they have a lot of fun doing that so that in a nutshell is where we are there's a couple of other peoples on here though this you might remember from the last videos ed it was a really fun little cup that i found in a service station in the far north of norway in the arctic and uh yeah i think it was made by the guy that worked there i still keep meaning to make something similar but i don't want to copy it i want to try and cook with something new but i haven't quite got around to it yet um and this is one by martin hazel who i seriously recommend you check out um if you check zed's channel out he's done some videos with martin and think you were making beads weren't you yeah and also a bur cook sir that's right yep and uh martin's a lovely guy and he makes the most beautiful work and he often works with burr and honestly it's just a thing to behold it's lovely and this was my little whiskey cook for quite some time and i used to really like using this one so there you go somebody else's works it's not all about me so just to end off on the topic of kooksas um is there a particular style you're going to carve with in this video yes we're going to go for something like like this so um it's fairly simple actually it's just a scaled up version of the simple student-y one that i do it's a fairly straight something really dramatic going on it's just um because to be quite honest it's jolly hard work for most folks just to holler them out and to do the outside and to get the walls thin and that's the most important thing to learn after that it's just you know a little bit extra here and there and trying to make them that little bit bigger and finding another hour to go another hundred mil deeper but if we can just you know simplify the process and get you going like we did on the previous video but with some new techniques hopefully you will learn have fun and carve nice things so paul your cooks are booked you want to talk a little bit about it yes um it's um i'm really proud of it it's a small book you can see what it is but it's quite concise it's got everything you need to know to get you going everything about tools and and techniques and it's what i made initially to to help my students um as an e-guide and it just got bigger and bigger to the point where i thought well it's more of a book than anything else so i um i chose to um publish it which was a big decision and i had to make it a lot more tidier than it was for just something that i was passing out to students and was that your inspiration just to kind of collect all the information you've been researching yes i gathered quite a bit of information and the main the main reason for writing the book and for teaching and for doing videos was i was seeing a lot of very confused people online lots and lots of very long-winded um discussions always the same coming up again month after month i've come with how do you stop cracks in cuxes how do you apply oil what tools do you use and it was getting a bit too tiresome seeing the same arguments go around in circles and never get resolved and people who probably made one or two cups as standing up and rightly so giving advice but that advice not always necessarily being accurate and i was starting to get good results with my work and basically resolved all the problems i thought anyway there still are a few problems but it's not it's not perfect but i'd resolve quite a lot of the issues and decided to to let people know how to how to solve those problems so i started teaching it and i had to had to be absolutely perfect when i was teaching it i couldn't have anyone confused or not picking up the skills quickly or not being able to deliver accurate information straight away so i made sure that the course was perfect and then i wrote the book to accompany the course and because i had more time no pressure and sat at home i could i could i could make sure that the words were correct and give him accurate advice so that's the inspiration and that's why the book exists and also you went to norway on on a research trip yeah i did yeah that was brilliant i just wanted a little bit more information uh so i i visited six museums over there um and that accompanied all the online research i'd done throughout scandinavia and in america and whatnot i realized there's not a lot out there to be honest but when i visited norway i went to a museum where they'd got an archive of cooks hundreds of them and the lady that curated that collection she was a wonderful really helpful person and she let me choose several to look at and i learned a lot from those cultures and that's why why that one existed i made that i was pretty much as soon as i got back and uh that was where i wanted to go with with cookies and i've tried to sort of deviate away from it because i don't want to just copy beautiful sami cooks's but to be honest that's the shape i'm i think i'm going to go with now that's that's the one so in the book it tells you basically how to make a cup it tells you how to resolve the problems it talks about decoration this is one of the wonderful cups that i found in norway look at that it's actually a swedish one that one and this is just the underneath so they they decorate the underneath just as much as they would do the top well that's that's that actual one there look how steep that handle goes gorgeous it's gorgeous isn't it and these are just some of my older ones that i was just finishing off one day um what's going to show you so it tells you all about decoration of milk paint and how to create it how to do chip carving um yeah here's what it is this is um yeah section on tools it's a good a good section you don't need a lot of tools but you need to need to have at least a few more than spoon carving just to make life easier for yourself yeah so it's all in there it tells you what to do and um hopefully it's of use to you so perfect so as i mentioned a link below to a page on paul's website where you can get a copy of yourself of a book which i would highly recommend [Applause] so paul we're going to get straight into the process where would you like to begin i'd like to begin by saying where to get your wood from and this is a much larger diameter wood than you probably think you would normally make a cup from and to me this is actually quite a small piece but it's a piece of birch and i love working with birch it's probably my favorite and um it's it's nice and it's not too easy to carve actually it's got some resistance to it but it's makes it a more durable cup and i much prefer the finish from them actually and they do seem to behave themselves with water and cracks and things so it's quite a nice wood to use it was you know this sort of diameter so it's the main stem of a tree and it was fell through woodland management work that to do um thinning out a woodland to to allow the trees that remain to grow to a better standard um and speaking of woods what woods are suitable for for crooks are carbon uh suitable well ones that i know work really well uh are birch and older um you can go sycamore it's a bit tough but you can go sticker more as long as it's not got too much of the heartwood to be honest with those you're good to go it depends where you're in the world try and avoid the really dense ones just because it saves lots of stress on your hands and your tools so things like oat the sap would evoke quite easy it's the heartwood again it's very slippy you can skid off it all the time and to roll the edges of the tool and ash is too hard really um so yeah i'd just stick to birch species and you'll find them all over the northern hemisphere um if you're in the southern uh or in the equator area i'm not really sure to go this whatever's not too hard i would i'd start working with those ones um in in the uk at least avoid the really soft ones avoid popular um poplar can be um very easy to carve but if you drop it on the floor they can just split into two i've known that happened and same with lime it's gorgeous to carve it's great for if you don't want to practice this and just see how bevels work in wood and to just move through wood then pop that lime is a very very good one it's very soft and very creamy easy to carve it's not furry or anything but um i've found that they're not very strong when when you put hot water in them and they and they expand in size they can crack uh it's just not quite got that strength that you need so um i seek the birch species themselves brilliant so with this piece in front of us where do you typically begin so i've begun already a little bit of uh preparation i've split it in half already because we used a little some some spoon carving that we were doing and it's the same what i use for spoon carving because it's that's how i make my spoons i tend to put the um the shape of the spoon on this this this plane here and we've got a nice flat surface to work from what we're going to end up doing is making a blank like this okay and the blank was there like that so what we've done is we've removed the area near the center of the stem which is called the pith which is where a lot of weakness is and we've removed the top of the bark just so we can make a flat surface to to carve a cup on you don't have to actually remove all of this and make it flat but for the video it'll it'll make it a lot easier to to see if you don't remove it you tend to get a more curved shape to the top a lot of people like that so they leave that and leave that shape in there but it's just for decoration because it means you can't put you can only fill it up to there anyway and that doesn't do anything except make it look nice but i really do like the look of it i must say so that's what i do and there's several reasons why one of the reasons is it helps to prevent cracking um is the removable pith and to carve your bowl in this direction and not and not that direction that's where you get lots and lots of cracks ah okay interesting yeah okay so what we'll do is we'll show you how i just rough out a blank very quickly um so what i do is um i just use a template just so i've got a bit of consistency and it just saves me getting the ruler out all the time so i know what this dimension is and i know what that dimension is and i know it'll make a culture and on the cooks page when you go onto the website i'll i'll stick up something basic that you can follow and that you can print out so yeah but if not if in doubt just draw around something that you know is slightly bigger than a conventional you don't cup want to go deep and narrow you want to sort of get more like a bowl just i just to be honest quite a lot of the time i draw around the lid of our sugar pot at home and that makes the perfect inside line that i'm after when i do round ones so i know that the uh center of the tree was there and all of the stress cracks that you get are there and that's why you don't do it um if you cut that way it's gonna split it's gonna split there even if you remove the pith that's where most problems occur the beauty of you doing doing it to the bowlers this end is as you bust through all these concentric rings it is in the in the base of your cup as you look into it you get those nice circles and that's what you get if you um do it with the open end up there so that's another reason to do it but what i do now is i normally draw a center line on the on the template that lines up with where that was and that means all the circles will be like the ripples of a pond so i'll put that on there like that and then i'll just give it five millimeters either side like that and i know there's a split it down there that's going to remove all the wood where i want it so just a rough old axe it's not a carving axis just splitting you can tell it's seen some action this has been split in wood like this for about 10 years it's really good so i'm just using a big old lumpy hammer mallet okay so that's the two sides done what i normally do is i have a dimension here that i follow so if i'm doing a shallow cup and i'm preparing blanks for students it might be kind of that size for the one we're going to do today i want it roughly around there so i'm already going to be taking off that kind of material by the time i've taken off the the dome we're talking something like that so if i work to those kind of lines i can do some splitting but it doesn't tend to split straight it will run off because we're quite near the edge but there's a bit of a technique you just start it off that's not too bad actually what you can do is turn it round and finish off the other side and then that normally brings the split back to the center so that's that side done i'll try and do it so you can see that's come nice but can you see how it split out wider at this end than it is there so even though that was a lovely split it's a bit wider now that's that's going to be an advantage actually i think in that we could um we could make it so the handle comes up a little bit which is always nicer anyway so i might work with that actually yeah so what i do now is i tidy up the faces the top split so i'll get a slightly nicer axe and while you're down there we'll do pretend i wouldn't normally work this low so i'm gonna just drop my knee and you can just start to clean that face up with the axe just following basic techniques before always um i'm a fairly loose grip so you just hold your your axe like this let it move and then let your wrist move as well and then you're not even moving my arm at all it's just that action when you move your arm that's when the serious power comes in that's when you can combine all three your arm your wrist and the movement of your fingers there it's got to move through an arc it doesn't then you're struggling and don't just hit it like this everyone does the minute they relax so much easier i'm just looking for a parallel front there i think that'll go it's going to be honest so i know it's a bit too wide so i'm just gonna chop those off and obviously i'm holding it fairly close to the head i'm a bit more confident so i do tend to hold it more like that and i get even more power but when you're starting out hold it more closely like this they call it choking up i've got a lot of control but i'm finding i'm not removing the material as fast as i want so i'm going to move down to here and i feel i feel like i'm making more progress but please just use the skills that you've got and don't don't rush into this because this is where this is where you remove parts of your body you don't just cut yourself like you would do with a spoon knife or something now the bottom surface i've got this little knot but it looks like it's coming out now so i think it's just going to be okay we can live with that um don't believe what everyone says you can leave knots in in woodwork and often do it just means a little bit harder work to to work around them but it doesn't necessarily split because the knot is there several have made in the past that's to demonstrate that so i need a flat base i want it to sit nice in the next device that we use okay that'll do that's the blank so we'll draw the picture on and then we'll be able to see how much material there is to remove so um now this will obviously get taken off at times and redrawn on for you guys you'll be able to see straight away what we're trying to make and that's always important when you're trying to show people and the low spot is going to be roughly across that center line so the handle is going to be slightly higher come down and then level out i think on this one what i like to do is to to have cooked sides just looks nicer if it comes in but you can just go straight up so you can come up like this and then go straight up that's one way to do it much easier to make them like that and the same at the front but i've come right around at the front if you see little things like that that will add an hour on just removing all that end grain there and curving it around and likewise you've got to follow it you've got to undercut so that's that's even more work it's little things like that that mean it might take you more than a day as opposed to half a day to make one um the overall size is another thing that that increases the time putting this handle on here all that wood has got to come out from a log that big so it's it's deciding your shape that's going to decide how much effort is is involved so that's what i'm thinking now you know we've got to do a video in pretty short time so i'm trying to think about little things that are going to slow us up so paul what's next in the process uh next we're going to start to do the outside shape what i like to do is do as much of the outside as i can and then i use that as a datum to set how much hollowing i have to do it's um a lot of people do the hollowing first there's nothing wrong with that really it's just that when you've already hollowed it and then you do the outside with the action you're whacking away if you're not careful with your axe blows and you're not aware of where you can introduce stress you can just crack them in the carving process way before you dry them or use them um if it doesn't look cracked it often will be anyway just it will remember where your ax blows were slightly less accurate or we're a bit too forceful and you won't see the crack until it starts to dry and then it will crack so is this because well we filmed the previous video since then i've obviously been inundated with comments from people using the process and obviously we'll be covering it throughout but probably the number one issue people have is cracking yeah um so you're saying obviously it's in the action process where a lot of that can actually emanate from so think about cracks as the most important thing there is absolutely no point making a culture if it cracks it just isn't you're just wasting your life so the whole process is designed to avoid that in very rare circumstances it still might happen and it's quite unpleasant i can assure you because it's character building but the only reason why i do this and teach it is to stop the cracks so that people can use straight grained wood not everyone's got bur even if you've got access to it it's really hard to carve once you free yourself up to be able to carve straight grained wood then it becomes an enjoyable process and you can make lots of them and you can give them to friends you can keep a weird collection like me um you can sell them and you can just move yourself up from just making spoons or whittling sticks and you can actually make usable products that are going to last for years and just you know look forward to your coffee in the morning and a whiskey in the evening and beer and all the wonderful things that you can drink and you can drink out of wood and if you if you can incarcerate grained wood there's more chances you're going to actually have utensils you can use so we talked about some of the processes to avoid cracks at the very early stages of selecting your wood slightly larger diameter taking away the pith things like that obvious things and for me the biggest part of the process is to carve it carefully still carve it quickly but carve it carefully and that's what we're going to do so i'm going to obviously get down to my line i think we'll go for a very simple cup and we'll just have a fairly straight size it'll go to a curve and then we'll just try and make it look like a cup and we'll work to that outer shape now obviously if i did all of it i'd have no way of supporting it in this device that we've got here so i do need to leave some flat areas at either end so that i can clamp it into this device which we call a clave [Applause] you could call it a bench you cooks a horse a bull mate whatever you want to call it but it's basically a device for holding water there's nothing clever about it at all and people get a little bit obsessed with these but um all i can say is just just chop out a section i use a chainsaw but you could use a bow saw and some and some chisels and a mallet and spend a bit longer and just pop four legs on it by drilling the holes and away you go i've made refinements over the years that make them a bit easier to uh to to work on the coaxers but so we'll we've drawn these patches on and that's what i'm gonna i'm gonna retain i'm gonna leave those on this one i go all the way down to the ground because it gives me a little bit more support i don't really want to take the underneath of the handle off yet that'll give me a more solid base to sit this down on so we'll give it a go i'll give it a go and see what happens here we go first blows of the whole process the underneath i can start to um to form that rounded shape just with a big fat bevel like that so we're gonna do and then we start to get the shape that we want then we can make it rounded or bring it around at the front or whatever so that big fat bevel we're gonna just get it all the way down to the end there same on this side uh [Applause] i'm always looking turning it over trying to make things sim symmetrical taking the same off each side trying to keep my angles the same so quite like that a general shape so i've taken a there's a deeper drop there than there so i could take some off that start to get some more uniformity to it and bring around the sides to meet this rectangle that we've made and i do come up underneath as well at the front and when i put my fingers in there to check the thickness i can check right down near the bottom okay just keep chopping away see what happens when you're working close like this to a line and you want to be accurate start off gently like that just feather it think of it as your finger just tapping away looking at it going i'm going to carve there i'm going to carve there and this this section right in there just keep aiming for that all the time with a nice light blow choked up on the on the backs just just using the top sort of inch and a half of the blade just tap it in there tap it in there then bring up the power and away you go that's uh and the best thing to do is keep your your elbow tucked in and then it goes down a more of a straight line if it's like that it tends to wobble across and you'll see that i clipped the line very slightly there which doesn't bother me because it's oversized anyway and that was because my elbow wasn't tucked in properly so you start it off nice and slow and get it exactly where you want it and then just bring up the power and it comes off in a nice clean line not far off from our rectangle gonna i think that's a wide enough bevel um for now and i'll just work down this seam because that's nice and easy to work so make life easy for yourself if you can which means that that will now come off a bit easier because we've got to tidy it up to that rectangle there we go i'm happy with that now i'll do for that bit this can all come off to there this is always a hard one to do here and you're working blind you have to be quite bold to go with it when you feel the flow there we go getting there in it a bit more on the bottom bringing that roundness into it now it's quite tempting to go all the way back here and start your angle from there but you'll get a very shallow cook so with not much base on it if you do i always just try to make take off the least amount you know about this much if you start if you start coming back here it starts to make your cookies look a bit weird to be honest because by the time you've taken all the material under the handle you just know this very small base get a bit tippy so this way you get a nicer base for it to sit on you can always take more off at the end of the day you're just trying to reduce the need for the axe after you've hollowed in fact we won't use it at all more than likely other than to do the safer areas around the handle okay so let's get in there now to take all the x marks off because that's what knives are for but uh if you think it's gonna be quicker with the axe do the quicker the quicker way and then suddenly the act starts to become a little bit of a hindrance and you think i'll just swap tools and it might actually be easier okay so these areas here i still want a reasonable patch to clamp it in but i only need it for the i don't need that face there i don't need all this bulk if i can get this material out i can go around with my fingers and continue to check that thickness and i'll have saved a bit of work for later on i won't have to use the axe so that's what we're going to do next we're just going to prepare it first with some explosion this is what i call a curve and you can only go so curved with an axe before the back of the ax hits the wood and you can't go around the curve anymore it's a bit like having a big bushcraft knife you can't really sort of make a spoon with it because you can't you can't go around the bowl because the back of the spoon is too wide and too big that's why slim pointy ones tend to be the way to go for the tight curves let's try and get a thing going there we go so that's about the limit for a curve but what we'll do is we'll just keep aiming for that base until it gets stuck i was talking about shock you don't want to keep that hitting there too much it's going to remember it might form a little crack there we can go straight in now i think we'll call that a day there do it on the same on the other side let's take some of that stuff [Music] okay so we're ready for a saw now so a saw will allow us to get that material out much faster so you can see so i'm going to saw down this line here and what sauce are you using i'm using them it's quite common uh tree surgery sauce called a silky gom taro and it's my favorite saw it's brilliant you can just do so much with it it's nice and long you're not just trying to use a small blade all the time it's quite a broad teeth pattern so it's eight teeth per inch i believe it is um yeah it's just cracking sauce the most basic one really but it's the only one i'd ever buy for for larger work it's a bit on the blunt side the blade at the moment but it really does the job so somewhere near that handle there will stop and turn it over and do the same on the other side always be careful when you first do it on these when you get these loose bits you can slide off and you can slice your finger if you're not careful don't put too much pressure on it let the saw do the work [Music] so tricky bit now is to get these bits out and you can just try and find a comfortable place clear clean your block it's really important so you don't slide off i'm just going to chip away now instead of it getting stuck bits will come out so one facet down there one down there and one down the middle it's always much easier to work in thirds like that all right so you're using a block as a stop sometimes yep um just more control i know it's not going to go diving into i don't want it i can just flick it into there and use you often do that it's it's quite a handy technique uh probably become a bit more obvious later when we go and remove this section right near the end and i can talk about it okay i mean that this is so easy to do with a knife now that you just clean that up later with the bulks out and we will be doing it with the knife on the outside before we do the hollowing as well so yeah do the same again there but i'll leave all this on that's just a nice big healthy stop which is gonna up against there happy days so same again so now we've got a little bit of shape to it we can hang over the block sometimes helps let's try nicely so right let's just have a look at it so remove the bulk it's fairly pretty much the same on both sides start to taper in coming round and we can start thinking about the base so i got my pencil which you can never find if you come on a course you'll see me looking for pencils i'm drawing a bit of a line that kind of marks the center in general don't have to it just sometimes helps same with here so that's roughly the center isn't it so i'll come down there amazing what a pencil line will do just to start making you focus so we know that that's the dead center of our cup so we need roughly the same amount of material around there in a circular circular way so we're not far off so it's a bit bulky there and there so if people are not comfortable drawing freehand circles can they just use a compass and you can if you like it's quite it's almost just as easy i mean that you have to do that freehand um no reason not to really um when you're there just when you do a curve um it's much easier if that's your center there you just rest your hand somewhere around there if you're right-handed and just that you're just using your hand like a compass you just pivot off this knuckle right and then you just move your knuckle and you'll see me do that when we do the center i'll do it now so if you were to do the center now you'd pivot over here somewhere and you're just going naturally where your hand wants to take you really but like i was saying before i've got a uh a lid off a container at home just i think it's our sugar bowl and it's perfect for doing this when i do round cups because this one isn't round so um that should that's the inside basically i'm trying that's a bit oversized i want it about half as thick as that at the end but that'll that'll allow for mistakes and whatnot so i know looking at that now i could just probably tickle these out here make that a bit nicer and less clunky so it's just helping to get to that final shape okay so i think then you look about done with the axe yeah that'll do so paul what's next in the process so next we we're going to refine the outside so we've got all these these axe marks we've got the the general shape and we've we've you know removed a lot of material very quickly but we're going to refine this to a knife finish um you can just use like a wool carving knife or a bushcraft knife or whatever and just come up like this and and spend quite a lot of time trying to make that right but i find i've got um less power behind the cuts um and it becomes quite tiresome processing it's adding a lot of time on as soon as i moved over to these uh double-handed knives that are made by maura knife in sweden um it's called the mora knife 220 i believe and it's or they call it the wood splitter but you'll see as soon as you see that you'll understand there's only the one knife that really looks like this often doesn't have the red handles uh they do two one with the red handles and one without but it's effectively the same tool quite reasonably priced i think they're around 30 pounds um i've had this oh god knows how long now since i think the first bush scruff show i think i found it at one of the stalls there absolutely love this thing it's brilliant people often think of it as a poor quality tool because they refer to it as a draw knife because it's not very long and because it's got two bevels on it like a conventional mora knife one on either side flat scandi grind that it digs in it goes down into the wood it doesn't slide across like a draw knife would and it feels awkward to hold on to going that way however is what it's designed to do a lot of people don't realize it's a push knife not a pull knife and it works beautifully in that direction and you want it to go round corners and you want it to turn and you can only do that when you've got a shorter bevel on the bottom as well as on the top that's what we're going to play with next i've i've just started to just to do a little bit on this side so that's what we're kind of aiming for it's nothing perfect it's just starting to get it as you want it and later on we will use a straight knife just to tweak this perfectly so we can get the rim to sit nice against the bottom of your lip when you sip and to get it just the right thickness all the way around and we'll be doing a similar process on the inside with another tool which we'll introduce later so i'm not saying you need this but it will save you a lot of time and it's quite an enjoyable process to use it that's when i use the end of the device here at the moment it's it's set quite low because i i used to use this for bowls if you turn a bowl on its side it's a lot bigger than a cooker is um so when i use corkscrews i just i just put a block there like that and that just makes it a bit higher if you make your own and you only want to make cuxes just just make it a bit lower like this section is now and you'll be well away so you just uh just pop it in there and use your body just to press against there and it's like an instant vise it doesn't have to be mega tight or anything and that's all that's needed you just put the tool on this will work from the high spot so that's the high spot that's the where the apex if you like of this circular parties and then you just go from the top working down down down towards the end and add a slice so don't just push with it start and try and use all the blade at like a diagonal action like this don't take too big a bit just get used to how the tool wants to cut and then just add that extra little bit in as you want to i don't want to take too much off there because we're quite close to the limit anyway so it's just a case of tidying up on that section sometimes you take more off so here i can be a bit more generous with the cuts so the whole time you've been mindful of the shape the overall shape yeah i'm not cutting into it if you're happy with the shape as you had it from the axe you'd only be concentrating on surface finish so you'd just be taking off a layer all the way around and then it would all look like a knife finish instead of all like an axe finish and be consistent do the whole surface and then you won't have bits that you've missed but yeah by all means look at the shape so i'm really happy with that shape it's coming down nice it's dropping to where i want it to drop there's a bit to do here so we've worked all that section already so that will take you much much longer with a normal straight knife simply mainly just because it's hard to hold and it's a cumbersome thing and you have to do all these fancy grips whereas this you just you just sit it on here it's just happy days and they're they're super thin and they're really thin ones but you can take much chunkier bits off if you want to and then again i want to work downgrade so i'm going to work from the top down there so just come across here these are a bit chunky look but it is enough at the end today says you know best not to take too much because you could ruin your edge and you'll see it every now and again when i've been using it i've been getting little lines up here and that's because the edges start to roll a little bit because it really wants to see a grinder rather than a stone next time i sharpen it okay start thinking about this final rim even though we're going to finish this with a straight knife soon and it's nice just to get the worst of the material off there's less to do so that's all the outside done for now i'm going to rework this section and we use the similar technique to remove these flat spots later on um but we won't be working on the end soon which i've got a new fancy way of showing you that so right so we can go straight into halloween now same block that you used on the end you can use to to initiate the space now you could make this space um exactly the same width as a customer plus a couple of wedges but i find having that extra bit of space means that when i swing an axe i'm not hitting my hand against here all the time it's quite a tight space to to work him and then he can double up as a spoon carving uh bench as well so because you often tend to move around and do different things with spoons longer handles and big serving spoons so um we'll get set up so so the block that we used on the end here uh just to initially get a bit of height um i'm going to put in here just to fill up the majority of this void and then we're going to use wedges and as you slide them together they obviously increase in this dimension which forces the material to be pushed up against this surface there's nothing more simple it's just a woodland vise i suppose you'd call it so this block was a little the gap there's too big so basically i'll put another one in and then we'll just shove these in should be happy days the only way that this works properly is if these surfaces on the end of your block are nice and flat and reasonably parallel and it can sit down on the on the on the base so just give that a little bit of a tap there and then we'll offer one of those in pop our leg against there give that a bit more of a whack there we go and that's that's all complete just one quick question um and this is actually also for myself is um there's a contraption i saw lee used many years ago called what's it called super jaws yeah they look quite handy actually like little vices and stuff yeah so things like that are okay as well aren't they i wouldn't hollow on one uh what we're gonna do next i think they're a bit wobbly okay and a bit noisy and a bit flimsy but um for general work yeah it'd be fine if you're just holding something for a little bit while you cut it no problem at all but i don't think i'd want to hollow a huge cuxer out i've not tried it though so i'm not sure but from what i've seen you know it's a bit like a um a workmate like a nickel workmate so it's a bit on the light side and they might bounce around a bit whereas this weight is an absolute torn it's it's a you know it's a nightmare to lift it but once i know i'm in place that's that weights my my to my advantage perfect thank you okay so we've gone to tools then so hollowing used to be you know probably considered the most difficult section of all of this i think now it's finishing it to a nice thin wall that's that's my most difficult process so halloween's quite fun and hopefully if you follow my procedure it'll be fun for you this is the for the first tool in the process and it's a straight gouge you don't have to necessarily get this make but if you think about this width and this is the sweep this is called the sweep and it's how curved it is this particular manufacturer file they're called pfeil it's a swiss make this is the number eight that they do and that's replicated there and the 25 is that width in millimeters there this is now you know has been for quite a few years actually it's my favorite um straight gouge i used to use a number seven quite a lot i find the eight is just a little bit faster to use i was a bit worried about leaving tall marks because it's not the smoothest you know it's quite a tight sweep in a way but i found it's more unacceptable and i now finish with another tool anyway so this is a roughing tool and it's sublime they're not a great deal of money but they're good quality and they last a very very long time and who in the uk would you recommend getting those from oh you can get it from lots of different woodworking suppliers um a good one is classic hand tools and they often supply this size as well and it comes in a curved version they call it the long bent gouge and it's exactly the same dimensions it's just bent now if you wanted to make a shallow cuxer um as in not too deep a bit like this one but a bit wider this curved gouge would actually do most of the the work you get almost the bottom i find that they always catch in some way but for um for a few minutes in the process i just can't bear to be without this tool it this curved one it just i used to try and eliminate it from the process and go straight to something more elaborate for doing deeper hollowing but i find that this works so so well for the first um the first inch or so of the internal hollowing but you'll you'll see that in the process so those two gouges definitely recommend those and then to finish the process you need a third tool and that's to get to the very bottom of a cup because these two ones they'll remove a lot of wood in fact we'll do nearly all of it with a straight gouge but when you want a nice flat bottom and you want to scrape across that surface you need a third tool or a second tool if you use this and the more elaborate one the process i use of doing the outside first means that once you've done all the hollowing with the straight gouge you're down to something obviously a bit more clunky than this but you're getting a thinner wall you're only getting something about you know less than a centimetre thick hopefully five mil thick and you're going to go down to something more like two or three mil when you start putting pressure on this edge is when i've realized that a lot of the tools i used to use in the past are no longer suitable i've seen this wall bend as i push against it and i'll try and explain if i use this curved gouge here and i go down there and i go down there can you see it's starting to hit there it's making contact with the wall on the back of the the tool there you can get away with that for so long as you turn through the cup and then it becomes like a lever and it can put so much force on there that it can cause cracks and again you might not see them until it dries and then you get the crack and then it'll be very dramatic when you put the hot water in and explode but for that section this works like a dream so for this last bit down at the bottom i find the third tool is is the way to go and you've got several options so one fantastic tool that i recommend if you want to make a shallower cup is this and it's one of nick westerman's swan neck gouges and it's it's a deeper version of this basically so once you've got your bevels lined up there's more clearance there at the back of the tool so you can go down go down go down go down and you can go across the bottom and we're now going across the bottom but can you see other tools hitting the rim there now you're going to get away with that on this one because it's quite a shallow culture and you can cut across the bottom in happy days as long as you're aware that that's rubbing but it's not using it like a lever deeper corpse on that on the other hand you go down you go down you go down lever it's being a lever and it's just gonna i've watched it just just causes all sorts of problems but for shallower corpse by all means i recommend this it's a beautiful tool it works so well the bevels are just set perfectly and once again that's nick westerman that's nick westerman's yeah um there used to be a tool that still is a tool called a dog leg gouge that hans coulson devised that's exactly the same as that in that it can go right down the side right across the bottom but it will do even deeper cups problem i found is that there's always a point where the the lever problem happens again this is only if you use my process if you hollow first once a big hollow block you can use any tool you like and you won't cause these problems you've just got to be very careful with your axe on the outside so they're all beautiful tools and i'm not trying to you know swing one way or the other but so i found the dog legs were a bit of a problem so i've gone over to twickercams again and i used to used to use these um i think we did it on the last video didn't we and i used to use 50 millimeter ones which were a bit too broad for the cups i was making at the time i found that they got stuck and this is a 35 millimeter one which just means that dimension there and i started out with a 40 mil one which is this one and that that used to really get in there quite nice it was just the right width without this tip hitting the side here and catching um just did the work beautifully but i noticed that the bevels weren't as as rounded as they could be so um i've got this chap called miguel in portugal to make this one and it's all rounded all the way around you see and it sits just like my favorite spoon carving knife the bevels are very similar and this turns through wood beautifully and so does this so this at the moment and these videos do change over time is my preferred tool for that that last bit across the base and go all the way down the side all the way in that corner all across the bottom and at no point does this touch the side of the cup so that suits my method and i can go for most areas with with just this one tool so that's the one i'm i'm going to play with today so just to recap your preferred tool for your particular process is a 35 millimeter tucker cam yeah from mcgraw of is it belzabu craft yes um yeah that's his company at the moment so a link to that will is obviously the links are in your book but also on the page that you set up as your central resource um yeah for the cook's carving excellent and just one quick question um obviously um to remind people that obviously when they typically buy the tucker cam it doesn't come with a handle does it um no so they need to attach your own handle yes very simple process just get yourself some nice straight wood and um if you're into chairmaking and all that kind of thing you'll you'll understand the process of getting some ash about this diameter and splitting in half or maybe a bit last year making quarters and that's all this was this was a quarter of a larger log and um and just you could not just use your normal knife for quite a long time or you could sit at a shave horse and just make these nice long facets all the way down then it's just drill a hole and put some boxy resin in there and um and the reason for the long handle for those that may not be familiar is for more leverage yes so you'll see when we when we do the work that it's more comfortable to hold it like this than to be like this you just relax more and you can twist and you can turn and you can lever and you can you can use this as a pivot that really helps so very usable tool i really really like to cams in general um and if you're after two comes another maker is nick westerman he makes a the 50 millimeter at the moment which is great if you do wider things like this that will be perfect so um yes there are the makers of two cams out there so um who else have we got i think that's about cool we can talk about the scorp so um this is a this is what i finish um all my cups with now i can get a really good standard finish with just the two cam but um this is much nicer it's not as strong if you like again it's another nick westerman tool in collaboration with at least offer and it it's just great for just scooping out those last few bits that really annoy you and for tweaking the the thickness so without this i can't make thin coaxes because that that just doesn't have the same control across this edge here as the um as the two cup so it's it's just a fantastic little finishing tool but it just means more tools more expense maybe so for the beginner it might put you off but if you just want to make a functional cup i'd say buy a straight gouge and buy two cam and you're probably good to go with those two tools there okay so we'll start hollowing now so we're going to use the the straight gouge and this is going to do quite a lot of the work the first few um stages in using it though could introduce cracks into the ends here and here so what we're going to do is just take our time and follow a bit of a strict routine just initially and then you can relax and use it in a more normal way i suppose you'd say so first thing i do is i just put the right on the edge of the inside line this kind of angle and just give it a couple of taps now come the other way and make a dish sort of ellipse type thing and do the same on this side okay what we're going to do now is join the two up and make a trough and then working from the side here we're going to do a similar thing and you'll see why we do this in a moment and see how that crack just suddenly went and joined up with the first one and that's all come apart so if i was to do that there when these two corners go into the wood they cause the crack to run all the way out the wood in both directions so you must always work towards each other initially like we've just shown you before you dive in in this direction once you've done that twice all the way around twice then you can start to just come down to the center from the edge this is just one of the problems you've got to deal with because usually you see the crack because you're using straight grained wood if using bur you wouldn't need to do this at all you just hammer away hopefully knowing that this wouldn't be an issue so you see the cracks are getting a bit more dramatic so we've got to be a bit more careful now so we're starting to see the crack i'm going to come out before it runs out and meet it and now safely we've only got this last tiny bit to do we're done so that's all of one side complete and we'll do the same here so you're probably thinking one doesn't use an abs when ads is quite a random tool it's a quite small space you're trying to aim for so it's not as precise i find them much better for bowls when you can come from both directions a bit like we're doing here but with a lot more you've got a lot more relaxed you can use a lot more power um but i found that this is just as quick because you're not trying to cope with problems all the time it's very very precise i'm working right up to that that inside line that i want to work to straight from the off i'm not messing around thinking about thinness right from the the other reason why is this gouge costs about 30 quid and then adds costs about 200 quid so i think i know what i'd prefer to use so are you going back round then to repeat yes so it's the second layer now of the whole process again but i can be a bit more aggressive is this also potentially a time where people typically develop cracks that manifest later on only if you don't follow this process yeah as we showed you those cracks starting and coming from the opposite direction to stop it that's that's the only way that you're going to get the crack share another thing that might happen is you might go vertically like this straight into the thing and chips wouldn't actually be removed and all you do is get the the thing stuck and then you might start just putting so much force in there that you you you've caused a problem so if you can just you know get your angles right so that the the chips come off then you know that all the force is going into that coming out of the wood and the force isn't staying in there so yeah that's that's one thing you could probably talk about [Applause] it doesn't take a lot of force you can it's only a lightweight mallet you could just use a baton you know just just make get some something um similar diameter to your wrist and just thin out one end with your axe so you've got a handle about that diameter and then just use a batten and that's what all my students normally use i'm just i'm just using a posh one today just because you can but it doesn't work any better to be honest okay so we're we're about there now with that so that's two layers done we've got control of it now and now we can we can really go for it and already we've got we've got down to we've got that far down the joint first joint of my finger just by being careful so if you can do that by being careful you can do the whole thing in a few more minutes so we're gonna start from the end again just because it feels like the right thing to do so you're starting at a slight vertical angle aren't you and then not like that and you'll just see it you just if you come in with your camera um and color it in so all of that is the chip that we're currently removing and you need to keep that consistent all the way down so if i went straight down now vertically that's only going to get wider and wider and wider and wider this is going to get stuck as you turn this you form the natural shape of the entire inside of the bowl anyway and you maintain this chip width so that you get you get something that just stays the same all the way down not that we've actually made that yet that's from the top you get the idea it's not it's not getting wider it's not getting thinner it's just staying the same the tool will naturally move over anyway it doesn't want to get stuck it wants to escape the wood there's a chip [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] you see the color change so we're going into the heart wood now the darker section don't always get it on birch i was quite lucky with this piece so obviously that sycamore cup that we talked about at the start of the video i was just full of the darker stuff and made a beautiful cook anyway making good progress i'll just keep on chipping away soon i'll have to start thinking about how thick it is measuring it with my fingers it's still really chunky so so we've done all this with a straight gouge how deep are we let's check that only about that deep um still quite good though um so you can measure the bottom now let's just check i'll just sight it down yeah so i've got about that much thickness in the base at the moment so um the gouge is going straight down going across going across going across and then the back edge is starting to make contact and that's the thing that we were trying to avoid particularly on these side bits here because we've got no at least at the ends there we've got support so whatever tool you use just try and avoid that whether it's a bent gouge or straight one or whatever but to give you more room what you can do now with a straight one is to just do a another sort of uh divot like we did at the start of the process and just make a hollow away from the edge so that's the edge away from the edge there you can go in from both directions and make a hollow i can do that again and slightly widen it that there is now the very base but we've established a step between there and there which means we can form a corner if you don't do that you end up with these very straight sided cuxers which you can't get a tool to curve around so that's really important so now we'll move on to the curved gouge and this is a pushing tool you can use a mallet but it doesn't feel quite right when you do and it has no benefit to it really if you need to use a mallet just go back over to the straight one i'm feeling this it's a bit thicker there than there so i'm just gonna i'm just gonna go with the straight one just a little bit more just because it's easier take bigger chips basically and it will widen out that base a little bit more so that the the curved one can really do its thing up to a point the angry which is where i'm working now and that is as well they're the most difficult bits to carve so you might as well use um the advantage of a mallet and a straight gouge rather than a pushing tool there so get that down to roughly where you think it needs to be okay so we're ready for the kerbal okay so just going to put the bevel on the inside there and then and this is what i mean about i was so reluctant to leave this out of the equation because it just works brilliantly [Applause] so you're approaching it from a slight angle rather than top down kind of straight down straight down to the center yeah if that's your center work your way around always going to the center let's look at those beautiful chips and i'm already close to wall thickness so if i just keep on i'll to keep walking around i'm afraid but now if you are doing a smaller and not so deep a cup if you like so if you like making really small cooks that are about 150 mil 200 mil then the um the nick westerman swan neck gouge will do all of this and go across the bottom and that's that's the tool to get for that job if you want to make deeper cups um or ones with a slightly smaller diameter at the top then i find that a three tool process works a bit better you could just use this and the tukey cam like we described but i'd rather do i'd rather have this for this process really speeds up the job and it's a joy to use okay so it gives you a lovely surface finish as well as removing lots of wood down to a almost final dimension really and at no point do i go much past that you said it's making contact now it's almost at the same depth as before with a straight one but what i've been able to do is do a an undercut rim almost which you can't do with a straight gouge it's very difficult to do with a lot of other gouges on the market as this is just like a precision instrument you can just get straight in there there's no messing and no skilling just rip it out i've just got to keep pushing it downwards and it's all the time it's widening that base and making it much easier for the next tool to get in so before it was only like that we're right out there now in those bottom corners there's just a bit to do here and then i think we'll move over to the next tool slightly different technique we're just nipping it down a bit no really want to keep doing that so you can see you're getting all these you'll get all these problems and which we can talk about later but if you go down you don't get those problems that's what peter ah always nice to go um a bit more undercut more in than vertical here because it makes the uh the handle so much more comfortable if you match that on the outside it's gonna get really close now the wall thicknesses you can see it's that all the way down now that actually goes thinner still want half that thickness yet though well hopefully got the gist of that we've used just these two gouges so this did most of the removal and this this refined it and made it a nicer shape and also continued to remove the material and just with those two tools we've we've got all this out so there's a lot of material there it's already a really good size estimate 300 mil at the moment but we'll try and make it 350. so the third tool i like to use is the two cameras we've described and these smaller ones are just really working for me at the moment swapped over to using smaller ones about three years ago and since then i've never looked back um i think they're really good tools so initially they're quite tricky to get through all these big lumpy bits and then eventually it'll work nice and sweet like the previous curved one was there are limitations though so if you're beginning then they're quite tricky to sort of get hold of um literally so you get used to how that sharp edge wants to cut so obviously that's a natural way that it might want to cut but you want to brace it it's bracing it in in different ways that allows that to happen i find that using the side of my hand on the cook often helps as a pivot point um with this resting in my thumb and i can pull on this and i can actually squeeze it towards me as well as twisting and that combination of the two and keeping the bevel riding in that wood is what really helps and i'm obviously showing you out here because you're not going to see a great deal in the bottom up but hopefully you'll then soon see what it can be so we're just going to get these high spots off the edge of that recess that we made i'm going to cross come across the end grain get into that corner which then makes space to come across right across the bottom this is really tidying up that that front edge now i can start checking because we've actually done the outside at the very bottom there's a way to go so we're in the safe zone if you like so we've just concentrated on these so you've got your side wall and that was all done with the plaster tool this bit hasn't been done and obviously the very bottom so that's what i'm working now [Applause] whatever tool you use for this for this bottom section you've got to be super careful you don't get too carried away and then make a hole in the bottom and it does happen and the students remind them basically if anything just concentrate on the um the corner at the bottom of the side wall and then the base will just naturally follow as you these clunky bits off they're not very attractive to see but eventually it gets smoother and it's much easier once you've opened it up a bit you sometimes can go back to the previous gouge and you can see that it would work better on that side wall so i'm not going to come up and see i don't know if you can see that on camera but this bit's proud and annoying me i could come up with this and try and get that off but i know it was so much easier if it came down with the the other tools so you sometimes swap between the two at this stage but for now i'm gonna this is in my hand so i'm gonna keep on using it and there's still lots to do with it i've been trying to stay on this side of the cup so that you can see that's been walking around but you can turn it around and come the other way it's a good way to get some of it off without having to keep walking everywhere but um sometimes good to keep walking so let's dance around this side a little bit and we'll continue what you've just seen around this section well we've pretty much done with the two cam now so i've got um i've got the wall there pretty much nice and even i've been managing to go straight across the bottom is it there's a few little bits to finish off so we'll just see you can just glide all the way across the bottom take these thin shavings off i mean nearly nearly there just a few bits in that corner again that's a different technique i'm really pushing into that corner and that leaves this proud area here and that's rather than pushing this is where we drag across very light very thin shavings just trying to decide when to stop which is always a tricky thing um one way to determine when when to stop you can start to see this green this is the heartwood um and it's forms like a circle basically with lots of lots of growth rings within it and i find that if you try and concentrate on making a nice neat oval shaped um lighter color there in the middle you can see it starting to form then you know whether you've got thick area or thin area than he's doing so you can see it's a new growth ring starting there look you see so if i try and make that as neat as i can i'll know that i've got a uni um you know a uniform shape at the base i know that that's a bit thick and you can tell it's a bit thick because the line goes back in again i make that more curved i know i've gone across it properly there's a bit of a faff it's nice to finish them properly now this can be much further improved with the scorp this is still almost a roughing tool if you like that leaves a nice fine finish that can work to a pretty tight dimension but the score can be even better so if you've got it usually i'd say i'll try and get most of it out with this so there's hardly any finishing work to do mainly just surface finish with the score and just fine tuning the rim so you can get a nice thin edge for drinking our tops that's still too thick for me i think we can go thinner and most of the thinness that we finally reach will be achieved by just improving the surface finish on both the inside and the outside edges and then we'll have something that feels nice nice when you drink out of it if it doesn't wear tongue so we're out the block now we've removed it from here and we've just got all these big awkward areas left to remove around the handle so spend quite a bit of time on the handle now um removing these and then you've got options you could drill a hole now and have one of the um conventional ones that you often see for sale um they're marketed in finland they're quite nice actually some have two holes and that's what initially got me into corkscrews but um i quite like just have a a very simple um a simple um open open handle like this you can just grab it pinch it like this you hold it in three different ways the only thing is it's quite a lot of material to remove it's a big old thing so a few a few techniques are needed first of all we're just gonna put it on the end of the block here seems to be the most convenient way to do it we're going to work our way in just doing some chops and the the most important thing obviously is don't make contact with the rim of the cup even just a slight glance with the corner can start to crack and again it might not show itself until the cup dries and things start to move using the block as a stop with the bottom part of the blade there that can help you to stop creeping forward too much the other thing i want to do is to make sure i'm only ever going to remove wood into fresh air if i continue this and there wasn't a cut there it would cause a split to go down that way so i'm going to start easing off soon and i'll just leave a bit extra on to do with the knife now something you need a bit more control and practice and you could probably just practice on some waste wood um several times and get used to it before you actually you know get to this stage where you could wreck something that's took you quite some time to to make again tuck your elbow in once you develop these sort of techniques you wonder how on earth you did it with just a knife before okay so uh the underneath now so i'm just going to take some of the worst of it off just to sing a bit of time being careful though i don't want to hit any of this at all well i'll stop about there yeah okay so we're going to get the pencil now and i'm going to try and match this shape onto the the outside and try to give myself a bit of extra wood for safety so i know that if i concentrate on this being the final outer wall it all should be good and then our handle i'm sure we have to handle pretty basic we'll just move a gentle curve up and down a bit of a groovy everything like that that should be comfortable fairly easy to make the more you make that come around and the more you make it come up and come around like on the other one we showed you that's when you start to think i've got a lead a bit on there well you've got on there and that means even more techniques coming in this direction with the knife in this direction and trying to turn in that area and the scorp's quite good for that actually so it's really good for lots of handle area areas so looking down there that's looking like that line is a bit too far away so if you you're not careful you just spend another hour with a knife i'll just bring that in a little bit it's quite tricky to to finally commit to where you want that but i think that will that will do and obviously you mirror it on the other side by keeping things parallel so we'll get the saw and see how we go so we always start off just going at this angle and even if it leaves that line it doesn't matter i'm gonna keep going okay to about there which means i can then come down and eventually match up with the line that we did want which means that lovely little chip falls out and now we can continue i'm just going to check with my fingers that everything's looking good there it is i'll continue down somewhere between those two pencil lines i think and obviously knowing when to stop so a bit more and you've got to check both sides you want the same amount of remaining wood on both sides otherwise you end up with a it goes down at a funky angle so when you do the next stage it might not break out quite as you planned so keep that keep that nice and parallel to the top surface okay i think we'll go after that okay so uh previously on videos i've often lined up my axe just inbound of that stop cut we've made brought the two down together and hopefully all that wood comes out and most of the time it does but i have had occasions where that stayed exactly where it is and all of the top surface of the cup has come off so now when when i've um been teaching it i've recommended people nibble away in in sections if you wanted to you could place that on there and then hit this with a baton or a mallet or whatever if you're not confident with the accuracy of your blows um you could work in pairs as well one person could hold the cup um the other person could hold the axe and the mallet or something along those lines okay so that's can you see how that's curved away it always happens so we need to we will come in this way you need to turn it over and come this way to counteract that and a similar problem will happen in a way it's a safety measure it means that you you're not gonna have too much retaining wood here and then probably cause too much stress so it's just something to bear in mind again i'm using that as a bit of a help to stop me from putting too much power into it or reaching forward too far that's the absolute limit if i'd have hit that there it would have been in big trouble and i think we'll just sneak up on it now with a an angled cut there we go that's the worst of it don't hit this too hard on on there because we don't want to cause um any cracks always thinking about stuff like that it's easy to get carried away because you feel straighter because it's not coming off fast enough well that's when you normally cause problems so i'd say that that's that's where to leave that right so we've got most of the uh the bulk out of the the bottom of the handle there and across the side so there's still a lot lots of material there it doesn't look very nice so we're going to try and get that off um it's a bit heavy duty with a knife but i've found that it's just the easiest way to approach it you can get a gouge and you can you can go down this direction and under there but it takes a bit of control to do that so let's just um we'll just try it with one of these simple carving knives there's frost 106 knife um made by mora knife and it's um it's the best wood carving knife i've ever used they're absolutely fantastic and so light you hardly know you're using it but everything you've seen on the table this has had a part in making that at some point and i've had this for quite a few years now and you can see that it's actually lost some of the stamp it should say sweden underwear it says maura and as i've sharpened it that many times it started to become more like a toothpick but it's still cars like a dream absolutely fantastic knife and i think it costs less than 20 pounds so so i'll just start off taking off these sharp corners because they're just uncomfortable to hold while i'm doing the other sections and this is a chest lever sorry a chest lever a potato peeler grip it's just like peeling peeling vegetables or whatever if you still do that kind of thing just squeezing like this and we'll go through several grips as as we need to i'm just starting to get a bit of a curve on the end take some of this sharp edge off so it's a bit more comfortable okay so this is another grip just very similar it's just that now we're gonna use these fingers to push push the blade towards you and it's because when you use it like this on a longer object like on a tool handle we call it a pull grip um and it's different to the potato feeler as the thumb goes on the opposite side just to keep it out of the way of the um the thing that you're trying to to make so we don't want the thumb in the way um and we hold the cup like this and just push these with these fingers it's very common one on the handles of spoons this grip i'm only going to the bottom of the valley though if you think of this as a valley you get down to the bottom of the valley then you stop and then you come the other way it's only a slight valley if you like slight curve it's still worth bearing that grain change in mind this one's a thumb push you're going to hold it in your fist just edge facing away instead of pushing you're gonna push with your thumb [Applause] and turn and use the tip again reach the bottom of the valley grain change corners and where corners meet always the tricky bits especially for beginners who you know um struggling to make this all nice and smooth but just um get the worst of it off for now so that's the worst of it look you've got these these areas where these two these two bits of gray meat so once you start to gain control of it you can you can do smaller and smaller cuts thinner than thinner pieces before you get to that place just start to lift out and lift out the cut then you can you can stop avoiding the problem of it getting deeper and deeper and deeper we're not quite there yet anyway let's keep coming from both directions until you you've got the least amount of rough area there that you can heal it's quite hard to get it perfect and sometimes you just have to live with them a line where the two meet it's not the end of the world just lifting out the cup you get this on spoons where the the bowl meets the handle because that's all this is really it's a big massive spoon anyway i'm being a bit too fine we don't need to to keep that up for a while um so i'm trying to try and get this bit off a bit more up underneath so that we've got a nice curve to eventually i'm just going to do the worst because we've got this big old mess here sort out a sec but i thought i'd just show you since we've started with the handle how will we continue it if i didn't have this to remove we'll do that next thing then just stop about there and then come the other way for now that'll be fine we can come back to that okay so we're gonna make it make this uh this area go in further and have a little bit of a hook coming at the end i'm gonna sooner establish that end grain surface first and then i'll know where to start the drop from so this is this is quite a calming part of the whole process it's slowing it all down it's all very dramatic with the ax and the gouges this is what most people probably think of when they think about making a cook so sitting down with a knife and whittling one it's still a large part of the process but it's definitely not the whole part i wouldn't want to really tackle a log with just a knife i think it might be a bit too take too long a bit too stressful but it's still still still involved in the process it's dropping away you don't have to do it this way this is just the way i do it like lots of curves curves there there there and it sort of mirrors all the curves that are on the cup anyway because it's a it's a cup okay so i'm going to go underneath here now just to reduce that down a bit different grips working different areas better sometimes you can use two or three grips in the same area to do the same job which is great if you're getting tired you know if you get an injury or something and you want to avoid using your thumb so much you can go back to the um you know the ball grip so that grain change was on about a bit more drastic under here i won't take it to final dimensions just yet start to get some control over it okay that's starting to look like something tidy this top face will decide where we want it it will i like mine all to lift up now i find it more elegant but it looks like it wants to drop down on this one we haven't got that much material to play with so i think that's what we'll do another thing to start thinking about is this top rim actually taking off this um pencil line and whatnot and trying to make it a little bit more uniform so it's a bit higher on there when it is there we've also got this fault if you like it there's too much come off that was just from axing out the original top circuit so trimming off the top of there is often a very nice way of quickly tidying things up you start to realize what you thought was a finished circus is actually something that can be improved just just by sitting down for a bit so at this point are you making the rim flat as in all straight surfaces or i'm improving the surface finish and trying to make it uh so it looks balanced you know i don't want it to to be higher on one side than another because then all the wood on that higher side doesn't perform any function it doesn't hold any more liquid so wherever the where the liquid is going to settle when it sits nicely on a surface i'd like to see that the wood was designed for that liquid you know i don't really want it to look hard and if this is the time where if you wanted a dramatic curve in here that you could put that in and it's uh yeah it's all good so well it's cleaned it up it's leveled it up and you can see also where you're going to have um fat bits and thin bits obviously you've got all this front to do but you can see if your uniform is a bit wider there look so i know there's a bit more to come off on the inside and you start to think does it want to come off on the inside or the outside now so i try to get the outside kind of okay so the inside there you can see it's not quite as rounded there as it possibly could be so i'm going to try and match that to that which will make that quite thin which will mean that has to come off from the outside so you'll you'll just be coming outside or inside make some sort of shape initially either in or out that you stick with and that normally saves the day but i can see automatically that wants to come out so i can do a bit of that now with the tip of this try and improve that it's a bit better don't have to be too perfect it will move quite a lot as it dries come in here it's a bit better already i'm thinner well i only do this for the first um sort of i don't know no more than a centimeter down from the edge because then the point of the um the blade just makes contact with that curve and it just gets in the way so there's another tool we're going to use for that it's a very quick way of just tidying up that room though and i'll probably use that inner surface to then dictate what the outside is going to do this is all personal preference and just done by eye so you have to follow my advice really so we're just going to continue to clean up this top face and establish where we want the drop and you want your high spots um when that's all clean and matches all the rim and you're happy with the top in general then you can you can use that as the top surface that you check the thickness and final shape but we've got some pretty heavy work to do with the front and the back really so i don't really want to do too much finishing work now because all it'll do is weaken the rim so when we're pressing down on the top for doing these sections but another thing we might just show you quickly is just a bit of finishing work so just cleaning up this outer surface there's absolutely no point having that all curved there because when your lip goes on it you just dribble everywhere so you need some sort of a lip you can you can very subtle with it so you can hardly see it it's a bit too defined at the moment so i'm going to take some of this off just either vertical or just slightly in and that's what makes cook so sweet if you see them with a curve on the outside this they're not very nice to drink from to be honest especially if they're thick so however obvious it sounds um as you're carving a cook so you're constantly thinking about the practicality of holding a drink and drinking it and holding it i don't see the point in making them unless you can use them and and that they hold a drink just as satisfyingly as a large ceramic mug that you can't you know currently drink out of at home you know why why make them smaller i don't understand um only takes another hour to make a big one compared to a small one so um why make it so that it leaks or through the end grain i i very rarely have it happen um but you know you've got to try and think what's going to stop it cracking or leaking and you know you can get quite arty farty about them and decorate them to death but um much rather a simple cut well made and i just grabbed it and i didn't have to think about how to hold it i just grabbed it you know because it just works um fill it with with whatever you want to fill it with and it just work there are limitations i mean yeah you do have to sort of ease off on the temperatures a bit i wouldn't use it for brewing in um i brew in a pot a cafe tft for coffee and you know tea pot for tea um i'd make my hot chocolate in a saucepan whatever it is um and then i pour it into the cup just after it's been made and then there's normally no no dramas and to be quite honest most of my corpse i do actually just put boiling water straight in them and there's no problem but just on the you know the safe side i say not to but that's no drama if you i always brew my coffee in a pot or a kettle anyway and then just leave it to do its thing in the grounds to settle and then i pour it and there's never ever been a drama for me so that's another thing where you can just grab it in the morning you don't have to think oh i'm drinking out of a special cup or anything you just grab it like any other cup and just use it and eventually it just becomes normal it's normal for me i'm a bit odd so um yeah i just want people to have practical cups that work well and and it's little things like does your lip work does it serve drink to you nicely does it feel nice to hold and then you can start thinking about what it looks like but normally if it looks right it's because it's going to function well anyway enough of a rant we'll um crack on and get these big horrible lumpy bits off the end and try to make it look a bit more like a cup so for a long time i used to just take the ends off with a knife same like you saw me just cleaned up the sides there earlier on that's super easy to do with the knife and i pretty much always do it with a knife you've got more control and it's perfectly comfortable to do that the ends however very very hard to get across even if you don't use my method and you hollow first and acts out later this end is quite um difficult to do and that's quite the reason why a lot of people leave that end on um if you leave too much bulk on the end and make it all pointy and probably leave it all like that then um there's potential for to crack there as you put a hot drink in there it can't flex as much as it can on the sides if it flexes more in one place than another there's a good chance it's going to try and find a release mechanism which is a crack so that's one reason why i try and make it the same all the way around pretty much so regardless of what method you use mine or anybody else's you've still got to tackle this end green at some point it's always a bit of a dread uh yeah so i just used a straight knife and then i just got it that this that we used earlier just for sort of tidying up the outside and coming down here at the end there could be used to do this as well and i used to clamp this and i think we did this before we used to get a clamp you can stand on it with your foot on a low block but we i refined the process and i used to use a thing called a hold fastener they used to have a hole in in the other ones these claves and it's a device which sits in there and it literally just goes down on the top of there and holds it in place and then you just give it a bit of an overhang and you can just push away all of that material and it replaces your foot you know it's a more civilized way of doing that and it was quite pleasant but i found that people have to keep moving the cup all the time and you hit your knuckles on the side of here it's a bit annoying and then i just had a brainwave one day i i said i've had this tool for years and it always had this hook in and i assume it's just for hanging it up on a on a you know a wall on a nail or something like that making sure you've masked up the the edge so you can always grab it and use it but it doesn't ever get that happening it lives in a bag so i thought what i could do with that eye and i'd seen clog makers use stock knife yeah a big stock knife to to to waste wood quickly it's definitely not a stock knife you can see it's not particularly thick so it has its limitations but it's quite flexible and i thought well what if i just support that in some way and then just see if we can use it and if you don't take too big a chunk it works beautifully so you've essentially got a hook embedded into the chopping block yeah and then just wrap it around there yep and it seems to be the way to go and you always know when something's going to work when a student picks it up immediately and has guaranteed success and half an hour later they've done something that would have taken even me an hour to do with the previous method i think if it's going to be quick for a student it's going to be really quick for me [Applause] as long as you're taking these thin slices you're not overloading this knife and you are working within its limitations so it's it's really becoming quite an important tool for me in the in the cook's carving process if people are unsure about this technique like you've mentioned a few times before they can maybe practice on a test bit of wood yeah why not yeah why not so it's come right around now and occasionally you can just come this way if you're careful don't really be careful with the um you don't want to put too much force on here but that's probably a bit easier with a straight knife so we can come back to that so i'll come this way now i'll start to and i'm keeping it flat it's more tempting and it'd be easier for the knife for it to go through this way but i'm going to put pressure on this cup here cause a crack easy to keep it flat more support just take thinner shavings it doesn't necessarily want to come off that easily but you can see that it does if you're careful it's all about twisting this if you twist that in too much you'll take too much of a bite you get it so it's just cutting and you just go with it really and as you make your way around the corner just bring it around a little bit and eventually sneak up onto the very hard bit which is this bit but we've got a we've got to get close to that first now i'm just gonna have to start checking thickness and shape see the shape already it's really coming on now that is so unpleasant to do with it with a straight knife so having an alternative method like this yet again it makes you think well maybe i do want to make a cookie instead of struggling there's a snowboard struggling still hard work it still does take some effort and some control and you might want to come back to this in stages i'm trying to rush through the whole thing but you might just want to pop this down for five minutes and come back to it if you're finding this is causing your wrist to ache or you're finding there's a problem with the tool in some way sometimes when something's quite difficult like this i like to just crack on with it i don't really want to have to keep coming back to it and dreading the process all right it's all all coming together nicely now this bit will just do with the straightener i think so sometimes you don't want to drag the tool all the way over because it can just pull off quite a big chunk at the end so what i can show you quickly is um we'll just get the um the straight knife and we'll kind of work in tandem with the other one and we'll just do a bit of a relief uh just to take some of the pressure out of that rim so small amounts of work across the end grain with a straight knife it's it's not too bad we've got to do the whole thing it's blending it into what we've already done quite nicely see it's way too thick there take some off on the inside anyway so i'll leave a little bit extra we'll probably do another pass with push knife in a second just get a bit more control over this and this is a time where if you want the cup to come around which is the thing that actually makes it look like a cuxer i think if it lips all the way around and then you undercut into that at least on that side then it gives the illusion that the whole thing's that shape even if this side has the area for the lip that we talked about and getting that curve right is quite important and you can match that with the curve at the back and it is quite important to come in at the back so that your the finger here goes in there and the rest of your the hand is that shape is the same shape as that basically and as long as the tops comfortable your hand will fit lovely and it's all part of the function you've got to pick this thing up and the handle is mega important on a on a cook sir because um something's quite unique you know you don't really get that on and green cups which i do love by the way and green cups are amazing things [Music] i can just i'm close to it i've took the meat off now so i'm close to it so i'm tempted to just this is where i start to think oh sure maybe i should do the whole thing with the uh the straight knife now but there's a little bit there it's annoying me so we're in this situation so why not just uh tickle that off with the um push knife while we can what i always finish with the straight one because this does tend to leave marks in the wood it rolls the edge after a while and you get these little tram lines that appear but it's mainly just for removing the thick stuff i'm coming around a bit more now make it a bit more rounded always feeling things so it's a little bit thicker at the end but we knew that that was going to happen curves starting to come i need to come more round there so i'll do that it's worth the extra five minutes to get that right in the mood well starting to get some control over this cup now it's um i've removed all the front i've blended it into the rest i've done the same on the back and i've just left a little bit of extra material there just so it's more comfortable to hold um so what's left to do we've got to do all the inside uh to a similar standard to the outside we can refine the the overall look of it and the thinness of the walls and use the same tool for the underneath of the handle and the underneath of the bowl so this is the last stage if you like and occasionally i'll go over to the straight knife just to tweak things as we as we need to i'm actually really pleased with the inside that we've just done with the cam to be quite honest um it's down to definitely down to final dimensions there's not a lot of thickness left in that base um the corners are really nice so i'm really pleased but what you often get is a bit of chatter around these bits here and lumpy bits and bits that annoy you so this is the tool just to just sort all that out really and it's great for just coming up underneath and just making the perfect undercut so we'll use that and it's the scorp that we mentioned earlier and it's basically like two spoon knives joined together um but the thing that makes this special for me is the very end here that you wouldn't have on a spoon knife or you would but it will bend too much and not work but because i've got that i can go right across the bottom i've had to re-grind this so this is a different profile on there it used to dip down a bit too much and i couldn't quite get the bevel to to make contact but now that i've re-ground it it just um it just works just a quick question for those that may not have a score um could they just use a normal spoon knife or not really for this bottom bit so that bit there you couldn't just wouldn't really it wouldn't really work um but you could use a left and right handed spoon knife to do all the inside yes as long as you've got a it's mounted into a handle so you can actually penetrate the cup quite easily and and get control of it but i just find that um the fact that the left and right handed spoon knife is joined gives more control even if you're not using the end so this has more rigidity to it so that works a little bit better i find it stays in the cup nicer and the grind that nick does on these are just unbelievable this this hollow grinding that really makes the difference because i've made several of these and i've made them to work all right but it's the hollow grind that it's really important to get that right makes them really easy to sharpen as well what is an alternative people can use then to kind of clean out the bottom there isn't one why it's this or the two can okay if you very handy with the um the swan neck gouges you can get a reasonable finish but i just find that gouges of any description are going to leave marks that are a little bit too unless you've got lots of different sweeps and you've got lots and lots of time but you saw how quick it was to create this i mean it normally takes me 20 minutes to do that when i'm not talking so if i've only got a few tiny little bits that need to be finished because i've got to reasonable standard already then this is this i just grabbed this and it's just like grabbing that to do all the outside so without those two i just don't think i'd bother anymore and yeah so if you can get one of them happy days so we've got to talk about grain so um on the outside the knife likes to travel across there and down into there from this high spot and the same down there on the inside it's opposite it likes to go that way in that way so that's what i'm going to do now i'm going to think about which way i need to go in this case it's that way to clean up this surface there's more of it it's more of a tuning tool if you want thin cookers this is this is the tool to use and if you want a nice surface finish quickly this is the tool to use as well if you want to be able to get to the very bottom all the sides and even this very awkward area here you can see it's starting to come fury you can come up underneath it like a reverse gouge i've done all of that now so now i need to come from the other direction okay there you go sometimes you just have to tweak it a little bit and what i like to do is to do all this and then come back to when it's dry and redo it again and then i can get a even nicer finish and then even thinner cup and get all the colors to do the thing i'm going to try and just be a bit sneaky and come up grain slightly to blend it in and then come back down again and it gets easier looking there we go [Applause] so uh that's the hardest bit to do so i'm getting that out of the way okay i'm really happy with that wall thickness now i'm just going to leave it so we've got to think about the rest so coming down here now see all these gouge marks look so the way around to avoid that is to use a shallower sweep towards the end just means another tool and even if i did that i think i'd still come back with this it's just such a nicer job start off a little bit grotty and then it should start to carve okay so i got stuck that's right at the bottom of the valley and down there and it stops and we come the other way i lift it up in one let's go around the whole thing that's where that grain changes probably should just keep on going and going you see the daylight coming through still whatever that is four mil thick it just shows you that all that end grain that just wants to leak that's why they do you've got to seal those balls up last thing you want is orange juice pouring all the way down your front so okay all of that's done now so i'm just going to um i've got a knot there and i've got the top of it just poking through it's a bit high compared to the rest so i'm going to spend a little bit of time just around with that cleaning up the base make all those circles look pretty and i think that will be the worst of the following just little tiny bits that grab your attention there but they'll become really obvious when you dry it some bits will lift and just need a little bit of tickle finish it off there's a bit there nice way to approach that i think it is this way around for ages but it's great so shape's not quite right there i'm going to take a bit of that off so we'd normally go down that way on the outside so we need to come this way you just have to be super careful here really take too much off if you're not careful we've got the grain change again just looks a bit more off it's not quite i always leave a little bit extra there's another one of those i love those bits um remember one of those things where you could just just leave a bit extra on and then you can always come back and take some more often sometimes a bit of extra strength is is a good thing anyway so we use the same tool for underneath the handle while got it because it just makes a nicer job of a curve but you can use your straight knife for this no problem just have to use the tip so this isn't as good to do but we can give it a go just to show you so straight knife does a better job a little bit let's go work out what's more convenient stopping and picking up another tool or carrying on depends on what you're going to do a certain thing i'm starting to get this uh this nice curve now it's all one smooth surface nearly a straight knife will actually be better in a second so that's what we'll go to uh another thing to work on now i've got this one is the base uh when you sit it down on a surface you don't want it to be bowed in some some some weird way or higher on one bit or another so a little bit of a hollow on the bottom will help that and this tool is very good it's a bit too good at it so you have to be really careful you don't overly dish the thing but it's the easiest tool to to do this with if not just a normal right-hander spoon knife if you're right-handed would be would be fine for this bit and now you can get away with a lot especially got two spoon on the left and the right so this i'll just have to see what this this happens here i'll just live with the fact it's there try and blend it in a bit better okay straight knife just swap things over okay now i'm going to make this more circular it's not quite good enough yet thing is you can get a bit carried away making it perfect and then it looks completely odd when it dries because things do move a little bit but so i have in the past left extra material on and then come back to it but it's much harder to remove because it's dry and this birch that i've been using recently it's not been moving quite as much which is great so i can just work that to a finished item in one hit normally it's all my new details now it's just finishing stuff and the top of that's not perfect come back right so the handle needs to be improved we'll give it a little bit more of a nudge in this direction you're just thinking what would you be happy to live with now for the rest of the cook's life and you're drinking out of it every day it might be worth you just thinking about little bits you want to remove or changes in the shape so obviously that's all all over the place at the back there so we'll tidy that up come back to it's dry that's pretty easy to do have it down here i'll tidy this up so that's not finished thickness but it's not far off to be fair and i can always tweak it later by coming up the sides and not the inside so we'll put a bevel on it now and uh and call it a dare thing so bevel just softens this sharp edge and um strengthens it as well kind of makes it a bit nicer and again you can come back to it dry and make a much better job of it than i am now and when you when it is dry and you're finishing it you can hold on to it and check that the handle is comfortable and tweak it again and again and again until it suits you or suits some sort of generic i've just noticed that was a bit lumpy so i'm just going to take yeah it feels loads better already um okay so we'll just carry on tweaking these sharp edges there's a bit of a tricky one this bit that'll do that's the outside beveled um no do the inside one [Music] bottom of the valley probably gone okay there now it's a tricky bit when to stop it's not far off is it if you want to decorate the tops of your cups with you know simple chip carving techniques and it's good to get a nicer finish on the top there it's not bad handle one's thinning out a bit so with the bevel around the back of the loop don't pull it off the end because you might lose the end of the corner there so i normally come back the other way and then one across the top here again don't pull it off the end come back with the weight that's by no means perfect i normally um spend a bit longer on this section to be honest so it's really where your eye tends to go and it's quite important for it to look good i think don't this um let's have a measure and you'll see how big it's very crude way to measure it but it's just a just a good idea to to see it's only a medium-sized cut really is by the feel of it so we'll get it we're not going to overdo it and get the curvature of the what's this so we'll just empty the bottle and then we'll just try and tip this in [Applause] it's a bit rubbish so it's over 300 because spilt off of it you get the idea so paul two topics to end off on firstly drying so kind of at this stage moving forward what is your process and advice in regards to drying so my process for drying is to get this and just put it on a shelf in the house like that and do nothing at all the thing to avoid is drafts wind moving past it and excessive heat but it does need heat to dry and it won't dry otherwise it'll just go mouldy i don't get cracks from drying them i only get cracks if i don't seal up the pores properly and then i pour a very hot drink in because that soaks into the pores it changes the shape of the cup it can't coat with it and it just explodes and that's what most people suffer from is a problem so um i don't do anything fancy at all i just avoid excessive heat and dendrites [Applause] and how long in terms of would you leave it out in terms dry it would only take a week like that if it's really thin and you can see how thin it is it's thinner it's as thin as the bowl of most eating spoons just before it comes to the the tip so it's only a couple of mil thick all the way down to the bottom so it's there's not a lot of actual drying needed and it will just escape there like you would not believe because that's all england that's all hollow millions and millions of pineapple holes same at that time so yeah it doesn't doesn't take long to dry um once and you'll know when it's dry because it'll change shape it will become it will go in in this direction and that will let you know that it's it's pretty much there it'll feel lighter it'll smell different as well um when you think it's nearly there and you haven't got long left then try and drive off the last the last bit of moisture is not not all of it you need it about three to five percent moisture content for it to you know not be too dry and too brittle if you like and i found that by putting them somewhere he thinks very hot it still won't drive it all off even if it's i do put them in the oven the conventional oven finish them off you can put them under the wood burner but they won't split that's not why they split you you've got the majority of the shape change done uh in that first week of it just sitting on a shelf so if you're in a bushcraft situation you're outdoors it's very windy here so i'll be trying to protect this slightly so i might just put bits of kit around it just to stop that initial blast from coming across it you can put it in bags and things but it just slows it down too much and you wouldn't really have paper bags in the woods because they just get wet and very soft and moldy these plastic bags they just won't dry it'll release moisture in a very controlled way and you can you can do if you really just but if you if you felt the wood in summer and it was really full of moisture and then on the flip side of that the weather was really hot then it would be drying too fast and removing moisture too quickly so you might have a few problems there so you might want to use the plastic bag if you if you want to do that it's not exactly traditional but just try and reduce the speed that the moisture is removed from the wood in those situations and you should be fine and the last thing in terms of oiling boiling yeah so oiling um i just use a cold pressed linseed oil a good quality food grade one i find that they cure really quickly and nicely if you let it cure properly then it will block up all these pores and it will solidify and cut should stay in one piece and you shouldn't leak everywhere there are alternatives though you can use walnut oil from the supermarkets you can use some of the gold good cold pressed um oil rape seed and grape seed oils they just don't tend to cure as fast and sometimes they don't fully cure but um yeah i just use i just use a good quality cold pressed in seed oil and it really does the trick so in terms of curing how long would you let it cure for the good quality cold press linseed oils they um they're fully cured within about four weeks some of the lesser quality ones ones the food grade but more for you get them in equestrian places for horse feed they take a bit longer for the ones that are just directly from the farm but the ones that have had a little bit of uh pre-oxidization which often happens with these sort of oils that you buy for curing yeah they're a bit faster they actually dry faster than four weeks but if you give it four weeks it's definitely going to do the trick if you're using the the other ones just give it twice as long then i think you'll be fine to be quite honest literally oil it really fully oil it until it's fully submerged into it don't do the thin layer thing because you need these pores blocked and they're so thin and they're drying from both directions that they will get enough oxygen to fully cure it's not like you're going gonna get a bit that never cures and if you did you'll never know because the outer and the inner surfaces are fully cured they're sealing it all up and you need those fully cured the reason for doing this is that it avoids hot drinks and getting in those pores obviously reducing leaking but more importantly cracks will hopefully stop the crack from occurring so that's your main that's your main thing you need to consider block those paws up fully cure them oil it and leave it somewhere and just forget about it don't be in any rush to to use it just there's just no point because you'll just crack it just just let it cure and if you want to after a couple of weeks just give it another light coating on the inside and the outside because what it does is it it reduces in size and those pores become slightly open again and just by filling them back up again it's like smoothing a surface if you if you're doing your walls and you've got little hairline cracks after you've already plastered just um just fill those back in again and that'll definitely make a durable finish and that should do you proud and you should be able to happily put coffee in there and drink narrowly so to end off um and this is something we've covered throughout the video uh the various kind of ways in which this can happen is first and foremost and this is probably the two biggest things that come up is splitting bracket so obviously we've kind of covered this throughout the video but just as a very simple brief recap um we're looking at things like accent aren't you and kind of the whole being careful throughout the entire process yes yeah so using larger diameter material helps removing the pith um being careful how you carve and blocking those paws up if you can remember those things happy days yeah and once again we've covered it in detail throughout the video um hence why the kind of detail which paul has been covering this process and finally um a few people have issues and once again you've covered this in detail throughout the video and even just now but just to kind of wrap up on is some people have issues with pouring liquids in and it's kind of leaking um so once again are you talking about the kind of the oiling and etc and curing things like leaking wear at the end or yeah the leaking at the end um yeah if it's leaking it's not fully cured right you've not oiled it so that's why we know we've mentioned that several times perfect so there you have it my friends that is a wrap for this video paul i'm officially going to coin you the cooks the king studio as of today we've all got referred to him as a cook sir king now that was amazing seriously uh thank you so much here even though we've captured this process before it's always really incredibly insightful to see your entire process how you approach things and how you've refined the process over order this time so thank you once again well i'm really pleased to get the information out and i just hope that that helped and it was a little bit of an improvement from last time and that um people have a lot more success in making cops and and not stressing so much about how to do certain things so yeah hopefully that was all worthwhile no so guys a final recap uh first things first is there is a link below to a page that uh paul has set up on his website on on that page is the following is the opportunity to buy his book well i would highly encourage you to do and treat that book as an accompaniment to this video and they both go hand in hand the books has everything recovered in this video but in more pristine detail listing out all the tools et cetera et cetera on that page of some other information as well a few bits and bobs in relation to tools and whatnot but really it's the book that has all that information in there uh like i said paul just kind of distributes his books all over the world on a regular basis so no matter where you are in the world you can order that book so all of that information is on that page also on that page is the opportunity to join paul's email newsletter which i would highly encourage you to do so you can be kept up to date with a myriad of things that paul is getting up to up and down the uk and in crafts in general what i'm also going to do is put a link below to paul's instagram where he's very prolific and on there you can highly encourage you to kind of give him a follow as always saying thank you for the time he's taken out for me to document his entire process and on there you can see the mirror the things also days getting up to i'll also put links below in the description to the previous two videos that we've done in this time i'm spending with uh paul and those are two spoon carving videos one on how to carve a standard eating spoon another and how to carve a production uh spoon so all of the links for everything that i outline are down below and also finally like i mentioned there is a breakdown of every single section in this video on the timestamp of this youtube video as well as a breakdown in the description below so as you move forward you use this video as a teaching aid and you can jump to any particular section being the halloween or anything else that we've covered in this entire video so rather than having to manually scroll through to find that section you can click on the time and then boom go straight to it because as we've done with the previous videos these are a teaching aid to countless people that are out there that refer to this video when and as they need to when they carve in their own cook sir and finally finally i would highly encourage you to take paul's teaching in this video and actually use it i think this is a big aim of yours isn't it it is for people to take it until you actually use it and to carve the cooks up i'd rather people just copy what i did and just provide a good technique and showed other people how to have success yeah and uh in in wood carving in general not just these cups it's just that um the techniques you've seen uh are all easy to to to practice on one object like this you could transfer this to any sort of carving and hopefully uh improve things that you do and and everyone around you so yeah so on that note guys that is a wrap i know there's a lot of links that i've mentioned there's a lot of references you know in terms of this video because it's such a meaty topic so once again everything links you down below paul is sincere thank you thank you for allowing me to document this entire process for obviously and for your hospitality uh during my visit down so guys that is a wrap for this video i sincerely appreciate you watching and as always i hope whatever you're doing you have a blessed day a blessing week ahead paul adamson and myself said outdoors peace out [Applause] you

Channel: Zed Outdoors

Views: 16,039

Rating: 4.9494472 out of 5

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Id: 98MxkdUw7eQ

Length: 178min 41sec (10721 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021