How To Carve A Whale Shaped Scoop - Chris Allen

hey guys how are you doing this is Zed from zero thoughts and I hope you're having an awesome day so I once again will dear friend of mine Chris Allen Chris how you do it very well thank you now you may sing Chris on a previous video which has been a very well-received video which is how to make a shrink pot now leading off from that this is a second video that we're recording with Chris and that is how to carve a whale tail shaped coffee scoop yeah this is Chris so it's quite well known for I own one myself it's a beautiful beautiful item very functional very aesthetically very good-looking as well now the idea with this tutorial is to walk you through in detail step-by-step how to carve one of these yourself using some basic tools so the guide here is not just for an entertainment point of view you can see Chris carving but also you can see all the nuances involved on how to carve one itself there are subtle nuances involved yeah it's always from carving very basic objects so Chris with his many years of experience is going to show you through so I hope you enjoyed the rest of the video where Chris is going to teach you how to carve one so Chris beautiful objects here's something you carved yourself isn't it that's right so I started carving these after being inspired by Martin hazel and he told me a scoop that he'd made from a beautiful bit of bird that just had a little bit of a flare to the end and I was looking at it thinking wow if I put a notch in there I can make it into into a tail shape and it's all evolved from there so now I do quite a flared fluke for the handle and the idea as a coffee scoop is that you can hold it and get into your jar or bag of coffee it's a generous measure of coffee because it all it will make quite a strong cup but I've seen people use them for loose leaf tea that's what mine's for and for flour as a measure and all those sorts of things I think you use yours for all different things in UK and yeah I've I've just refined the design and like the curve in the bowl and the handle it just adds a little bit of movement now as a carver I don't do 3d animals or anything but the icons in a particularly artistic so this has got a nod towards what I think is is fancy carving basically but still retaining that strong functionality and they go really well that people really admire them on the stall and they're a mainstay of what I do so yeah we're gonna walk through how I get from from a birch log to this stage so the first step is obviously cleaving the wood that's right this is a section of birch which you use in the previous video as five and a half five inches across and what I need to do is find a clean section that I can take a rectangle from which is the outside shape of the scoop and to do that I'll use a quarter of a log this size and you can do them on half a smaller-diameter log if you want it now as a green woodworker I have a fro handy throw is a really good way of splitting timber and the width of the blade will generate a split that goes all the way across the timber you can if you want to use an axe to do this and that all work but a fro once you've buried the head into the wood it has a handle sticking up vertically which allows you to lever any problematic logs apart works really well on much longer timber and bigger timber as well so I'm gonna hit it with with my favorite mallet which is surviving quite nicely and we're just gonna bury the throw to the back edge of the blade you can see the split in this short piece of timber has run pretty much all the way through sometimes if you listen carefully I just heard a few more little tinkles of the wood splitting but it's not going to go any further without some assistance so because this is so short you can just see how the fro works by pulling and backwards or forwards pushing on the handle and you can get right through and that gives you a nice clean cleft and that's partly in partly because of the the blade going all the way across the timber so we just have a quick look at the outside of the logs we've got some scarring here that'll be a knot you can see there's a wobble here which will be a knot here so I think yeah we probably get a good clean section above this knot but we'll put yeah I think well we'll open up this side and see how we go and then we can always use another bit if it doesn't work so back on with the fro just go into quarters this time open that up so the fro is a fairly blunt tool and as a result it can be put on the ground I wouldn't do that with an axe again this is looking fairly straight we've got an inclusion here which is a fissure in the bark where the trees been damaged you see here and then it's added growth on top so there'll be a weak spot there but not quite like that piece we've got the not seen just see the waves in the wood where there's wobbles so I'll use that for a spoon or two in future and this is the piece that we'll be using so what I'll do is I'll use the curvature here as one side the cleft is another and I'll just split this off so with using the throw in the previous two cuts we've had 50% weight of timber either side of the blade and so first in half and then second in 2/4 here we're going to do an offset cleft which will mean that there's more timber on this side of the blade than this one and what should happen is that split will run off and I'm hoping that if you get a nice angle onto that you'll be able to see that happen as I hit the throw into the wood so here we go the depth between the cleft surface and the throw blade should be deep enough for a scoop and what others I'll bury this into the wood see if that's working can you see how the splits running off like that that's because this portion of timber is bending more than the other side and that's fairly consistent and typical so what will happen as I lay this down you see how you get that ski around perfect and that's worth bearing in mind just for green wood splitting that you do generally it's a nice little visual representation there so that sections cool that section slightly off however we've got a reference line on here if I grab my axe and back onto my trusty wildlife hatchet I can then use this cleft surface on this side as a guide and just match that and go down from there so here my axes go into a lot of weight of timber so what I'll do is I'll put it over to the side and just break the weight of timber up with these stock cuts and then as my axe goes down and you see how the timber bends away there's less weight to it and I'll just be able to drop a straight line from there and then the other thing to do is just take the bark off now the bark is very soft compared to the wood you need to be extra careful with your fingers and then we'll do the rest of the trimming up with the draw knife so Chris we're going to do the next section in your shape horse and I was just admiring your Schafer's if you guys have been watching my channel then you know obviously a ton of video that's been an extremely well-received video from a mutual friend Neil mates on making a budget style shave horse so is this one you made yourself then yeah this is one that I went on a course with Mike Abbott and came away with back in 2006 or perhaps a bit earlier I think and this is Mike's shave horse mm pattern that's available in his book and so Mike did the the chainsaw work on the the log that becomes the body so unlike a traditional English pattern that's got a plank with a ramp that you made this is a solid lump of timber now it's splitting but that's fine it's stuck together and you don't have the adjustment on the ramp with the block underneath but it is a single piece it works really well and I'm able to put a lot of power behind my work because there's no risk of the block moving around and putting stress onto the onto the joint at the end and but apart from that the configuration is the same it's a frame and three legs into a body which which you use with a draw knife so yeah there's some I'm not sure a head is original and I've replaced the other components but this is one of the first bits of turning that I did and had some help with the shaving and the cleaving but thoroughly enjoyable process that I used in ads and the horse isn't the best in the world it can be more refined but it just does the job and it keeps doing the job and I love it it's sort of part of my journey if if you hear me so yeah basically I hop on and show you what I'm going to do with this bill it so it's slightly wonky it just needs truing up and I'll do a little bit of shaping to even it up and then I'll have some smooth surfaces which I can do the marking out that I need to on and to stress obviously yeah most people can do these live an axe basically yes no yeah it's only because I've got my shape horse here and I'm Clare used to doing it another point this bit of wood I'm going to draw two whales on and do them tail to tail and I do also do this on four I do four whales all in one row that makes sense and it just means that you've got something to hold on to while you acts on to quite a small shape but also from a production point of view I can take a log that's sort of like 30 centimeters long and a bit longer actually but make four items do all the processing in one place and just from a production point of view makes things a bit faster now my draw knife today I am using a Swanton jar of many draw knife and I can't remember the exact dimensions but it's much smaller than a standard English pattern and it's an awesome tool I make my gypsy flowers with this tool it's integral to how I make those and just getting fouled on a lot a little bit but it will just smooth that off spin the work round and come back the other way and I use this tool bevel up works really well and then on the sides so I don't mind a little bit of a bark staying on we're gonna chamfer to get the curve of the bowl in here so it's not too much of an issue and we might it's probably a little bit too wide for the scoop so probably take that off but rather than taking it all off for the sake of it and then ending up with something that's very narrow for the sake of taking off all the bark down to that that line will be fine where we are for now so not only we sort of eliminating any wined in the wood that might throw out the marking up process and will also give ourselves a smooth surface to work off it's just amazing draw it once to worry about these little tick marks and things that's nice to be back on a horse I've spent most of the winter whittling sticks and moving rocks around and things like that I've done that much making on the horse yeah that's so good so that's fairly good got a little lump in the middle but maybe we'll make that the top I'll see how it goes so Chris you're gonna be marking up these the design they're using your pattern that's right and I use a template in flexible plastic as you can see it's about nine centimeters long the circle is about four point six centimeters which seems to work quite nicely obviously it's sort of after half the length of the scoop and then you just have to draw the tail on as you like it and what I'm going to be doing is using these dividers to to basically stabilize the template as I work and then I'll draw round the outside of it and then I'll reverse the template and pop it on there so that I've got two back to back and you'll see how that helps me work go forwards so what I will do just mark a centerline roughly this just helps me line the templates up you know if you're designing you do that I look like you know your own freehand design you do that a little bit more carefully so you've got two holes in the plastic basically - yeah what is these no compasses got a pencil in it these are dividers which you can fix a certain distance and then offer it up to measure things you've seen them use on old maps in nautical movies and stuff where they sort of warp the compasses and dividers across but yeah you pick them up I've got a couple of packs in marking out kit and but a compass this one's an old draftsman as one has a spike and a pencil and I'll use this just to I'll show you to get the ste inner circle working so I'm just going around with a pencil I do like to use a sharpie marker for this usually but I appear to have used it in the house rather than left it in my kit so that will be using a pencil today I'll just shift that around and the nice thing about having this pinned you know there's no technicality to this is it just for pinning it down in the wood it also provides a point in which to put the compass which I'll show you in a minute so yeah that's that's the template drawn and then what I do is offer the compass up and then the compass is circular so you go around like that you can see I'm either off or the template slightly out it just gives you something to work to and then I just reduced that down and that will give me another line to work so quit so you marked out both both scoops that's it so I just did what I did a moment ago again tail to tail and then I've added these lines so I'm going to take a a soar and put a stop cut in here so that when I use an axe to chop this way any splits that are generated won't take the tail out or vice versa the bowl so we'll have an air gap caused by the saw here and that's fairly obvious it's fairly common as well to to do that and to protect a curve here the concave curve but additionally I'm going to put a saw cut across the back and if you imagine the scoop sitting here like this the other one the tail go in that way I'm gonna put a relief or a saw cut in here so I can axe down onto it from both sides the more you can do with the axe the quicker the product is to make because the axe removes wood very quickly but it doesn't do so accurately so we get so far with the axe and then do the rest with the knife so this stage is gonna I'm going to use a silky pocket boy saw to just start soaring into these [Music] just outside and then the one across the back just after a bit careful you go to the spine for the tail just if they're gonna be shorter half anyway but that new week and the billet and as you hit it with the axe you can get fractures a place to sort of balance to be had so about half way usually for me is good enough so there the saw cuts down into the tail and then we're gonna acts this way and that way into this saw cut so a couple of nice axes you got here Chris yeah and yeah good friends both so I've been using my wildlife hatchet throughout the videos have been doing together and but I thought I'd put it next to this smaller hatchet and I can't remember what these are called whether it's a hand hatchet or a belt hatchet because I bought this one quite a while ago but it's favored on courses people pick it up because it's nice and light but the light Eddie axe the higher the frequency you have to chop with it because it doesn't do as much work so for me it's fairly rare that I pick this one up but it comes into its own four scoops because they're small and the the size is appropriate to the task so let's just take this one out of the way a quick shoutout to max your sheath still doing the job max well done thank you very much and then we'll get on with the task at hand so what I can do is chop down the side you see this bit that we were talking about with the bark the curvature of the bark still on is superfluous to requirement so I can take that out and just break the fibers up and then chop down close the line and then let's need to chop the fibers off on this side okay so that just trimmed to size and then what I like to do for these it's quite these this is quite deep in terms of the depth between my fingers so I'm going to do the back first which just takes some of the effort out of cutting into the side so what you'll see is from if I hit this sore line at the back I know I'm halfway up the tail so I don't want to be too deep there but it's a good place to start and that just starts the the bottom of the stem of the tail and then the flat of the tail will be right at the end there and we turn this around and again starting at the same place I've just wandered a little bit above but that's not a problem I just have to be careful not to glance off and strike into here and wreck the other scoop does happen from time to time expected okay so now I've got less material around the tail for chopping in so what I'll do is I'll show you how I go about this and rather than holding it here and being careful and trying to get all the way across the width of this small blade all the way across I tend to lie it down and come in at an angle that allows me to be slightly more accurate you see what's going on here so you've got a sham for a cross rather than all the way across like that but then as you chop down the rest comes off and you see how this line is slightly off a bit more chopping in and that line is now perfect it is ninety degrees to your flat so it's a good little tip you can't do it on the other side very easily it just helps so this side it's harder to do yeah but what I can do is turn the whole thing around and use the same technique for the tail so I'm using the very tip of the axe to lead with and I'm moving to the edge of the block so that the heel and heel and toe top and bottom I kind of remember which way round it goes but I'm just clearing the bottom of the blade of the axe by working on the edge of the block yeah and then again come in this side as you can see I'm quite close to my hands the safety here is that the the axe if it slips will go into the block it's very unlikely to hit my leg and I'd have to overreach by quite a lot to get the to get the hand there's a good amount of timber in between there so last one on this technique okay and then just to tidy this up I can come that way I've gone below the line of the saw cut there so just break those fibers up okay and again I'm a bit of a diagonal instead of coming down like that or dead across I'm a bit of an angle just allows me to cut progressively across the grain rather than all at one go and then if I twist around I can come the other way I won't found myself too much to see the other side of that these are actually too deep I'm going to have to take a little bit of depth out of these but that's all I've got done for a while so and then I can do the nose these ones that's the other end so this for me is one of the trickiest things to do I need to float my axe just off the line of this cut and not over cut so it's just a little bit trickier and sometimes I like to just place the axe pick the wood up and then go down like that and then it's easier to find that surface so here I'm coming down onto the grain and it's breaking off but it's resisting so that's where that angled cut really helps instead of Smashing the fibers and potentially breaking bits off and then here I'll just have to stand that up and this is a good example so if I had one scoop I'd be holding it here and working close to my hand because I've got to what my fingers are much further away yeah so now the Troublesome bits are these bits that are left and what I like to do is hang the whole piece of work off the edge of the chopping block and then if I need to I can still see how I've rotated it and I can present the pool at an angle and as long as I am careful work like that well suppose now you forget to talk when you concentrate so yeah it's just about carefully working in there and then I've got a little bit of excess material between the tails and I'll just tap my axe through there okay and then this side this is one of the more risky cuts I like a sharp edge rather than a than a slope just because you catch catch the corner nicely but this is the closest I get to my hands so this is the harder cut to make my point of view can you see how that that's a an angled cut and I'm aiming at the corner and making that angle so that there's less material to cut and then coming back in and nibbling away until it's a lot flatter you see how that it still goes off at a slight angle I can just pick that up gently it's worth getting this right because the keep certain the ax removes material much quicker than the knife but if you're not confident or you've got a heavy axe you can do this with the knife it just takes a little bit longer that's all yep so the the depth on these scoops I've realized now is a bit too deep so what I'll do is I'll just place the axe and tap through and again instead of throwing the axe and trying to hit a line by placing it and then pulling the wood up underneath its slamming down you end up with an accurate cut that Cleaves and then you can just smooth that off and I'll just take a little bit more last refer to the clock yes yeah and the technique really is you place and put a little bit of pressure on with the axe but then you pick the wood up against the downward force of the axe and drop the the whole thing onto the block just have to check for evenness it's pretty good see yeah it just makes some of the the knife work easier your acts like a bit of a knife and just see if you can work through those or if you're very gentle just tap away and take the points out because they take three or four passes with a knife or more this axe isn't really long enough to do it but you can use a I could give a teeny action you see that so the tip of the axe is in the block it doesn't work all the way around and it will work on that orientation and then the end of the axe just works much better with a larger axe and a curved bit but yeah you can trim up I don't mind a little bit of knife like this is fresh birch so it works out okay and you can spend time getting into this concave if you want I know that by the time I come to do that I would have refined some of the weight off the bottom so after that I like to put some champers on with the axe just to start everything off one side so this side and then the nose so you've got three facets and then I just take that line off to join the joining them in and they can be fairly rough and then following this facet the tail on this finished scoops is going to have a rich line going through here so just cut in I want to cut too steeply and then pick up from there and thin the tail out so you can see now I've got a facet coming around here and a bit of blending with the tail you can take a little bit more off here if you want to but you've got to remember if you want that curved top-line and the tail not to be right up at the top you need to allow for some depth to come off the top so you don't want to go too thin between the thumbs there and you'll scoop some out of here as well so see how I got on with that enjoy playing with the forum [Music] guy on the ground they pick up the white birch and pick up the dust and that'll get on my knives so yeah saw notes in half you can see the tails are quite chunky there sometimes I use the axe just just shamp for those back and then use the template to redraw the tails but we'll see how we get on in the next section so now the knife work then Chris yeah on with the trusty 106 so I've done the majority of the the heavy work with the axe and now I'm going to work with the knife and what I like to do is work to the pencil line and I'll do that across the depth of the tool out of the scoop and then I'll put some marking I'll mark out some lines that'll help me generate the curve so yeah here I'm going to use a thumb pivot cut you see my fingers are tucked out of the way and that means I'm going to use a sort of up-and-down motion with my wrists and I'm going to use the thumb of my holding hand as a fulcrum around which the blade can pivot and then just subtle movements to ease the workpiece around you see how I'm working at a diagonal and peeling down I'm not going directly down which can break this lower edge off I'm going at a diagonal or a sort of skew cut through the this is supersoft birch it's nice and sappy and I'm looking to try and maintain 90 degrees between the horizontal and the vertical surfaces just so that I can maintain control so it's up to you as to whether you cut to the pencil line or cut all the pencil off the key is really consistency and make sure that you do it all the way around so that you get an even cut okay so in the same way if you remember in the shrink pot video we're working in different quarters the grain is going up and down like this in this orientation so I start on the side and work forward because I don't want to start round here because I'll potentially if I introduced a wedge here I donate a split with that take the apex off this corner which you don't want to do so whilst some thumb pivoting I'll go to the opposite corner sometimes I like to think of a clock face so you've got six o'clock 12 o'clock or points on a compass and work at the cardinal points and generally you're working from an apex down into a concave or from top from uphill to downhill so maintaining the thumb pitch pivot pivot stance I can work from round the side down into the bottom and then when you get here I tend to move around a little bit and just the thumb pivot changes it's a bit of a pushy cut as well so I am applying a little bit of pressure with my left thumb or my holding hand thumb just to get down through this tighter and part of the curve you see here I've withdrawn the blade so I'm using the tip which is thinner the width is thinner on the tip and that means it will go around the curve a little bit more sweetly so the safety here obviously and you're cutting away from your hand but you do have to be careful not to push the tip of the blade and catch yourself I've done that once on a cook's ER and have a scar along here because of it and so just watch out in theory you shouldn't be putting a lot of pressure on so you shouldn't have too much room for slipping but there's always a chance you know especially if you do something new so this curve down that curve done just take a little bit more out of there and then we just need to change knife grip so I'm going to go to a can opener or paring cuts you see here the blade could catch my thumb if I came all the way off but in principle the blade is your thumb is out of the way of the path of the blade and it allows me to work from the side back up to the top if you imagine the grain is coming this way so you're slicing through the fiber at the top and it's pushing it onto the one of the underneath and allowing the cuts as opposed to going the other way where the last fiber is unsupported and would break off and again maintaining that 90 degree between the horizontal and vertical I'll show you that once I finished this curve so by working on the ridges you take wood that's not supported either side and that's a general principle that's quite it and then you generate another ridge work on that you see how instead of making a really long thick plow cut like that which you might see is taking quite a lot of effort in the muscles of my hands and I'll straighten all my fingers by taking those corners all the time it's worth making your work a little bit easy more easy especially on the end grain which is harder to cut and the end grain is where the fibers are presenting and you're literally slicing across two fibers or the ends of the fibers which is tougher so I've been referencing this 90-degree between the horizontal and vertical plane and I can show you that by turning it sideways and you should be able to see all right it's not perfect there are bits that I can see as a flare here and a bit of a dick there but the general idea is that you want to be carving square so the square it's two sides it's a rock it's a right angle so you've got one so I on the other side and the square you can keep it all the way through the process the more control you can exert and what I'll do is I'll show you where I Mark these walls up and how I convert that into a curve again it just means that you can take off an equal mount all the way around and convert that into a nice round shape that you see on the final product and you don't have to just sort of hack away at that and hope for the best and those burn ages getting that to work so you'll see that coming to fruition in the later in the process so I've come fairly close to the line all the way around that's looking pretty good and I've just got that last corner left to do and again this one's slightly trickier you can do it as a can opener or a paring cut but you're slightly fouled on the tail so alternatively you can go back to that fun pivot but you're now working blind so I can't see the pencil line so it swings around about so I find this easier in terms of the access but just have to be careful about coming too close to the line or undercutting the lines and here I'm having to choke the knife so you can see I've brought the knife down into my holding hand and I'm just having to make sure I don't grip too tightly with that finger and that's how it works and that allows me to bring the tip into play remember we talked about having it in the tighter curve this side and sometimes you'll just go I can't do that because you've not had it as much practice you ten design it might not be as strong or you might not be as confident and to do that it does build up that carving strength will build up as you practice so yeah that's most of the perimeter pretty much where it needs to be with just a little bit on the top here I'll just pick out check and I like to carry on now so basically keep going round the tail and we're just working the other way to how we have been I'm using a thumb push technically you see how the thumb is pushing the blade down the curve and then the same here it's more of a push the pivot is like that and the push is across if that makes sense but again working with grain direction in mind and then blending those surfaces together I'll be around so you will see that that technically is not very safe but I just I'm just picking up a little curve just to release the fiber that's pushing the other way just no power at all on that and if you don't feel that that's safe turn it around do the thumb public the other way it it requires a bit of focus and an acknowledgement that you're doing something you could cut yourself with it and then mitigating that so tricky cuts that I find is this portion round here and you have to sort of hold the scoop in a sort of like a pistol grip style and push through and that can take a little bit of effort to master you could also take this your chopping block excuse me and lay it down and then push the knife down into the block so that your hand is further away and your grip is stronger against the block but you can refine this we're going to work the top and the bottom of this section so if you want to you can leave that and wait until it's much thinner to work on this portion here you have to work the other way around the curve just use the tip to take thin slivers for me speed is important so I don't like to stop and change if I can help it though now just this side to do and these they I hate I prefer doing the curve of the ball to this bit but you can't have everything your own weight and then just change the grip and see how I'm reinforcing this paring cut with my holding hand fingers because you're gonna come off into air and you could catch yourself if your thumbs they're that sort of thing so it's just about it what's safe so there's just lack of control as you come out of that cut so it's worth mitigating it and then I'm gonna work blind again I kind of know this shape very well so I'll just go with the thumb push II pivot that's working out right and then go back to that can opener and again choking the knife so that the the blade is presenting the tip if you've got a smaller knife maybe the Mora 120 had worked there I do have a smaller blade that then you don't have to choke the blade with that that can help having said that the Mora 106 the blade profile is great for carving and I don't tend to recommend the 120 so people that come on horses and things if we look at the back compared to the top it gives you an idea about why this some this perpend this 90-degree is important so there's a slight chamfer on this which is making this look at a place so I'll just work on the back edge to bring that under control it's not critical at this stage because I'm going to be taking some more material off here and we'll refine as we go but that was just a good illustration what we were doing what I was talking about earlier next up I'm gonna mark some pencil lines so this is going to be at the top of a tail and that'll be the bottom of the tail it's still quite chunky I can refine it down further from there if I want to but again using this technique of rubbing your finger across a reference line and letting a the pencil mark show so if I extend that around the side you'll be able to see where the top of the tail will be and if this is the highest point you can then draw a line to the highest point on the tail and that's what helps give me this curve I want in the finished piece okay so then staying with this technique and assuming the tops flat which it is because we smoothed it off with the horse what I'm going to do is put a line that's perhaps two three millimeters all the way around the top of the rim and that will give me the depth of the curve for the the tail section to come into the bowl and then go to the nose if I show you on one of these that's the curve at the top so this point is higher than that point which is kind of what I'm mimicking there and that that will become more evidence as we go additionally so we've gone all the way around with that additionally what I'm going to do is look at these facets and choose a point so if you've got a very steep facet you have to choose that as the lowest point but I'm gonna put a line all the way around the bottom and this will be used to generate the first angle for the curve and then I'll bisect them I'll put a line that's equidistant between the two or in the middle of the two lines and that's one of the first lines that's going to help me with the the carving what you can do is also spit tricky but you can just sort of gauge around on the bottom if you can't I tend to draw that in by hand once I've done that and that provides the base of the scoop it's not accurate it just that gives me something to weigh in math and then what I'll do is I'll cut this Ridge off just that could be a little bit further down if I wanted to but that will help with the curve that I'm going to make and I'll show you that now so in basic terms we're going to cut between this pencil line and that pencil line which involves cutting this Ridge off working with the thumb pivot and a bit push cut and again working in quarters so I'm working from one side towards the front and then I'll do the other side turn it round and work the other way and I'm going to generate a flat I'm going to push that flat forward you see how we've worked between the pencil lines and pushed that flat forward being careful not to undercut that pencil line at the top they see how moving my hand out the way every time so that looks a bit odd at the moment but once you take this Ridge off it'll help to curve everything around and then we come to the end grain here so we start the other side being just okay it's about consistency and having a facet that goes all the way around turn the piece around and then we're going to work backwards into the tail and because there's a large portion of wood under the tail you just have to allow those shavings to collect under there and do the same this side you can break them off because they're in my way the same here so here it doesn't matter whether you cut all of this bit off first and then this bit and then take the middle if you can there's a flap all the way through that's fine as well so can you see here we're generating a facet that blends into the tail the tail now I can just trim a little bit more off and then that facet will go through into here into the tail itself but you see this is tearing up because we're sort of forcing the knife through the grain so what I tend to do is then just adjust to get a smoother cut so you're constantly assessing grain grain to flow yeah so I'm trying to control shape but the grain alertly let me work certain ways so all let me work this way because I'm at a diagonal you can see the growth rings so I'm working diagonally across in this orientation I was pushing out and into the grain so I was jamming down it and then I'll just readjust and I can make her this is a chest lever cut that allows me to work and and you can see here the markings on the back for where the tire wants to be and you can see here the the profile of the underside of the tail isn't great at the moment but we're just looking to get that material away so here's that's the example of where you pushing the knife into the grain and it just doesn't work very nicely you change orientation of the blade to get the feature you want and then I can cut that Ridge off so we're back to cutting ridges out and that just helps with the profile for now I've just noticed there's a high spot here compared to here so this is going off at an angle so I'll just trim that out so it's basically flattening it off in terms of assessing the grain yes I understand ranks are carved a lot of it and what you can do is look for clues in how the chips are coming off but also how the surface looks so these are smooth surfaces and there's a little bit of tearing here because the grain hasn't been treated carefully enough so the grain the the chip that you get from the knife you know that one not very ragged on the edges thick and consistent I've gone with the grain on that here you see there's some feathering that's because I'm coming down from both sides and I'm not quite got those lines to meet up so there are clues and the sound as well and the field if it if it Jags if it steps that makes a difference so yeah just just tidy this up a little bit that gives you the the first major facet so what we'll do next is carry on and we'll cut this pencil line off and you see this ridge line here what I'm not doing I'm only cutting the ridge off I'm not cutting between two lines here I just cut the ridge itself off turn around see these are much stabia cuts because there's very little power needed there's no support for the wood on the ridge either side of it so it comes off nice and easily okay it's quite lumpy and blocky at the moment and then what I like to do just extend that all the way around yep then what I like to do is cut up to that pencil line again using the tip early thin shavings you're just shaping at this stage and resisting the urge to blend and generate a curve I'm generating facets which are then turned into a curve okay and if you can see that against the dark earth but there's there's one big facet primary facet then that secondary which has been softened by taking it all the way out for the line I leave this between these two pencil lines because that's the the flat so you have a curve that then goes into a straight and the top of the rim is here but then as we curve down and we drew this this angle this curved line the top of the rim for the lowest part of the bowl will be at the top of this pencil line so now the next step cross yeah so this is the last phase of the initial blending of the of the curve I'm just looking there is quite a steep reach there so I might just take that out in isolation because that primary facet was quite steep just blend that in and so now what I'm looking to do is working quarters but I'm gonna work from the rib from the base up into this flat and hopefully you'll be able to see you're making a wider facet and it's okay to cut this pencil line off but you don't necessarily need to cut above it and see how you might not camera might not pick it up I'm sort of rolling my wrist and exaggerating here you see how the knife is rolling round and that just helps to smooth things off and your is basically looking to cut a line and then cut off any high spots so if I show you this side and you're looking at the profile you should be able to see that this is smoother than the faceted surface that I haven't cut yet hoping the camera going to pick that up but I'll carry on working so you get a good feel for that so now just change grip again to smooth and blend over the the back portion of the bowl and that inevitably will mean carving into the tail stem a little bit as well to the other side and again just finding those high spots on the facets that we've generated you have to be careful about pushing the tip here it's all about pivot there's no big power or anything put on with you ya holding in a knife holding hand and again leaving those chips on there and just starting to look at symmetry what you're looking to do here really is to get to a symmetrical ish place once we've finished carving this wood green we'll let it dry and then there's the final carve to do which is about getting the surfaces nice and smooth but you'll also be able to refine the shape at that stage as well and now what I'm doing is I'm visualizing the silhouette of the curve I'm just looking for the high spots as I work and that's about turning it sideways it's harder to do the back edge but yeah I feel for that just turning the work around and looking at it dead-on as well you're looking for even the side-to-side which isn't too bad need to do a little bit okay and then what I will do is just thin out that facet a little bit this is a forehand cut I can't quite apply the same technique there so it's an open thumb pivot and then you see how we're coming close to the line do that evenly either side and we're left with this ridge line which I can cut out powerful forehand Cup just to thin out the tail a little bit and staying in that grip now I've got more access with the knife I can just and what I'll do is I'll work start to cut further down to generate a diagonal rather than a concave there we go so we're on the line they're not quite on this other side close to the camera pretty much there and then just blend between the two okay and then just for the last little bit that cut and then I can champ for a little bit more extenuate this ridge line on the back I'm gonna look at the ridge here now I've got a little bit of a mess here so what I'll do is I'll just try and pick this line up and make the curve goes back round you see how the outflow of that cut then just helps tidy the ridge up and back into the facet that I've just generated so do the same on this side and that should push your rich more into the middle slightly more even and then blend letting the tailback out from there bit of a ok for him working on there so that's not too bad it's still slightly uneven ok it someone mention OCD yeah it helps to be slightly obsessive with these so that's the profile that I've gone for ok and then I'm gonna work the top of the tail now as I said you can do this with the ax and then redraw your template I tend to work in the same way as I worked underneath the tail just working not the whole width you want to preserve height between the fingers here so we're looking to sort of tip the tail down a little bit so you can see I'm just working in half inch off the edge of the tail once I get down to that line I can then examine the facet that I've generated which will be quite ugly to start with and then blend it out from there so you see how it's quite lumpy here and what I can then do is just blend into the facet that I've created and that just starts that movement of the top now I tend to leave it around there maybe do a little bit more but as we carve this portion this line will change so it's a dead flat onto quite a clumsy curve but when we add the recurve the concave the other way in the finishing process that line will make a lot more sense through like that so as a final thing while the woods wet I just I really ought to adjust the template but then it would make the template physically quite weak so I just like to thin the tail stem portion out a little bit I've found that it's an area that can have carried quite a lot of weight in the finished item just go backwards and forwards in the grain I don't necessarily like coming back on myself like that where my whole hands in the way but you just refined that line down whilst the woods still wet you see the difference do the same on this side it's three or four passes with the knife and then tidy the curve up just removes a little bit of material just the tail can actually be quite thin in the final piece and then it's a little bit more refinement so so yeah that's where I'll leave the outside shaping for now you can fettle it and go a little bit further there's a little bit more thickness there than on this side you can see the the distance from the line but in terms of the video what we're going to do next is use a scorp to hollow out the bolt so Chris the Halloween gal yeah and to do the hollowing I use a scorp now scorp is a full loop of steel which is effectively two drawn at to hook knives in one this one is made by least offer it's a it's a slightly narrower blade than standard and he offered this one to me specifically because of the scoops that I make and it really is good for for turning round in these tight tight conditions so what I tend to do is work across the grain just to get the hollow working the the depression going so that's a cross grain cut but then I switch fairly quickly to a pivot cut so I'm pivoting the blade around my thumb to work quickly into the the scoop bowl and I'm just changing the angle up a little bit to present the tip of the tool which has got a lot of curvature to it which allows me to take big shavings bigger the shaving few of the passes with the knife and then just start to work around the bowl bearing the grain direction in mind and then pivoting up the other way but not dragging I'm twisting so if I was to slip I'd be slipping away from catching myself so if you only have a hook knife this is doable but this tool really lends itself very well to scoops in particular because you've got very little flecks in either side of the blade because it's supported all the way around and you also got this tool here now you can buy a hook knife that comes all the way back round on itself but the tip with an unsupported hook that goes all the way around is very flexible and so if you've got left and right hook knives that helps if you've got finishing knives that are a little bit more open then they might not be so suitable so just go with what you've got I'm just a bit fouled on the camera normally I'd I'd do that section around I can get that yeah and you might find a combination of a roughing hook and a finishing hook will help you or you just make a shallower scoop potentially you can drill out the center which might help although most drills have a leading point which you have to carve to the bottom of you think most of the Halloween are places yeah go quite a long way with this the key is an even wall if we were to have left this without hollowing the thickness the amount of timber that's there and there's more potential for tension and you probably come back to and it's cracked by getting a wall going and there's there's room for the timber to move and shrink and it's less likely to crack unless you've got unevenness in the wall so a thick bit versus have been bit which again sets up that tension that we keep talking about so this portion is quite tricky in an ideal world you'd go at it like that but this grip is quite difficult I was working quite well actually so sometimes I use the tool this way because then if you do slip your thumb is well out of the way and I'm looking forward to spending some more time with Lee and getting him to remind me of the different grips he has for his corpse because he spent a lot of time focusing on that but again it's about working methodically you know the knife sort of bottoms out a little bit once you've carved the shape of the blade so you move you release it a bit more by taking a bit of another bit of the scoop out and then you can access better the portion that you just bought them now so that was quite dangerous you see how my palm is in the path of the blade so just caught myself there fast glad choice of words you know just saw that I was doing that and shifted the grip so that there's no chance you know I have to be I can't come through the wood to get my palm so I have to come up and out at which point the palm is out of the way and then just use your fingers once you get towards the bottom use your fingers and what I tend to do is put a little bit of a dimple in the bottom and so you need a little bit of decent timber left in the base to be able to put the dimple in and that just helps it sit nicely on the table not all of them sit up straight but nice they do and the reason for that is the weight of the tail can drag the the cup of the bowl off a little bit so this is where the score really comes into its own I can just change the angle of attack very quickly and work all the way around the ball I don't have to put the tool down and pick something else up it really helps because we're going to refine this rim we go quite deep and then adjust the rim so you get a high spot here in here and a low spot either side and I find that a little bit off-putting sometimes you like that's too deep for a scoop you know stop stop carving but you do reduce the volume by reducing the rim in the last of the later carving stages so Chris the next phase yeah this is the wets the finished wet carving stage for me I've just looked at a dry example that I'm gonna car up next and I've done a lot more refinement on the tail you know you could take all these marks out but you're gonna have to go over this whole thing with a sharp knife to refine it anyway you know the tail I could go down a little bit further but that's the end of the West wet stage and what I'll do is I'll dry this for a couple of weeks again 20 degrees room to observatory see room temperature not in direct sunlight not next to a radio or anything like that directional heat will cause the wood to move and that's where you split so what you for example you got shavings here on the floor would you put those you can yeah that's one techniques a loose plastic bag with shavings in the trouble with birch in this wet is that it can get quite it can go rotten I tend to put things in a wicker basket and then panic when I've left them in my lounge and the heat who's been on because it's cold and stuff like that but on a shelf somewhere out of of a actively heated environment is ideal but a lot of this trial and error and we were talking about bread making earlier that will change with the season so in some of these taking less time to dry but you've got higher risk of splits and things as well so yeah just cautiously and not obsessively some people will pack things in shavings and leave them for months and things just depends on your your application and your experience reading and so you've got one that you've been growing out from before that's right this one was made in the last year and as you see I've been talking about the the thinness of the tail and things like that looking at this I'm wondering if I've already had a carve of this one there was one in the basket I started late one night so I think this one has actually had you can see the coloration difference that's the giveaway so I think I've already had a go at this so maybe I should feel less guilty about leaving that tomato chunky but it is off and I might have started trying to add movement to my work by having these slightly off but that looks like it it's asking for this bit to be carved as well but what I've not done is carved the back of the body you can see the facets from the wet stage carving you can see this is off so I'm going to take that same Moro 106 knife and just try and show you the difference between the wet carving and the dry carving stage and what you should notice the most is the size of the shavings the thickness of the shaming is a very thin and it leaves a nice smooth surface also the power the wood is tightened up significantly so the power you have to put behind to achieve a shaving is is increased you know that's not looking too bad so I'll just do a little bit more on the apex of that convert the concave blend that down the sound is different you can hear that scratchiness it's a bit bit more aggressive so then I'll come this way and then back the other way I'll watch that camera line said if I catch that with a 106 the tip of 106 I'm not sure who's insurance will be claiming on okay so this is really general just backwards and forwards and that just gives you a fairly smooth line and just looking at this curve I want to refine that a little bit more see how we got that that's not looking too bad so I've got a little pinch point here a little little angle there that I don't want him a final piece I've just nibbled that out now and blend it back so yeah that line is not looking too bad so we're doing this out of the cold in the woods usually I do when we're finishing at home where it's nice and clean and warm but a sharp knife is key to this process or if you're going to sand the same applies if you want to sand this what's happened is the timber is shrunk the cells are tighter you know more condensed more tightly packed so if you've got are going to use sandpaper allowing this drying stage and will add to the quality of your finish so here this curve I like it doesn't quite match that one so I'll do a little bit higher up on the curve and hope that that evens things out for the eye just see someone that hasn't carved before we'll pick this up and go oh it's not even you know that a a novice human eyeball will see the unevenness here so I like to just get those curves matching as closely as possible to eliminate the chance that someone will decline to purchase one of these so think my craftsmanship stodgy there just gently just trying to loosen those fibers off so I'm happy with this portion in symmetry but not this bit here so I just need to nip that out and that comes with experience you know you just sort of you understand how what part of a curve affects the next so the next phase Chris I've marked up the room here so this is about the flowing line so partly because this is a whale tale inspired item I want to capture as much of the essence of what the the animalistic side of what I'm going for so yeah it just just helps and you can see this line here which is the one that we carved it around the top that just helps me to keep the distance from the rim to the base of the curve the same on each side so the grain direction is a little bit funny here I'm just going to come around one way you see how it's fracturing in it in an ideal world you wouldn't allow things to fracture but I know that I'm going to carve back this way and pick that up and then I won't take that chip off I'll use that chip or that cup that I've just done is the stop cut further it coming this way yeah that doesn't look too bad and we'll do the same on the other side this hops it gives it a dynamics doesn't it no not overly this is about ascetic so yeah I mean there is some extra scoop eNOS going on here but actually more about the way it looks you can see here I'm gonna need to blend in across the top and then I'm gonna need to do a little bit across the bottom as well and they're fairly even which is nice to see just very carefully it just takes a lot of experimentation to get these cuts right and just go delicate with what's called very short grain so the length of the fiber through the cross section this wolves really short so it can fracture and break quite easily and you just need to be a bit careful with it but have a play with that you can see where I've been I've been cutting out which direction is up and coming in see how you get on so that's an example of going against the grain losing the light and over here as well which isn't helping okay so hopefully you have to see against the fleece here the top line that we've generated and that's the ascetic that we've been talking about and the flow for the beast fairly happy with that so now I'm happy with the top line of the rim go back to very similar to the earlier phase working around from the quarter line forward and these are just very shallow cuts you see how I'm basically cutting off the oxidized timber and any dirt and any pencil lines with the very tip of the blade which takes a nice thin cut you just blend that off so this is final finishing cuts going in you can see how thin and wispy these shavings are and this will allow us to do the final shaping as well and it's just easy to blend you're letting the surface that you've just cuts you know in the blade run against that and then interacting with the high points relative high points of the faceted finish left in the wet carving phase so that's from one from one side to the tip and then we'll go from the other cardinal point it's a bit far back around you see I'm working in phases I'm not traveling all the way around the rim like that I'm working sort of across in lines and allowing the knife to curve over as we go so my hand was in the way there it was worth stopped inside and get any ketchup on my work okay so that's that's the top done and then if you look at it sideways I'm looking down at the ground it's quite a faceted finish I think given the time to straighten the light I'll leave that like that and people like feeling the toolmarks in the work and then just working on the back edge and again then blending out into that tail stone just picking out the pencil marks that I added for the rim and then we're back into work that I'd previously done I work more so I've just caught the tip drag the tip through the work there which isn't ideal so just blend that out and then onto the last quarter and again the grip here you working very close to your fingers with the tip but I'm not putting any power on the blade so I feel fairly comfortable to do that and a little bit of a gap so having talked to you about working in sort of lines around I am working a little bit along in the other directions with the back but that's because the the outflow of the blade is into inter timber so now I'm going to look at the line around the base got a bit of a lumpiness going on this side so we'll blend that in and so we've got a concave curve and I'll just pinch that into a convex and then line that up with the ridge so what's going on on the other side as well and then blend it say about here that little crunchy noise there is the grain complaining I'm just managing on the other side so the top you've got a low spot here so all this is high so I'll just blend that down a little bit it gives a bit of a bear visual so I'm fairly happy with that just a little bit of tidying up so I've got a little bit of tongue crane now I just want I can't let that go that's messy so the the room here is a little bit jagged and all I want to do is just clean that up and I'm just carving the very tip of the curve because it's the bit you look at yep so visually that's pretty much there and again the human I am not carving this for a carver you know a fellow carver would forgive you that but a customer wouldn't so yeah that's pretty much the top view done I just can't resist taking a little bit more out here that's the top view done we're gonna hollow the or smooth off the the interior of the scoop now yep so now we're gonna just take a final cut around the inside of the bowl with the scorp and you can see here the the color is coming off this is the oxidized layer so I know when I've cut certain portions and work one quarter and turn work the next and these are very thin cuts they're just taking a single layer around just being careful about the rim thickness just peel that let's turn the bottom and they work on the other side and then just this last corner to finish off and there's just a few little bits that's a nice and there's a nice thing and a bit of a curse about the oxidization is you can see exactly where you haven't been and then additionally can you make out that this is thin this is thick so I just need to go through and even that out and I'll do that by carving the top of the rim down a little bit see how we're just blending that in and then we'll match it as close as we can on the other side a little bit more okay that's fairly good fairly happy with that so there's two phases left we're going to mark out and cut the flip the tail fluke and then I'm just going to sham for the edges while I've got the scoop in my hand I'll just make a bit of a dimple and that just is less functional but it just helps it sit on a sari just helps it sit on a flat surface fairly easily then marking out the tail fluke I'm going to bisect the line which is roughly there and then draw a little triangle and then what I'll do is I do this by hand but you're looking for a concave into a convex so it come down from the edge and then back up and then back down to that triangle and the triangle just helps me visually see where I need to aim at so fairly dainty touch to start to get the curves right and realistically you're looking at quarters you know so your up and down quarter mark is the trough all right so yeah and then if you've got a very small knife it's worth using it I tend to push push into the grain at the bottom there and then come I mean just follow I do usually use a small knife that's quite quite a different experience that got a chip in my hand so just using the tip I'm able to peel through you see how I'm going in and then coming out by using the very tip of the blade I'm able to get back up the grain as it were that's looking pretty good and then this side I'll just stay in the same grip and orientation so I'll go down the grain and then back up I'm cutting very thin slivers to start with a little bit further on you need to be careful coming down here because you can Jam your knife into the fibers on the other side which doesn't give a great look and then I'm just going to turn this knife around to come back the other way that's the way the grain wants to work okay so don't normally have to do this but I'll just go onto the table and just try very carefully not to damage the other side of the Fluke mainly because I'm trying to get the camera angle to work and I'm on a very chunky blade [Music] come back this way I might just refine that a little bit later but that's the general principle for what we're going for and then just make sure that the curves are nice the tendency is does that have a bit of a V and lose the smoothness of the curve here so we can go straight on to the final phase which is to nip out the tips of the tail where where it's weak and can break so we do that and then with the very tip of the knife just want to knock off that sharp corner where the flat goes at 90 degrees it will take that pencil line off and it will just make it look pretty it also serves to protect against Dinks so the the beveled edge just helps to stop it from getting dented or breaking that edges weak and it does bounce a little bit of light and it feels nice or in your hand even though you've got to look quite closely to see what's what's actually going on we do that at the edge I'm going to do that very just on the tip of the tail as we work round okay and then because of the grain direction I'm gonna pick up the facet we've just carved and we're going to go back round the tail fluke and in here you can see how small those shavings are they're literally just the corner of the surface coming off go this way back this way get yourself into whichever position feels safest said Anaya they're sort of moving around a little bit just to get the best camera angles I'm working off a table and normally I'll be working in my lap so there is zero power you literally just dragging the tip through the most lightest touch to get that little corner so that's pretty much the finished item and what I would normally do with this is put my makers mark on in pencil and then use a sharp blade a correlating blade just to slice that in and rub some cinnamon in but that's effectively all the carving done and it's ready once the maker's marks been added to go in the oil now when I I always have a sharp knife with me because I'll look at this afresh and go I don't like that bit I'll just you know there's a little bit of unevenness here so I will just do one last check and refinement before the oil the oil I use is cold-pressed linseed oil which cures and offers a surface coating and it can also impart color especially in Birch it go it adds up at yellowness which you can see in the finished item here that's that's bare wood versus oiled wood but the the key is just to add a very light coating and I use kitchen roll to do that but just the dab enough to fill the pores and coat the surface and then let that dry for a short while and it will be ready for you to use so there you go guys that is a wrap for this video Chris I cannot thank you enough you're welcome so guys I know this is a long video and I know a lot of the steps might seem a little bit of repetitive the way it was filmed but here's the one thing I've learnt with these tutorials it's in these little subtleties that you learn quite a bit so you even just watching Chris at work even as always filming this video I'm learning a lot so I hope you enjoyed this video there is one thing I want to ask from you Chris is a full-time Greenwood work he does this for a living he said how he earns his income and what you just showed you here and video you actually charges people to kind of teach this stuff so it's a huge honor for me and and someone really grateful for days they allowed me to document this process for you to learn at home so there's only really one thing I asked you to do and as a way of saying thank you if you gain any value from this video whatsoever and that is to check him out on social media and give him a follow I'm going to put a link down below to his Instagram his fanpage and also it was blocked and it would mean the world to me as our way of saying thank you to Chris to go and check that out now there's a couple of things I will add there's a few things Chris has mentioned terms of resources for his scope he's also written an article for the bushcraft magazine and a few other kind of like bits and bobs and resources that is mentioned in regards to these scoops so what he's done is he's put together an article on his blog that links to everything so what I'm gonna do is link to that article down below on his blog so if you go and check that out on that he breaks down you know the tools that he's using etc etc and from there you can obviously contact Chris's voice you can find out more about the work that he does also his fan page he puts a lot of information up and also the Instagram yeah I posted a lot of stuff up on his Instagram now here's the thing with his Instagram and as we kind of wrap in his video up now what chris has told me is that he very kindly wants to give this away his scoop he's actually carved on this tutorial so in order to enter the giveaway what you need to do is go to his Instagram profile and find the image that he's going to put up now depending on kind of like the timing of when these videos out and when you're watching this video the giveaway might be coming up soon who has actually ended if it's ended please do go check him out anyway because he'll be doing more giveaways in the future as he achieves her alarm at landmarks on his Instagram following so the point being is that he's very kindly unbeknownst to me said he wants to give this away to anyone in the world no matter where you are no matter what age you are and I think that's really cool I want to enjoy myself with stuff so in order to do that life consent is going to be doing it via Instagram so like I said the link is below to his Instagram profile please do go check him out and await the giveaway and it's a fantastic opportunity for you to win a genuinely beautiful item so once again Chris a sincere thank you I really do mean it's been a long day but Chris's being an absolute trooper taking the time out once again like I said to record this video so min the world to me you check him out on social media down below and as always I hope whatever you're doing you have a blessed day a blessed week ahead from Chris and myself set up those a cell [Laughter]

Channel: Zed Outdoors

Views: 91,513

Rating: 4.8874998 out of 5

Keywords: zed outdoors, outdoors, survival, survivalist, prepping, preppers, camping, hiking, bushcraft, wilderness, sas, military, forest, wild, tactical, bob everyday carry, every day carry, edc, bug out bag, awesome, best, wildlife, nature, army, ray mears, bear grylls, self sufficiency, wild camp, wildcamp, solo, primitive

Id: _wEQH5AaZNQ

Length: 99min 11sec (5951 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 05 2018