Spoon Carving- Spoon “Crank” Explained

I get tons and tons of people pretty much every day asking how I get a good amount of crank to my spoons when I carve them and to explain that I first have to make sure that everybody that's watching knows what spoon crank is so I've got a normal metal eating spoon here nothing fancy and if you look at if you look at it's not perfectly flat there's an angle between the handle and the bowl and that relationship was called the crank and depending on what you're using a spoon for whether it's an eating spoon or a cooking spoon you might want more or less crank for cooking spoons personally I've generally like a lot less crank they tend to be more straight and for eating spoons they just tend to sit in the hand better and and feed you better if they have more crank to them this one's got a pretty good amount of crank especially if you put it next to this one now while it's not always necessary to have this amount it can be fun to make them this way and some people prefer to eat with a spoon with more crank this one I just finished yesterday and is out of apple wood and for those of you wondering is from straight grained wood this is not from a crook or anything like that so I figure I squared up a blank of cherry excuse me gonna drink a coffee and I figured I would try to explain this the best I can so first we're going to take a design of some sort and I've been liking this asymmetrical eating spoon here and I generally have the crank already marked out on the template itself and most of my templates anyways as you can see the template fits this piece of wood pretty much perfectly and where that line is I'll continue it off onto this piece of wood and put that aside for a minute and then I will use a folding saw to trace over that lines and make this depth better a stock that you don't want to go crazy here you want to check every now and then and see how deep you're getting on both sides because sometimes you might have your your solid leaning more one way or more the other but I have a nice thick life here so I can afford to give this one a little extra crank so I met about maybe a half an inch depth on one side and about three eighths on the other even that up a little bit looks pretty good so the crank is established in a very very early stage of the axe work basically I took a a log turning it into a more or less rectangular billet created my stop cut and I'm already gonna get into creating the crank so let me let me do this as visually as possible I have this stainless steel scale here which if I place it here and draw a line and then draw a line here as well hopefully you guys can see this that is more or less the crank that I'll be going for on this spoon and you can take it a little farther if you know the depth of your keel like let's say my keel is gonna be I don't half an inch deep which might be might be a lot but I can I can make that thinner as I go connect to that line and I generally like to make my handles pretty thin these days so some you might be looking at this going oh my gosh I got to make a spoon that's that thin that's that right up but that's basically you're looking for kind of that I always call it like a Nike swoosh almost it's a very squared up Nike swoosh so I generally speaking I should have did this on this side so that I can see what's going on but I'll show you as I go I take almost from the end grain and at a slight angle and start cutting towards that stop cut and then I just follow that through Holloway until I hit you know that one and I don't typically they don't have these lines on the side of my billets it's there for visual reference for you right now a little bit of cleanup and I'm pretty much there this cut is especially hard to make if you do not have a really sharp axe with a very flat bevel if you have a rounded bevel this is a lot harder to do but as you can see I'm right on that line so what I want to do next is take this piece out and I start by taking just the corners down and you don't want to go too far because you will chop right through the end of your bowl so as you get through the material you want to ease up your pressure and put a little bit of back pressure on it then you want to do the same thing here so you're basically left with a lump in the middle that's v-shaped but on both sides you've cut all the way you're learning so you just want to take that out a little bit farther to go still so that's pretty much where we want to be now you can at this stage redraw your design on which I'll do now and basically you just line up your crank line on your template with the crank line that you've cut into your billet I'll just do a quick job of tracing this on this stage is a little bit forgiving you can even after this further establish your crank or lessen it depending on what you do so it's not a hundred percent make-or-break it's not like what you see now is set in stone necessarily so the side profile and the top view and then you just want to remove material on this side of the lines I'm going to actually go a little bit bigger then the line that I drew on the side and you'll see why in a minute and again taking off the corners and then do the same thing on this side that looks pretty decent so then I'll refine the middle and eyeballing every now and then you already need to take my material look at it from the end make sure things are symmetrical and at this point I'll take my or my eye my saw again you can see it a little better hopefully and right here and right here I'm going to create a stop cuts and this makes the axe work a bit easier going pretty much all the way up to my pattern I leave a little bit of space sixteenth of an inch or less some people will go all the way up to the line and some people go I don't know wait far away from it I guess that's not necessary and that's what we're left with so I will go straight in from the endgrain here assuming that the wood is nice and straight if I've got wobbles to the to the grain at all I will be very careful when doing this or do it differently if I can trust that it's going to split pretty straight then I'll go ahead and drop a stroke from the angry so you just want to come up to the edge of your pattern here a lot of this is going to be redundant from my last videos but for the sake of showing the finished project all I'll see this through all the way to a spoon blank right on top of my line there I'll do the same thing on this side quick little drop a little bit of bulk removal then you got to get this quadrant this quadrant this quadrant and this quadrant off and I always save cutting the excess off the end until pretty much last because a lot of shock is absorbed into that and I don't want to cut all the way up until my pattern now and ruin what's potentially wood that I want to keep so you can start pretty much on any one of these four quadrants I usually start with the handle and then I'll do the two quadrants behind the shoulders of the bowl and you have to be very very careful when you're coming up to your stop cut because if you go through a little too far you're gonna put a micro Nick in the end there which Walters tries will radiate into the backyard Bowl and is the source of a lot of problems for a lot of people that are newer at carving and admittedly some people that have a carbon for a while some of you might notice that I haven't used this axe on camera yet and this is the third spoon that I've used it on and so far I'm absolutely loving it it is the journeyman by Woods means finest it's the the heavier the two axes that he offers and kind of spoke to max a little bit about what's to be expected from this axe and his impressions and I'm looking forward to getting some spoons under my belt and giving my impressions on it as well so far I mean it's pretty early but like I said I've only done this will be my third or fourth spoon boy but so far I'm pretty impressed I will just say that and leave it there so that leaves us with that still a little thick what I like to do is take off the corner here and here as well as back here on the back of the shoulders before I finish up I could still do a little bit of thinning of the handle if I wanted to and make sure to square things up while I'm at this stage because it's a lot easier to do with the accent make sure both sides are symmetrical we're kind of laying the foundation for your knife work at this stage you want to do as much as you can to make the knife work easier axes a lot kinder to your body than the knives are puts a lot of stress on your joints when you use the knives and the axe when used correctly alleviates a lot of that okay take some off the back of the shoulders this is a little bit thicker than I normally would go which isn't a problem this cherry cuts really really nicely so I'm not afraid to have to spend a little time on it with the knives or I could take it down just a little bit right now with a simple drop top blend in the handle a little bit push this again and that is pretty much good enough for me so that is starting to finish from a billet to a spoon blank and you can get closer to line if if you're comfortable doing so some people will get farther away and that's ok too all depends on your skill level but that is what you get here's a side-by-side with a regular eating spoon if that's what you want to call this this is a normal one to me and then alternatively with another cranky spoon so you can see that this one has pretty much the same amount of crank and that's about it hopefully uh hopefully that explains some things for you guys clarified some questions you might have had and thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: HuronSpoonCo

Views: 17,261

Rating: 4.9590645 out of 5

Keywords: spoon carving, spoon crank, crank, greenwood, huronspoonco, sean hearn, spoon blank, woodsmans finest, carving

Id: DK2O5MgrXKg

Length: 18min 42sec (1122 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 24 2020