Lots and lots of of shavings!
I know it doesn’t look like much in the thumbnail picture, but the pile of shavings that came out of our most recent swan carving was almost three feet high and four feet square! It never ceases to amaze me how this huge volume of wood shavings can be produced from a swan that only measures 32″ long. And only about half of that distance is hollowed, since we don’t cut into the tail section, and the wings on this particular swan don’t get hollowed out at all.
In the ‘old’ days we did this work with a hand drill and an adze, but now we clamp the ‘body’ of the swan to be hollowed into a cradle and then use our large drill press – with an equally large forstner bit. The drill press takes all of the elbow grease out of the initial work, but we still need to go in with hand tools and clean the area out smooth. The tricky part is not getting too deep in any one area and creating an issue with any of the detail carving still to be done.
So, after the hollowing, and the carving, and the sanding, and the painting we get this:
That’s it for now. I’ll be back later with a show update and an possible newsletter sighting!
Jac