Today's Carvings and Lessons from the front line

[Roy Fleshman]

Attached are three photos of carves I did today. The large yellow one with the CT logo is something I am playing with for work. Never hurts to curry favor right? Anyway, it was done on a scrap of pine which I have little of and rarely use, except for the Carvewright. Nothing special, I stained the middle with a regular walnut, let it dry a few hours and the dyed the surround wood yellow.

I intended to make a set of book ends with the second one. I have plenty of hard rock maple and walnut in various sizes and try and use the scraps as mush as possible. Hate to through away wood. And actually most of my hard wood is collected by business that throw it away. So first mistake, I size the carvings to the wood, rather than think it out. I am hesitant to carve small, thinking the detail will not hold. Anyway who needs 16 inch high bookmarks. As I carved, I thought maybe I will just stain them different shades. I am half way through the second carving and in comes my friend. You have one of those. He is the idea guy. Anyway, he works on projects off and on in the shop and keeps an eye on things when I am not around during the weekday. He has been reading all about this machine the last week and somehow seems to know more than me and my two months of research. I digress. Sorry. Anyway we are talking about how to put the dust collection system on. And we go over to the running machine and lift the cover. Of course the machine comes off. Evidently, according to him, when you lower the cover it starts back up again. It didn't so I just hit the enter button and the carving continued. We must have done something else, either jiggles it or rest the track, anyway the bottom half of the carving is off set about .5 of an inch and is no good. At least for display. It is good for testing stains, colors, etc and that is why I have the rainbow warrior. Live and learn and adjust fire when needed. The finished product is the one in yellow. I liked that color the most and then I slight hit it with some brown stain on the edges and low areas to both distress the look and make it pop. A little history about this carving and myself. I saw the original when I was stationed in Europe in the early 80s. It was located in the British Museum and as I recall, it was carved into stone as I recall about 450 BC. I had just read a book about the Spartans and looking at this I wondered if the artist was carving depiction of the Greek warrior fending off the Persian snake. Regardless what it means to anyone, I bet the artist had no concept that 3,000 years later someone would be carving into wood use technology beyond belief for his time.

Thanks for reading, back to the grind or carve....

[fwharris]

Roy,

It looks like a productive day! A hint on stopping/pausing a carving. Use the "stop" button instead of raising the clear cover. Pressing the stop button once will pause the carving. This sends the signal to the machine computer to halt all operations at the same time. When you raise the cover the computer has to recognize that the cover and cut motor switches are opened and then react to it.

The screen will give you the option to continue (#1) or abort (#2). When you lift the cover after pressing the stop button the display will change to "cover open".

It looks like you have a nice selection of wood on those racks!