Wood Carving Knife

          Lately I have been playing around with wood carving, and looking in to carving tools,  knives, gouges, draw knifes etc...  At the same time I have also been wanting to try my hand at making a knife, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I took a blacksmith class a few years back where I  made a knife from a railroad spike. So even though I have never really tried my hand at knife making since then, I knew the basic principles from the previous class.
 This knife is primarily a wood carving knife, I cloned the design from a Mora 106 knife blade. All in all I thought it turned out pretty good for my first shot out the gate. I made the blade from an old chop saw blade I had laying around, and the handle from some left over oak scraps, the sheath is from some scrap leather. So even though this is knife and sheath are not perfect or works of art, they are functional and serve my desired purpose, and that is what really maters.

I hope you enjoy the post, and as always never stop creating!
Thanks.

Oak Celtic Mash Paddle

             Awhile back I did a post on a mash paddle I had carved out of a piece poplar, it was a completely aesthetic piece. The soft poplar wood is great for carving, but for a usable mash paddle it is to absorbent and fragile.  I loved the design of the poplar paddle so much I decided to remake it using a piece of oak. I'm not going to go in to a big explanation of the steps I took to create this paddle. I did however use a wood burner this time around for the decorative features. I hope whoever is looking at this page, likes what the see and if so please re-post any pictures on Pintrest or Facebook. Thanks!

Again Thanks for checking out the blog, and as always "never stop creating"

Celtic mash paddle

This was a project I did a while back and am just now getting around to posting pictures of it. This project was a lot of fun, for one I have never dabbled in wood carving before and it gave me a reason to try my hand at making mosaic pins. So a Mash paddle is a tool used in brewing beer (is basically a big stir stick) I wanted to play around with a carving project and this gave me that opportunity. Typically a mash paddle is pretty basic, but whats the fun in being basic when you got skills right!

Because this was my first attempt at carving I used a softer wood (poplar) which I would have rather used oak or maple, but finding maple in Florida is damn near impossible. This paddle is more decoration than functional. Like I said I was looking more at the carving aspect that the practicality of the piece, but the next one I do will be oak.

I started out by laying down a pattern on a 3/4 board, then used a jigsaw to cut out the body of the paddle.

 Once the body was cut out, I drilled holes in each negative space on the knot section of the paddle. Then using a copping saw I cut out each negative space. This part takes a while so don't get frustrated.

After a rough sanding to clean up the edges and crevices, next is time to break out the chisels. Now I would not recommend using carpenters chisels but if that's all you got I'm sure you can pull it off with some fineness and patient. What I would recommend are carving chisels, you will have more versatility than you will with a straight edge chisel.

To get the affect that the wood is knotted, I dug down a 1/4 inch or so on the parts that would give it a uniformed weaved affect. It sounds more difficult than it is, the hardest part of doing a Celtic knot is making sure its consistent.

After I was satisfied with the knot work I carved a Scottish thistle in the handle, and because this is not a functional piece I used a not food grade stain. If this was a functional paddle I would have used a butcher block stain that is food grade or I would have just used mineral oil.  

  
I was really happy with the final product and would defiantly make another. As always I hope you enjoyed the post, if you have any feedback feel free to leave a comment and I'll get back to you as soon as I can!

Remember, all that makes a person an expert in a craft is practice!

Thanks.