Carving a wooden bowl, Part 1

I’ve carved many bowls over the years, and even turned a few on the lathe. In 2022 I carved a couple of bowls for my niece’s wedding, and I’ve carved perhaps two dozen more since then. I’ve developed a pretty standard process by now, although I’m continually refining it. In this post I will show how I go from a raw log to a carved bowl.

Understand up front that this will be a long post and only the first in a series of posts. In this first part I show how I split a bowl blank from a log and then shape the outside of a wooden bowl. In the next post I’ll show how I hollow the inside. After that will be smoothing the inside, filling the cracks, and then final sanding and applying a finish. I’ve hollowed the bowl and will be posting about that soon. It might be a while before I do the rest of the work on this piece.

One other thing. I’m showing you the tools and procedures I employ to carve a bowl from a piece of wood. I’m not saying that this is the only way to do it or even that it’s the right way to do it. I’m showing you what works for me. If you have suggestions for improving things, or questions about something in particular, feel free to contact me via email. The address is jim AT mischel.com.

Wood selection

It strikes me as funny that people often ask, “Where do you get your wood?” It’s as though they think there’s a special place to get logs that are suitable for carving. I’ve often joked that I carve FOG wood: I found it on the ground. Seriously, though, the stuff grows on trees! I find carving wood wherever somebody has pruned or cut down a tree. The neighborhood in which I live has a lot of trees. There’s always a good selection of logs lying around, and people are happy to have me take some away. If they need convincing, the offer of a handmade bowl carved out of wood that came from their tree hasn’t failed.

In addition, new neighborhoods are continually being built in the area, meaning huge piles of plowed-down trees. My truck and maybe some help from a friend will get me more wood than I could ever carve.

Trust me, finding wood to carve into bowls is not a problem. Much the opposite, in fact. There’s so much that I can afford to be, even have to be, selective. Depending on what I’m going for I might select for shape, size, type of wood, etc. Even being selective, there’s no possible way I could carve all the really cool pieces of wood that I would like to carve. Availability of carving material just isn’t an issue.

For this demonstration, I selected this piece of oak that I rescued from the burn pile at Sherwood Forest Faire. When I threw it into the back of the truck a year or two ago, it was fresh-cut and had no splits. It sat out by the garage and, as wood does, cracked as it dried. That doesn’t bother me: cracks are just another feature to incorporate into the design.

I don’t know which of the many different oak varieties this is. There are more than 500 different varieties of oak, a dozen or more of which are native to Central Texas. This one is pretty indicative of oak in general: medium hard, straight-grained, and beautiful when finished. It should make a lovely bowl.

Prior to splitting, the log was 25 inches long and varied from 11 to 12 inches in diameter. I split is approximately in half with a wedge and sledge, and threw the larger piece onto the work table. The larger piece turned out to be about 5-1/2 inches thick in the middle.

I set the other piece aside for later. I’ll probably carve another bowl from it at some point.

I’d never kept track of how long it takes me to carve one of these bowls. Fortunately, I took a whole mess of pictures. The picture timestamps give me a good idea of how long each step took. I didn’t document interruptions, though, so it’s impossible to get an exact time.

The reason I’m keeping track of time is that I’m contemplating selling my work. I’ve always given the bowls I make away as gifts. If I’m going to start selling the things I make, I need to keep track of how much time I spend making them so that I can get an idea of how much to charge. That, too, is a whole other discussion.

Flattening the bottom

The first big task is rough-flattening the bottom of the bowl. For this bowl, the bark side will be the bottom. I’ll end up flattening the top, too, but I do the bottom first because the top is already approximately flat after splitting. It sits nice and steady on the bench. As is often the case I had to add a wedge to prevent it from rocking while I work. It’s a whole lot harder the other way: trying to keep a round log from rolling from side to side.

My workbench is pretty simple. The base is a Black and Decker WorkMate that I bought at a neighbor’s garage sale for something like $20. On top of that is a work surface that I knocked together from a couple of 4×4 scraps and a piece of OSB left over from some project or another. Raising the table four inches did wonders for my back! It also provides a large, flat work surface. Before I got the WorkMate, my workbench was one of those brown banquet tables, four feet long and two feet wide. It was nice to have all that surface, but clamping was a bit of a problem when working on smaller bowls. I might go back to the banquet table, though, for some larger pieces.

I’ve heard it said that you can’t have too many, or too many different types, of clamps. I do have a lot of different types of clamps, but there’s nothing special required here. Just two run-of-the-mill screw clamps to keep the work surface on the table, and two more for a block to keep the log from sliding forward as I work on it. I’m not worried about it sliding backwards because it’s heavy enough (about 30 pounds at this point) and I won’t be applying significant force in that direction. Notice the wedge under the front right corner. That’s there to prevent the piece from rocking as I work.

It’s important to remember that here I’m flattening the surface. I’m emphatically not leveling it. That is, I just want it to be a (roughly) flat surface. I’m not trying to make it parallel to any existing flat surface. The other thing to keep in mind is that word “roughly”. I want something that’ll sit on the workbench without rocking as I’m carving the bowl. A little wobble at this point is okay; I’ll worry about getting it perfectly flat after I finish carving.

I do rough flattening in two steps. First, I put a coarse wheel on the angle grinder to remove the bark and make a (very) approximately flat surface. The primary reason I do this is that it’s a whole lot easier to rough things out with the grinder than with the electric plane. Once I get down past the bark, I begin taking off wood with the electric plane. I can adjust the plane to take from 1/64″ to 1/16″ at a time. I usually start at 1/16″ until I get to where I want to be. I might make a pass or two at 1/32″ if I need to smooth some ridges.

I’ll be the first to admit that the electric plane wasn’t really designed for this use. But it works really well for rough flattening. I know I’ll have to make another pass at it, but that’s okay.

How wide should the base be? However wide you think it needs to be. Seriously, it rather depends on the size and shape of the bowl, and how the bowl will be used. For a display bowl, a fairly narrow base is fine: just enough to keep the bowl from falling over from light pressure on the side. For a bowl that will be used, you probably want a wider base. This bowl will probably be a display piece, but I want to carve it to look as though it is, or was, a functional bread bowl. At least on the outside. I made the base 6″ wide. That will narrow a bit when I carve the sides, but I think the final width will be at least 5″.

From the time I took that first picture of the bowl blank on the workbench up to now is, according to the picture time stamps, an hour and five minutes. I got called away briefly while I was working on flatting the bottom, but I don’t recall for how long. I’ll say it took an hour to get to this point.

Safety

Before we go any further, let me talk a bit about safety. As you can see in the picture above, I wear a full face shield and a respirator. I also wear ear plugs, which you obviously can’t see. This wasn’t always the case. The first few times I carved a bowl with the angle grinder, I didn’t wear any of that stuff. I’d just throw on some shop goggles to protect my eyes, and then get to work. That prevents the most immediate hazard, but ignores the long-term effects of inhaling wood dust and repeated insults to the ears. Oddly enough (or perhaps not), I didn’t improve my safety equipment in response to those dangers, but rather because I found that wearing the improved safety equipment made me more comfortable.

I noticed, after carving a bowl, that my head would be buzzing for a day or two afterwards. The best way I can describe it is tinnitus with a vengeance. One day before carving I threw on the ear muffs I used to wear when mowing the lawn (I use earplugs now), and afterwards I was surprised at how not-exhausted I was. Turns out it takes some serious mental effort to focus my attention on carving with the steady roar of the angle grinder. And that’s when I noticed that my tinnitus wasn’t appreciably worse than normal. Ear protection became an essential piece of safety equipment after that.

The addition of the respirator is a similar story. Debra caught me digging black boogers out of my nose a day after I’d carved a bowl. I realized I was being stupid. I could prevent the discomfort of my reaction to the wood dust and avoid embarrassing situations by wearing a respirator. Now after carving a bowl I can still breathe normally. Plus, I don’t risk some random fungus colonizing the warm, dark, moist land of Lung. The wood I work with comes from the wild; it’s not the kiln-dried, sterile, and perfectly-dimensioned turning blanks one picks up at Woodcraft or Rockler. There are a lot of bacteria and fungi in found wood, and many of them are quite happy to set up shop in your lungs. Those kind of infections are potentially deadly, difficult to diagnose, and hard to treat. Wear an N95 respirator if you’re raising dust. Or at least wear a protective mask of some kind. Even a cloth tied around your face is better than nothing. Anything you can do to prevent inhaling what you’re grinding will help.

I adopted the full face shield on the recommendation of a friend who was injured when a bowl he was turning came apart on the lathe. A piece of that bowl hit his safety glasses, destroying the frame and putting a good-sized gash in his forehead. The very next day I was turning a bowl, wearing a full face shield as recommended. The bowl came apart on the lathe and a piece of the bowl smacked my face shield about even with my nose. I don’t know how much damage that piece of wood would have done to my face had I not been wearing the face shield, but I vowed right then never to find out. I wear a full face shield whenever I’m swinging that angle grinder or using other power tools that have a high chance of throwing stuff at my face.

And then there’s the elephant in the room: the missing guard on the angle grinder. That’s a standard piece of safety equipment, and I tried carving a bowl with it in place. The guard gets in the way. It’s a removable guard, which tells me that it’s an optional piece of safety equipment. I understand the dangers of removing it, but I just don’t see them as critical. In particular, I’m grinding wood rather than metal: it’s not throwing off sparks or small metal shards. I do have to be careful, though, not to catch the workpiece with the back of the disc.

One more safety consideration: keep the area around the work table clear. You do not want to be tripping over stuff when you’re holding on to a tool spinning an abrasive disc at 15,000 RPM. That thing will remove skin with alacrity. I wish I could say that I’m not speaking from experience. Fortunately I’ve only taken off a little skin. Others have incurred much more serious injuries. The tool isn’t inherently dangerous, but it can be dangerous if used incorrectly.

Rough shaping the ends

When I was first starting out with wood carving, I developed what I call the Coarsest Tool Principle. Understand, the concept has been around for ages; anybody who spends time working with wood or any other material they want to shape has probably adopted it without even thinking too much about it. Briefly, the Coarsest Tool Principle says, “Always use the coarsest tool available that will do the job without tearing things up.” For example, if you want to remove 2″ of wood, cut it off! It’s foolish to 30 minutes grinding wood into powder when I can spend 30 seconds cutting it most of it off with a chainsaw, followed by five minutes or so spent shaping the result with the angle grinder.

This bowl will have a pretty traditional shape: wide at the top, narrowing to a flat base, and an oval opening. So the ends curve up, and narrow. I save myself a lot of grinding time by cutting the ends at an angle with the chainsaw. I’m not attempting to make the final shape, although I suspect somebody who’s more familiar with chainsaw carving could do a better “approximate” job than I did here. The first picture below shows one end and the pieces I cut from it.

In the picture below you can see how I clamped the wood onto the workbench so that it would stay still while I was cutting.

According to the timestamps, I spent 25 minutes cutting the ends off the bowl. Most of that time was spent locating the chainsaw, sharpening the chain, and adjusting the chain tension. Call it an hour and a half up to this point.

Flattening the top

I didn’t take any pictures while I was flattening the top. As I said previously, the top is already flat-ish. I didn’t have to grind anything away with the angle grinder, but rather started removing wood with the electric plane immediately. That still takes a while, though. The wood is 12″ wide and the plane can cut at most 3″ at a time. At 1/16 inch per pass. That’s a minimum of 32 passes with the plane to go down 1/2″. I had to take off a little more than that. All told, I probably ran the planer over the top at least 50 times before I had it flattened to my satisfaction.

Which brings up the question of why I flatten the top of the bowl. After all, I’m going to carve away most of it. Why spend all that time making sure it’s flat?

There are two reasons.

First, if I want the sides of my bowl to be even–the same height all the way around–it’s a whole lot easier to accomplish if they start that way. Leveling the top of a bowl once it’s carved is tedious: first I have to get them approximately even, then take it to the sanding table to get them perfectly even. Then I have to carefully shape the edges. Unless I want the bowl to have a flat top rim. But that brings up other considerations that I’ll save for another time.

Even though I don’t typically want my bowls to have perfectly level top edges, I still flatten the top of the bowl before I begin carving. The two pictures below show why.

To support the bowl while I carve the outside, I attach a floor flange to the top. On a separate board that’s clamped to my workbench, I’ve attached another floor flange into which I’ve threaded a 10-inch-long, 1-1/4″ galvanized pipe nipple. Then I turn the bowl blank over, thread the flange onto the pipe, and screw it down. It’s quite an effective holding jig. I find it ideal for carving bowls.

If you want to build something like this, be sure to get the right length of pipe so that it positions the bowl at a good carving height for you. You should prefer a longer pipe over a thicker base, although your base should be at least 1″ thick. And use four screws in both pipe flanges. You want that piece of wood to be held as securely as possible. It’s probably safe with three, but why not go ahead and put the fourth one in there? I use 1-1/4″ or 1-5/8″ (whichever is convenient at the time) #9 outdoor decking screws. Unless of course the bowl blank isn’t that thick.

According to the timestamps on the photos, it took me 30 minutes to flatten the top and mount the bowl on the carving stand. Call it two hours, total time, up to this point. Time to start carving.

Shaping the outside

I hear from time to time about people who hollow the bowl before shaping the outside. I don’t know how they do it. I’d be afraid of taking too much off and breaking through because I can’t easily determine just where the inside of the bowl is. More importantly, once the bowl is hollowed out, how the heck do they hold the thing still so they can carve the outside? I know how it can be done, but it’s a whole lot more difficult than my simple pipe flange holding jig.

The first thing I do before I start carving proper is remove the bark. For removing bark, I prefer the coarse carbide disc you see in the picture above. I picked it up at Harbor Freight for something like $10. It removes bark in bigger chunks than does my normal carving disc, and seems to go faster. When it comes to bark, bigger chunks are definitely better. For some reason I find bark dust extremely annoying. Weird, I know, but there it is. I didn’t use this grinding wheel to remove bark from the bottom of the bowl because I couldn’t find it. Turned out it was in the drawer where it was supposed to be, just buried under something else.

I carved my first few bowls, outside and inside, with this exact type of disc. It’s possible, but there are much better carving discs. Especially for hollowing. But if you’re severely budget constrained, you can make it work.

After removing the bark, I changed out the disc and started shaping. I don’t usually have an exact shape in mind at this point. I know generally what I want, but I’m open to improvisation, although there wasn’t much improv involved this time. I rounded the ends and shaped the sides so that they’re more planer than curved: almost flat. I’m not at all concerned with making the bowl perfectly symmetrical with both ends shaped the same, sides perfectly straight and at the same angle, etc. I can appreciate that kind of precision, but I find trying to do it very stressful. I like the look of an irregular bowl.

Without an exact design, I move around the carving, slowly removing wood and turning sharp edges into gentle curves. The disc I use (picture left) is very aggressive and necessitates a light touch. I never let the full weight of the grinder bear on the disc. Doing so would take a deep bite that could easily go deeper than I want. It’s also a whole lot easier to control the angle grinder when taking thin cuts. If I go deep enough, that disc could get stuck in the wood and rip the angle grinder right out of my hands. That, as they say, would be bad.

Pictures in the gallery above show the bowl after I finished rough shaping with the carving disc. My goal at this point is to have the bowl in its final shape. I’ll do a lot of smoothing, which will change the shape a little bit, but what you see here will be pretty much the bowl’s final shape.

Picture timestamps tell me that shaping took about 40 minutes. I’m about two and a half hours into the project.

A note about angle grinders

Angle grinders, by the way, seem to come in two flavors: those with slide switches and those with trigger switches. Having used both, I much prefer the trigger switch models. From an ergonomic standpoint, I find that they fit my hand better. I can use a trigger switch grinder longer with less fatigue than I can a slide switch model. More importantly, the trigger switch is easier to turn off: just let go of the trigger. There is a trigger lock so that I don’t always have to be holding the switch. When engaged, I have to squeeze the trigger again to disengage the lock. Squeezing the trigger briefly is a whole lot easier and faster than reaching with my thumb to turn off a slide switch model. You’ll pay a little bit more for a trigger switch model, but I think it’s money well spent.

Don’t skimp on your angle grinder. I know you can get a slide switch model for $20 or $25 at Harbor Freight. I’ve bought, used, and burned up many such. I got tired of buying a new grinder every year or two. Even their “high quality” model that cost $30 lasted only a year and a half. I bought that Ryobi angle grinder you see in the picture above for about $60 eight or ten years ago and I’ve carved dozens of bowls with it. More comfortable to use and lasts longer seems like a good deal to me.

Smoothing the outside

I do like that carving disc. It makes quick work of rough shaping, but it leaves a pretty rough surface. In addition to being rough, the surface is uneven; there are a lot of small low spots that I need to eliminate. There are several ways I could smooth the surface. I’ve tried hand scraping, hand sanding, and flap wheels on the angle grinder. All work, but I prefer the angle grinder because it’s faster.

In keeping with the Coarsest Tool Principle, I do initial smoothing with a 36-grit flap wheel on the angle grinder. Although I could do some shaping with the flap wheel, ideally all I’m doing is removing tool marks and low spots from the surface. After smoothing with the 36-grit flap wheel, I do it three more times using 60, 80, and 120-grit flap wheels. I could probably get away with just 60 and 120, not even using the 36-grit wheel. But it only takes a few minutes for each smoothing pass and by the time I’m done I’m reasonably sure that there aren’t any deep tool marks left in the wood.

In the first picture you see the rasp plane that I used to finish flattening the bottom of the bowl. That thing makes a pretty quick job of flattening the bottom, but leaves deep gouges in the wood. I can eliminate them on my sanding table, but if I learn how to operate a hand plane (i.e. one with a blade), I won’t have to spend as time at the sanding table.

In the second picture you can see there are some small flat areas. I’ll remove those with sandpaper.

Timestamps tell me that I took another 45 minutes to flatten the bottom and smooth the sides. I think I probably got interrupted in the middle of that, but perhaps not. Total time to this point is three and a half hours.

Sanding the outside

The primary reason I sand the outside now is convenience: it’s a whole lot easier to sand the outside of the bowl when it’s being securely held on the carving stand. I’ll have to do much of that over again after filling the cracks, but that’s okay. Sanding now gives me a uniform surface to work from, reducing the amount of sanding I have to do while fighting to keep the carved bowl still on the workbench.

I’ve recently changed two things about how I sand these bowls. First, I sand wet even at the coarsest grits. Water helps prevent the sandpaper from clogging. It also softens the wood, making it easier for the sandpaper to cut. I’ve found that I do a better job of sanding, and take less time to do it, when I use water. Sandpaper with a waterproof backing is a bit more expensive, but I consider it money well spent.

Averaged across all the grits I use, sandpaper costs me about a buck a sheet. The way I cut the sandpaper, one sheet provides three pieces that fit well in the hand. Sanding the outside of this bowl, I used 4 pieces, one each of 60, 80, 100, and 120-grit. That’s one and one-third full sheets of sandpaper, or about $1.33. By the time I’m done with the bowl, sanding inside and outside after carving, and then sanding up to 220 grit after filling the cracks, I will have used maybe four full sheets of sandpaper. And this is a big bowl. Sandpaper isn’t a huge expense.

The other change to my sanding process is the addition of gloves. Specifically those work gloves with the rubber (nitrile? whatever) fingers. And the reason I wear gloves now is because my fingers started bleeding when I was working on a bowl a few weeks ago. It takes time to do a good job sanding, and all that time while I’m sanding the wood I’m holding on to the sandpaper. My fingers would be sore the next day, but I just chalked that up to the cost of making something pretty. But bleeding fingers is too much.

I spend a lot of time sanding at this stage. I want to make sure that I have removed all of the tool marks, and all of the low spots and small flat spots are gone. To help in doing a good job, I’ve developed a little system. I start sanding at one end of the bowl and move clockwise around it, making sure to cover every inch of surface. It’s pretty surprising how well my fingers can find low spots and flat spots, even through the gloves. And of course my eyes are there looking for irregularities, too.

After completing a trip around the bowl, I do it again, but counter-clockwise. One reason I switch directions is simply to spread the load: when moving clockwise, my left hand is doing the sanding. When I’m moving counter-clockwise, the right hand is occupied. The other reason I do it is so I can see the wood from two different perspectives.

For each grit, I move around the bowl three times (sometimes more) in alternating directions. I also vary the starting direction at each grit. I want to make sure that each hand does approximately half the work, and I want to avoid any kind of bias in my procedure that would cause me to miss something.

I’ll be the first to admit that I probably spend more time sanding at this point than I really have to. That’s okay. I’d rather spend more time now so that I don’t find myself having to back up a few grits when I’m sanding away at 180 grit and discover a scratch that requires 100-grit sandpaper to remove. Backing up and re-sanding is a huge pain in the neck. Especially, as I mentioned before, when the bowl is no longer securely held on the carving stand.

Another nice thing about wet sanding is that it gives me an idea of how the piece will look when finished. The oil finishes I use (usually tung oil or linseed oil) don’t color the wood, but they do give it a wet look. Getting the wood wet with water approximates the color of those finishes very well.

I wasn’t surprised to find that sanding took a long time. Picture timestamps say that it was an hour and fifty minutes from the last picture I took of the smoothed bowl and the first picture of the wet sanded bowl. I took a break in there to wolf down a snack and do a couple of minor chores before I started sanding. If I were to guess, I’d say it was about 20 minutes

At this point the outside of the bowl is carved and sanded. From the time I first put the log on the workbench up to now is right at five and a half hours. I have another half hour of cleanup to do (putting tools away, etc.). Call it six hours, total, to go from a raw log to a bowl that’s shaped but not hollowed. Understand, though, that this bowl is quite a bit larger than what I typically carve. My bowls are usually 16 or 18 inches long, 7 to 10 inches long, and 3 to 4 inches deep. This bowl is half again as large. Perhaps more than that.

I took a few pictures of the bowl standing upright on the workbench. I think this will look nice after I hollow the inside.

You can see in these pictures that I didn’t get the top of the bowl perfectly flat. If I were concerned about that, I could spend a little bit more time making it flat and, if I were really concerned, level with the bottom. But that’s not the look I’m going for with this bowl. I think it’ll look just fine the way it is.

Osage Orange whittling

I was digging through my wood stash a week or two ago and came across this piece of Osage Orange. I’m not sure where I got it. I think it was a branch that I cut off a larger piece that I carved six or eight years ago. I’ve been re-discovering the joy of just doodling with the knife, and thought I’d see what kind of doodle I could whittle up.

Understand, Osage Orange is a hard wood. I mean really hard. Think “harder than mesquite” hard. I’ve carved several different things from this wood, but always with power. It’s harder than most carvers will attempt with a knife, or edged tools in general. But we already know that I’m a little unbalanced.

I stripped the bark and carefully carved away the outer layers just to see what I had to work with. The wood is hard, but not terribly so when cutting with the grain. It’s not very forgiving when carved against the grain, though. I found that, as with most hard woods, I can carve upstream if I’m careful, but I had to be extra careful with this wood because it tends to tear surprisingly easily. Cutting across the end grain is … well, it’s really hard.

With no particular design in mind, I started whittling away. At some point I thought it’d be interesting to try making some curves that follow grain lines. I shaped one end and incorporated the two branch stubs to vaguely resemble a bird … or a dolphin. I added a little bit more shape to make it look less like a stick. But my real purpose was to highlight different features of the wood.

The picture on the left shows the piece after I’d done most of the carving with my BeaverCraft C2 whittling knife. That little knife really is a joy to work with. It’s inexpensive, feels good in the hand, and the blade holds an edge well. It’s the knife my students use in classes, and I recommend it for beginners. And for advanced carvers, as well. The shape of the blade isn’t great for fine detail, but that’s okay. I don’t do much detail work, and I find that bench knives with very narrow points have a tendency to break at the tip. Or perhaps I should say that I tend to break the tips off of such knives. The BeaverCraft knife has a pretty broad, thick tip. I’d have to try very hard to break it.

At this point I pulled out my detail knife to touch up some of the cuts. A lot of carvers would go to sandpaper after that. I used to, but over the past few years I’ve started making the first smoothing pass with a scraper. More correctly, with a knife that I’ve re-purposed as a scraper. It’s just a sharp knife that I scrape over the wood, removing fine shavings. This does a much faster job of rough smoothing, and the sharp tip of the blade can get into areas that are very difficult to reach with coarse sandpaper.

In theory, a good scraper is all one needs. It leaves a fine glossy finish. But scraping something perfectly smooth, especially with these hard woods, is a difficult and tedious process. The end grain, in particular, will drive you mad. If you ever try it, you’ll much better appreciate the invention of sandpaper.

In a discussion at my monthly carving get together last week, one of the members commented on how carvers hate finish work. I had brought for show and tell some of the things I’d been whittling recently, all of which were simple shapes that I spent as much time sanding and finishing as I did carving. Her reply when I told her that I enjoyed finishing amounted to, “You’re different.”

I started with 60 grit sandpaper to get the carving smooth, and then worked my way up through the grits: 80, 100, 120, 150, 180, 220, 300, 400, 600, 800, 1000, 1200. The last four I sanded wet. I had intended to go to 2000 grit, but couldn’t find anything beyond 1200 in the shop.

After sanding, I set it aside and let it dry overnight. This morning I wiped it clean with a paper towel.

I’ll be the first to admit that the carving isn’t great. But it does an excellent job of displaying the wood’s beauty. And it’s glass smooth. I find myself picking it up just to feel it. Then I get lost looking more closely at different features, seeing how branches affect the grain pattern, and alternately admiring the cracks and being disappointed that they’re there.

Understand, I’ve not yet put any kind of finish on the wood. I’m still considering further sanding. If it shines like this at 1200, what will it look like at 2000 grit?

The wood has a decidedly orange tint to it now. That will darken to brown over time, due to oxygen and ultraviolet radiation. The only way I know of to prevent that would be to lock the carving in a dark, airless box.

Osage Orange. 5 inches long. Hand carved, and sanded to 1200 grit. No finish.

More whittling pups

Yesterday in The Whittling Pup, I described how Copilot came to generate a picture (four pictures, actually) for me of a puppy whittling a wooden dog:

Copilot completely misunderstood my request. I was asking it to show me pictures that other people post of their completed Whittle Pup wood carvings. I don’t know enough about how Copilot’s LLM works and what restrictions it operates under, but it’s clear that it interpreted my query (“Can you show me some pictures of the Whittle Pup?”) to mean, “Show me a picture of a puppy whittling a wooden dog.”

Not an unreasonable interpretation, really. Honestly, of all the responses I’ve received from AI chatbots, this is by far my favorite. Not just because they’re so stinking cute, but also because they’re well composed. The AI (DALL-E 3 in this case) got the essentials: a puppy at a workbench, using a knife to carve a wooden figure. Those pictures are, unintentionally, brilliantly amusing.

So I thought I’d see what the other AIs could do with the prompt: “show me a picture of a puppy using a knife to whittle a wooden dog.”

Google Gemini

I especially like the top-right picture. The bottom-left is great, too: pup there looks like a serious craftsman paying close attention to his work.

Meta AI

Meta AI generated only one picture in response to the prompt.

The picture certainly is cute, and amusing. Particularly the placement of the knife. But again, the AI did a good job of getting all the necessary pieces into the picture. We can quibble about how those are arranged, but why?

ChatGPT

ChatGPT, too, generates only one picture at a time. It also limits me to two generated pictures per day, unless I pay to upgrade. That’s okay, the first one it generated is great:

I like this one a lot. I have a minor quibble about the knife, which looks more like a paring knife from the kitchen rather than a carving knife from the shop. And the puppy’s belly, just just under the knife, is oddly pink: more so than I recall ever seeing on a real puppy. But, really, those are my only criticisms. It’s a wonderful picture.

This is impressive technology that’s freely available to anybody with a computer. And the technology is in its infancy. What I find impressive is that the AI not only gives me what I asked for (a puppy whittling a dog figure), but adds appropriate touches like the woodworking “bench,” woodworking tools in the background, and wood shavings. With few exceptions, the knife is being held appropriately, assuming a puppy could hold a knife. Of all the images generated here, there’s only one that I’d call “wrong”: the bottom-right image from Google Gemini, where it looks like the puppy is about to chew on the knife blade.

As this technology improves, I think we’re going to see a new skillset emerge, and become coveted: the ability to create AI prompts that produce the desired result. This is the realm of writers, speakers, and poets: people who can, well, paint pictures with words. It’s an odd mixture of technical and creative writing. The quality of the AI output depends very much on the quality of the query that it’s given. I need to explore that in more detail.

Recent whittlings

I’ve been doing a lot of carving lately, mostly relatively simple whittlings from small tree branches. It’s a fun type of carving, especially because I can complete an entire project in an hour or three. That’s a huge departure from the bowls, which take several hours to carve, twice as long to sand, and the same amount of time again to fill the cracks with crushed stone, complete sanding, and finish. My simple little whittlings also let me think of other things while I’m working, something that’s difficult to do with the bowls or other types of carvings.

Not that there’s no challenge involved. Every piece of wood is different and poses unique challenges. Working around knots requires careful attention, and carving areas where multiple limbs come together and the grain is going every which way can be difficult. That’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about: describing how to identify and best carve wood that has interesting grain patterns. Straight grain is easy to carve and favored for big woodworking projects (chairs, tables, other furniture), but a small carving that takes advantage of interesting wood features can really stand out.

I don’t know that any of the carvings shown here really stand out, but every one of them was a learning experience for me. How useful they are beyond that isn’t really a concern.

Above is a stir stick (for mixing drinks) carved from a small oak twig. It’s about 8 inches long. The stone at the top is crushed malachite. There’s a similar spot of crushed stone on the other side. I think oak is a perfect wood for this kind of carving. It’s strong and it shines up beautifully, and it’s easier to carve than most of the other woods in the yard.

At left is an example of what I’ve come to call “stabby things.” Stabby things are essentially just sharpened sticks. Well, maybe not “just”: there is some design thought put into them. This one came about because somebody in my wood carving class at Sherwood Forest Summer Camp pulled this piece of cedar (Virginia Red Juniper) from the pile and started trying to carve it. I took it away and gave him something that a beginner actually had a chance of making something from.

This cedar is generally very soft and easy to cut. As long as the grain is straight and you’re cutting with the grain. The wood is so soft that when you try to cut against the grain, your knife gets under some fibers and the wood starts to tear. And if the grain curves even the slightest bit, it’s distressingly easy to get into a situation where you’re tearing rather than cutting. I took this piece from my student because it contains two large knots and some really twisty grain between them. The handle is about as simple as I could make it, heck, the whole piece is about as simple as I could make it because carving that block of wood was a real challenge.

That cedar, by the way, was a 1″x6″ block of wood that I cut from a much larger piece. That much larger piece was used as part of a window frame in the Great Hall of the castle at Sherwood Forest Faire. My friend was hired to re-do the windows there and he asked if I wanted the wood. My students at Summer Camp got to carve a small piece of the castle.

Anyway, stabby thing, five or six inches long.

This is a piece of Arizona ash, six or eight inches long, from a tree that died in the yard a couple of years ago. I had carved a lot of it with power (bowls with the angle grinder, and some utensils with the Foredom), but hadn’t put a knife to it until I started this piece last year. The wood is pleasant to carve: generally straight-grained and not terribly sensitive to carving against the grain except around knots. Unlike most of the other carvings here, which came to me originally as branches, I got this from a 3/4 inch board I’d had milled from the ash in the yard. I’m fresh out of ash branches since most of the ash trees in the neighborhood didn’t survive two years of ice storms. I thought I’d try burning a simple design into the handle. I’m pretty sure that the design would look great if rendered by a competent pyrographer. I need to spend some quality time with the wood burner. I haven’t decided if I like the way it turned out.

In April or May of last year I bought a new carving knife. It’s called a Sloyd knife, a Swedish design that is used mostly for roughing out larger carvings. It has a long (a little over 3 inches), curved blade. I’d never used one and this piece of elm seemed like the perfect place to try it out.

The result is a large-ish dagger with a 10-inch blade, carved from an elm branch 1-1/2 or 2 inches in diameter. The design was inspired by the Rondel dagger, but this piece isn’t intended to be an accurate reproduction. It’s hard to see in this picture, but there’s a pretty good curve about where the blade meets the handle. That curve was in the branch, and I just carried it through the completed carving.

Carving this piece took a long time. I worked on it every night for a couple of weeks, put it down to work on something else for a while, picked it back up, lather, rinse, repeat. I pretty much finished carving it last summer, and then set it aside to carve the oak dagger (see below). I was going to do a wood burned design on the handle. The ash dagger above was my practice piece. I decided that I need more practice.

After I finished carving the elm dagger above, I thought I’d do another one in oak. I think this piece of oak is from a Post Oak tree in the back yard. This wasn’t a limb, but a piece that I split off a very large chunk of the trunk. Again, I did all the carving with my new Sloyd knife, and then set it aside. That was last summer. Back in June of this year I started carving again and two of the first things I finished were these two daggers. I scraped them smooth (as smooth as I could), then sanded them to 1200 grit. The finish is two coats of boiled linseed oil.

You probably noticed that the daggers don’t have well-defined edges, nor are they particularly pointed. There are two reasons for that, both of which have one overriding reason: these daggers are meant to be carried as props at Sherwood Forest Faire. Rather than a steel blade that must be peace tied (i.e. cannot be removed from its scabbard), I can carry this wooden dagger. The end is blunted to prevent a sharp point that could hurt somebody. And there’s no sharp edge for the same reason.

I could have created these daggers with sharp points and sharp edges. Oak and elm can easily form an edge that’s sharp enough to cut, and a lethally sharp point. Especially if you strengthen the edge and the point with the liberal application of super glue. But thin wooden edges, even those strengthened with super glue, are brittle and prone to break. I doubt they’d survive a single full day being used as props at Faire.

Yes, it’s a finger wand. Kids who’ve seen or read Harry Potter really like wands. I’ve been asked many times to carve one. I haven’t done it because kids usually want a wand that, well, it looks artificial. Manufactured. Perfectly straight with a perfect taper, etc. Where’s the magic in that? I started peeling the bark on this oak twig, wondering what I was going to carve from it. I’d been doing almost exclusively stabby things for a while, and wanted something different. One thing led to another and now I have a fingernail and first knuckle on a very long and crooked finger. The whole thing is about 20 inches long.

The handle is actually sanded bark. I carved away the outer layer of bark using my carving knife, then sanded it with 60 grit sandpaper to get a smooth surface. I sanded the handle up to 220 grit, and the rest to 400 grit.

I wonder if I can find somebody who wants a finger wand.

I think all of the pieces above are sanded to 400 grit, with the exception of the finger wand and the two large daggers. I sanded the dagger handles to 400 grit, but took the blades to 1200 grit. The difference really shows on the oak dagger. That blade shines.

Finish on all of them is two coats of boiled linseed oil. The linseed oil actually penetrates the wood and cures, making the surface quite a bit harder than natural wood, and also protecting the wood from moisture and bugs. I’ve found that two coats, maybe three, is enough. After that the wood can’t absorb any more. I like the linseed oil because it provides protection without adding a glossy look like a polyurethane finish would add. If I want to make it glossy, all I have to do is let the linseed oil cure for four or five days, and then spray it with poly.

This is just a small sample of what I’ve been carving. At least a dozen more are in the shop, in various stages of completion. They’re simple carvings, but I’m having fun with them and now and then find something exceptionally beautiful inside the wood I’m carving.

An artist’s inner dialogue

“Let’s carve something new.”
“Okay, I’ve got this cool idea for a new stabby thing.”
“Something new that isn’t a stabby thing.”
“But I like stabby things!”
“Yeah, I know. Let’s do something different.”
“But … stabby things!”
“No!”
“Well, fine. Let’s carve … a finger!”
“A finger? Haven’t we carved enough fingers?”
“We haven’t made a finger since … well, forever! Before Summer Camp, anyway.”
“Well, okay. We could carve the fork in that mesquite branch. Make it look like a pointing finger.”
“Cool. Or even put a magnet on it. A Fridge Finger!”
“Hahahahahaha.”

After carving several fingers

“Okay, done with fingers for a while. We said we’d carve that dog.”
“A dog? You always want to carve a dog! You think I have a problem with stabby things?”
“But we said we were going to carve it and give it to her.”
“We never told her that!”
“Don’t even go there. We’re carving that dog.”
“Well, okay. But I’m not gonna like it.”
“Tough.”

Some time later

“Man, this is boring. I thought the first rule of carving was to have fun.”
“Just shut up and keep working. We’ll be done with this in a couple of hours.”
“A couple of hours? We’ve already been working on it for a couple of hours.”
“Tough. Let’s just get this done.”
“No! I quit! I will not make another cut on this dang dog! Just … think of something else.”
“You’re right. This whole accountability thing is crazy. How about … a wand!”
“A wand? You mean like a Harry Potter wizard wand?”
“Yeah. We could prune a small branch, shave the bark, shape it …”
“Huh … yeah, okay. A wand sounds cool. Let’s do that.”

After stick acquisition

“Man, this is going to be so cool.”
“Shaving the bark is kind of fun, you know?”
“Sometimes. Other times it’s just tedious!”
“Is this one of the fun times, or the tedious times?”
“I’m having a great time. This wand will really be something.”
“I don’t know. Those curves might be a problem.”
“No way! That’s the best part. The wand will be crooked!”
“A crooked wand?”
“What? You wanted a straight wand? Just like all the others? Boring!”
“But who wants a crooked wand?”
“When did we start caring what other people think about our carvings? I want a crooked wand! I think it’ll look cool. Different.”
“You and your ‘different’. You always want ‘different’.”
“Just shut up and keep having fun.”
“Okay, a crooked wand. Whatever … Can we put a finger on the end?”

We’re trying to decide how to finish it.

Oak stump end table

We took down an oak tree in the summer of 2010. The tree was rotting at the base and might have fallen on the house, so we had it taken down. I paid the tree service to fell the tree and cut it up into firewood-length pieces. Except for the trunk, which I had cut into two pieces, one of which was this fork that was about 7 feet off the ground. The other piece was the log I described splitting by hand.

In August of 2014, I thought I’d try my hand at turning that piece of wood into the base for an end table. The descriptions below are taken from my Facebook posts at the time.


August 26, 2013

New project: an oak end table or perhaps the base for a coffee table. The wood is from a tree we had taken down four or five years ago. This piece was about seven feet off the ground–where the tree split into two primary branches. It’s been sitting out in the yard since it was cut. See individual pictures for more information.

Note that this might be a long-term project. The wood is likely still very wet inside.

The piece is about 26 inches tall, and approximately 18 inches wide and 30 inches long at the base. Lots of cracks, but it’s still a very solid piece of wood.

First step is to make a semi-flat top. My little 14″ electric chainsaw had trouble with that. The top isn’t quite as un-level as it looks in this picture, but getting it flat will definitely take some work. The final piece will be 19 or 20 inches tall.

A blurry picture, I know. I’ll get a better one. This is the result of about an hour with chisel and mallet to remove the sapwood, and maybe 15 minutes with an angle grinder to smooth some areas. I still have about 2 hours of mallet work to go on the other side. And flattening is going to be a chore; that oak is hard!

August 28, 2014

Rough flattening the top with mallet and chisel. Slow going, but faster than the angle grinder. Second image is the pile of debris I’ve created up to this point.

August 30, 2014

I spent some more time flattening the top, although you can see that it’s not quite flat yet. I also spent an hour or two shaping and smoothing with a 36-grit sanding disc on the angle grinder. The next job will be to drill a few big holes in the bottom. Hollowing will lighten it (more than 100 lbs right now), and also help it finish drying. Then I’ll flatten the bottom and level the top.

September 14, 2014

I did a little bit more flattening work last weekend, and completed it this weekend. I also completed rough sanding by hand. I bought some long auger bits, 1/2″, 3/4″, and 1″ in diameter and more than a foot long. Unfortunately, my little 3/8″ drill doesn’t have enough torque to drive those through oak end grain. I’ll have to get a 1/2″ drill that has more power.

October 2, 2014

I got the new drill and drilled a bunch of holes in the bottom. I wish I’d gotten a few shots of the pieces the drill was bringing up. The wood was surprisingly wet inside, even after four years lying out in the yard. I knew that it takes time for wood to dry (rule of thumb is one year per inch of radius), but seeing that demonstrated is quite an eye opener.

I dug out the center a bit with the angle grinder and the die grinder, then used a router to straighten the edges of the hole so I could cut a piece of wood, glue it into place, and then plane it flat. But I’ll leave it open for now so the wood can dry some more.

January 5, 2015

I spent more time on hand sanding, finished flattening the bottom and the top, then put a couple coats of wipe-on poly on the wood. The glass I ordered came in, and now part of the oak tree that was out in the back yard sits in our living room.


I had planned to sell this piece, but Debra said she wanted it in the house. I’m kind of happy she wanted it because it’s the first piece of its kind I ever made. I’m kind of attached to it. Nine years later, it still stands in front of the pull-out couch by the window. It’s a great companion piece to the oak coffee table I completed a few years later.

Oak burl bowl

Eight or ten years ago I was at a friend’s ranch to collect some wood from a fallen tree. While he was showing me around the property (about 300 acres), he asked me what those “big warts” were on his oak trees. I explained what burls are and how they form. He wanted to see what they looked like inside. We found a tree that was pretty clearly almost dead, and he went to work with his chainsaw. I ended up with two burls. I carved a bowl from the smaller one and gave it to Todd and his wife as a “Thank you.” I kept the larger one.

That piece of wood was about two feet long, 16 inches wide at its widest point, and five inches deep.

I drilled a bunch of holes in the top with the intention of letting the wood sit in the garage and dry for a while. Then I turned it over and removed the bark with the angle grinder. I also ground down a semi-flat spot for the base and finished it with the belt sander.

Then I got impatient. Why wait for the wood to dry? Why not rough carve it first, I thought, and then put it up in the rafters? A bowl with 1″ thick sides will dry a whole lot faster than a big ol’ oak burl.

So that’s what I did. It took me a couple hours of swinging that angle grinder to get the general shape of the bowl. I went over the whole thing with a 36 grit sanding disc, and then put it up in the rafters to dry for a while. That was June of 2016.

Four years later I was rearranging stuff up there in the rafters and I ran across the unfinished bowl. It was well dried by then. Happily, I had left the sides thick enough that it didn’t warp or twist horribly. I spent an hour or so touching it up with the big angle grinder and re-flattening the bottom (it warped a little bit), detailed it with the smaller (2″) Foredom angle grinder, and started hand sanding.

The hand sanding took several days. One thing I discovered is that sanding oak burl or any other highly figured wood can be incredibly frustrating. It’s often difficult to tell the difference between a tool mark and a natural feature of the wood. Even up close, a whorl can look an awful lot like a tool mark. Or vice-versa. This becomes increasingly frustrating as sanding continues at the higher grits and the surface becomes smoother. I can’t remember how many times I was sanding at 600 grit, for example, and had to step back down to 60 or 100 to sand out a tool mark and then feather around it to smooth the depression. Fortunately, by the time I got to 800 grit I’d found and fixed all the tool marks.

I eventually sanded the entire bowl to 2000 grit, and the wood shone like nothing I’d ever made before. It was beautiful.

The slightly darker areas there are just water. From 600 grit to 2000 grit, I sanded it wet. The dark spots are where the wood hadn’t yet shed the moisture. What astonished me about this was how smooth and shiny the wood was without any kind of finish on it.

I decided that I didn’t want to put any kind of polyurethane or varnish on the bowl, but I wanted something to preserve the wood and prevent it from drying out completely and crumbling. I’d had good luck with mineral oil in the past, so that’s what I used. It took two weeks and something more than a quart of mineral oil. I’d apply a coat of oil, let it soak in for a day, and apply another coat. I kept that up until the wood just wouldn’t absorb any more.

The bowl now sits on the living room coffee table. It is, I think, my personal favorite of all the things I’ve carved. I suspect I could be convinced, over time as I age, to part with most of my other carvings. But this bowl will likely be in my possession until the day I die.

Ask an AI: whittling or wood carving?

A friend of mine asked a generative AI (Nova: Powered by ChatGPT & GPT 3.5 Turbo) about the difference between whittling and wood carving. This is the response she got:

Wood carving and whittling have been practised for thousands of years, dating back to ancient civilizations such as the Egyptians and Greeks. The early humans used wood carving to make various objects like weapons, tools, utensils, and figurines.

It is believed that the practice of carving wood began as an extension of the use of stone tools, as people realized that wood was a more versatile material than stone. Over time, wood carving became a widely practiced art form, with artisans developing diverse styles and techniques.

Whittling, on the other hand, is a type of wood carving that involves using a knife to remove a small amount of wood from a larger piece. It is believed to have originated in Europe during the Middle Ages, where it was primarily used to make simple household objects like wooden spoons, bowls, and cups.

Whittling gained popularity in the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries, when it became a popular hobby for colonists and pioneers. Today, wood carving and whittling remain popular artistic expressions, and practitioners continue to develop new styles, techniques, and forms.

This reminds me of something a not-very-bright fourth grader would turn in after consulting the encyclopedia and visiting the local branch library. Bad paraphrasing of randomly selected factual (or maybe not) statements strung together into paragraphs that are tenuously cohesive and sometimes self-contradictory. With a little fluff thrown in to show that it really was the student’s work. The student would receive a “C” for such work if the teacher were especially kind and impressed with the diligent research, good spelling (although there’s that curious use of “practised” rather than “practiced”), and penmanship.

That said, the article does answer the question: whittling is a type of wood carving. The rest of the article is mostly gibberish, sprinkled as it is with unsupported factual statements, uninformed speculation, and known falsehoods. But whittling really is a type of wood carving.

Exactly what constitutes whittling is an open question. Merriam-Webster defines “whittle” as a transitive verb:

1a. to pare or cut off chips from the surface of (wood) with a knife
1b. to shape or form by so paring or cutting
2.  to reduce, remove, or destroy gradually as if by cutting off bits with a knife

By that definition, whittling is wood carving done with a knife. If you are carving wood with a knife, you are whittling. According to the dictionary. But that definition is not universally accepted. If you ask five wood carvers the difference, you’re going to get at least five answers. In my experience, most of those answers are of the “I know it when I see it” variety. Some say that it has to do with the level of planning involved. But everybody’s line is set differently. To some, anything more complex than a sharpened stick is “carving.” To others, anything carved from a stick found on the ground is “whittling.” Some put a time limit on it. Others base their judgement on the quality or purpose of the final product. My primitive carved knives and forks might be “whittling,” for example, but my friend’s beautifully carved and decorated (all using just a knife) replica dagger is a “carving.”

I like the dictionary definition. All the other definitions implicitly and sometimes not so implicitly make value judgements that amount to “whittling is just passing time, whereas carving is creating something of value.”

In any case, I’d be interested to know if anybody would find the AI-generated response to be anything other than gibberish. Elementary and secondary educators should be exposing students to this type of answer and pointing out the obvious flaws (unsupported and contradictory statements, wandering paragraphs, etc.) so that students can learn to spot them. It’ll be a while (decades, at least) before these generative AIs can write a freshman term paper that would get past an instructor who’s paying attention. It’s probably a good idea to be able to spot AI-generated content so you don’t make the mistake of depending on it.

Unloading

Upon return from the sawmill I was faced with the daunting task of unloading those big pieces of wood from the trailer. The smaller piece, of course, was no problem. At less that 200 pounds, getting it off the trailer and onto the garden cart was trivial. I was a little intimidated by the larger pieces, though, and decided to wait ’til the weekend when I could get a few friends to help. But then I saw the weather forecast and realized that I wouldn’t be able to get the truck and trailer into the back yard if I waited. Rain always turns the back yard into a very soggy mess.

I thought about it overnight and decided that if I could load the big log all by myself, then I should be able to unload the two smaller pieces by myself, as well. The next morning I backed the trailer up to the slab behind the garage and started working. My idea for the smaller piece (approximate weight 800 lbs.) was to lever it up and get some rollers under it. Roll it off the trailer and onto the slab, and then use the same technique to position it on the slab. I enlisted Debra’s assistance in moving the rollers.

Trailer positioned for unloading
I drove a wedge under the log to simplify getting a lever under it.

Unloading the smaller piece went almost exactly according to plan. I just had to get the bottom of the log high enough off the trailer deck to put a couple of rollers under it. The rollers are 1-1/4″ dowels that were formally jousting lances at Sherwood Forest Faire. When they break they’re thrown into a big pile. We go by periodically to scavenge a few to keep for various projects. Truth to tell, rollers wasn’t a use I had envisioned when I gathered them.

Rollers in place

With two rollers under it and the 2×4 supports removed, a medium-hard push at the back was all it took to start moving. Every foot or so, Debra would put another roller under the front and I’d remove one from the back. There was no worry about the trailer tipping because the larger log (1,200 lbs.) was forward of the wheels. We quickly got to the end of the trailer.

Preparing to come off the trailer

The idea here was to roll the piece off the trailer onto the first log, then forward onto the second and transition back down to the dowels. I didn’t plan this well. I made two errors. You can see in the first below picture that the first log rolled forward, as expected, but it’s still forward of the piece’s center. There’s no support at the back. When I rolled it forward a little bit more, off the trailer, two things happened. First, the log tilted back. It also pushed the trailer forward because I had forgotten to chock the wheels.

Coming off the trailer
Oops! The log fell back, off the rollers.

This was just a minor problem. It took a few minutes for me to lever the back end up and get another log under it. Then we rolled it forward onto the smaller log and back onto the dowels. After that it was a simple matter of pushing and moving rollers. This goes a lot faster with two people: one to remove rollers from the back and another to replace them at the front.

Back on the dowels
In place, sitting on bricks.

My original plan for the larger piece was to tip it sideways and roll it off the trailer onto the slab, then wrap a chain around it and pull it up on end with the truck. I have no idea why I thought that would be a good idea, but by the time we got the smaller piece in place I realized that I could use the rollers with the larger one, as well.

We used the same technique to get rollers under the big piece: a wedge to make a space for the lever, then put it on blocks, slipped the rollers under it, and removed the blocks. It rolled with surprisingly little effort.

Moving on the rollers

I could have planned this one a little better. I knew that the trailer would tilt when the log moved rear of the wheels, and the log would roll off the end. In fact I was counting on it because I didn’t want to deal with trying to step it down off the back of the trailer. But I should have placed some blocks at the back to provide a primitive ramp. In retrospect, I’m lucky that the thing didn’t have enough momentum to tip over.

This didn’t really pose a problem. The lever is a wonderful invention. I lifted the front with a lever, which allowed the back to roll almost completely off the trailer.

After that it was pretty easy to put a block under the back and a roller under the front to get it going again.

At this point it was just replacing rollers again as we moved forward. Something to note if we ever do this again: be careful with alignment of the rollers. We had a little trouble with it rolling in the wrong direction because we had placed the rollers at weird angles. They don’t have to be exactly parallel with each other, but should be within 10 or 15 degrees of perpendicular with the intended direction of travel.

These two will sit here on the slab until I’m ready to work on them. I’m not going to wait for them to dry, as that would take too long. Air drying time is approximately one year for every inch of radius. I’m not going to wait 15 or 20 years before carving. Not that I could: powder post beetles would have them falling apart long before that.

I’ll of course have to move these again when it’s time to work on them, but that doesn’t worry me. We got them off the trailer with little effort. Moving them on a flat slab shouldn’t pose a problem.

Again, don’t underestimate the power of simple machines. Debra and I unloaded these two pieces (approximately 800 lbs. and 1,200 lbs.) by ourselves using a wedge, a lever, and some rollers. And without expending a lot of physical effort. Had it not been hot and humid, I probably wouldn’t have broke a sweat. It really was that easy. Took a little brain power to figure out how to do things, but we didn’t have to exert ourselves.

Sawmill Day

Unloading the ash trunk

The nice thing about the sawmill is that they have tools to handle these big logs. Bill’s truck with the boom on it easily picked the Ash trunk off my trailer. We also used it to move the log into the sawpit, and to load the larger piece onto the trailer when finished.

The first task was getting a smooth cut on the bottom. We laid the log on its side and Bill got out his trusty little 72″ chainsaw. The thing’s a monster but it made quick work of sawing through the bottom of the log.

Making the first cut with the 72″ chainsaw

Then we picked it up and put it in the sawpit to make two cuts: one at the top to give a flat surface for the coffee table, and then one about 18″ from the top to separate the coffee table base from the rest of the log.

We ran into a couple of problems. I thought I’d gotten all of the screws out of the log, but I missed two of them. The first one destroyed the sawblade. While digging out the first one we discovered another. I’ll do a better job of checking for metal in the log next time.

The second problem was an oversight. When we placed the log for the second cut, we didn’t see that a bulge in the log would impede the blade. Well, not actually the blade but rather the mechanism that the blade rides on. We got about 3/4 through the log and couldn’t go any further. So we lifted the thing out of the pit and Bill finished the cut with that monster chainsaw.

In addition to the big log, I brought a smaller piece of Ash that I’d collected during the Great Icepocalypse of 2021. Ha! When I collected that piece, I thought it was large and heavy. It’s about 4 feet long, two feet wide, and a little over a foot thick. I just had Bill make two cuts to flatten the top and bottom. It’ll be a coffee table when I’m done with it.

And there’s my three pieces, nicely strapped down on the trailer, waiting for me to unload them. That should be an interesting job.