An online carving group with which I’m involved is doing a “friendship stick” project. Each of 10 carvers makes 10 carvings from a 2″ x 2″ x 3″ block of wood, and sends one carving to each of the other carvers. Every carving has a 3/8″ diameter hole drilled through it from top to bottom. When we receive the carvings, we display them stacked on a 3/8″ dowel.
The only rules are that the carving cannot be larger than 2″ x 2″ x 3″, and it has to have that hole in the middle. Beyond that, anything goes. I decided that I’d make little houses from a cedar fence post. The picture above is one of the houses I’ve carved for the project. This blog post is the first of several parts showing how I go from fence post to finished house.
Above is a 13 inch long piece of cedar fence post. We’re replacing the 30-year-old fence around our property, and I pulled this post from the ground a month or two ago. The wood isn’t really cedar, but rather Ashe Juniper, Juniperus ashei. The stuff grows like weeds all over Central Texas, and the wood is commonly used for fence posts. That it’s held the fence up for 30 years is good testament to its suitability for that purpose.
The first step in making a little house is turning this post fragment into blocks. And the first step of that process is making one side reasonably flat. After carefully checking for and removing any nails and fence staples, I took the piece over to the bandsaw. I set my fence about 1/2″ away from the blade, adjusted the height, and made the cut.
(Yes, the picture is a little blurry.)
You can see a few ripples in the cut. Normally I would have done with a resaw blade (a 1/2″ blade with four teeth per inch), but I had the 3/16″ blade on the saw and didn’t want to mess with changing it. The resaw blade would have made for a straighter cut, but this was good enough for my purposes.
With one flat side, I could then take the piece of wood over to the table saw to finish squaring it up. I used to do this on the bandsaw, but it’s easier to get square sides with the table saw.
The picture above shows the piece with three sides squared up. After cutting the second side, I set the fence for 2″ and cut the other two sides. Then I set it for 3″ to cut the blocks to the right length.
The resulting blocks aren’t quite square because my initial cut with the bandsaw wasn’t perfect. I could have made allowances for that and squared things up on the table saw, but it just wasn’t that important to me. As long as the blocks are approximately square and don’t exceed the size limitation, it’s good enough for making these houses.
The next step is drilling a 3/8″ hole through the center of the block. Again, perfect placement isn’t terribly important, although I don’t want to be too far off. I used to do this with a hand drill, but I recently got a drill press, which makes things a bit easier. I just mark the center by drawing lines from corner to corner, and then clamp it in my drill press.
Unfortunately, my drill press’s range is about two and a half inches. So in order to drill through a 3″ block of wood I had to clamp the block in my bench vise and use a hand drill to finish the job.
With the block cut and a hole in the middle, it’s time to start carving. Stay tuned.