This is the third in a series of posts about carving a little whimsical house from an old cedar fence post. See Carving a whimsical house, Part 1 for the introduction.

In Part 2, I finished carving the roof. The next thing to do is establish the roof line and gables, and carve the sides down in preparation for the doors and windows. To that end, the first order of business is to draw the roof line similar to this:

I use a Typhoon “bud” burr, shown on the right, to cut the roof line in the wood. If you
don’t have that particular burr, a flame shape or a taper would probably do just as well. This line doesn’t have to be terribly precise; just be careful not to carve away the roof.

The picture on the left shows the house after I’ve cut the roof line. You probably noticed that the bottom line looks like I cut it with the same burr. I might have. That bottom line, by the way, is where I’ll carve the rocks that the house sits on.

The next thing to do is carve the space between the roof and the base relatively flat so that the roof overhangs the house. I’ve used several different burrs for this and still haven’t decided which one I like the best. The 9/16″ Typhoon that I used for rough shaping the roof works okay, although it’s kind of hard to get the middle portion. However you do it, be careful not to go too deep. Also don’t worry about getting it perfectly flat. At this point, the most important part is to carve down the triangle that makes the gable on each end.

Above you can see that I’ve carved the gables, and then drawn lines to outline the trim board that serves to separate the wall from the gable. The next step is to relieve that board by carving down the wood above and below it.

Carving away the wood below is easy enough: just outline with the “bud” burr and then carve the rest of the wall. Carving the gable is a bit of a pain. I’m still experimenting with the best way to do that. If the area is large enough, I’ll use the bud or a flame shaped Typhoon burr. If it’s smaller, then the ruby carver seems to work pretty well. However I’ve done it, though, I’ve not been able to get a good sharp line. I keep trying.

Here’s what my house looks like after carving both gables and the walls on all four sides.

Again using the Typhoon bud burr, I roughed out the rocks that make up the base of the carving. I probably made a mistake using that large burr for this, because the resulting rocks have too much space between them. I had to do a lot of smoothing and shaping work to get it to look even halfway decent in the end. Live and learn, I guess. I would suggest taking your time with a ruby carver or perhaps a long taper Typhoon if you have one. In any case, something smaller and less aggressive than what I used.

After I finished roughing out the rocks, I spent a little time with the flap sander to smooth the walls a bit so that I had a reasonably flat surface on which to carve the doors and windows. If you don’t have a flap sander, a sanding drum will work as will any other burr that leaves a relatively smooth surface. The surface doesn’t have to be completely free from scratches, as you’ll be cleaning it up later. But you probably want something pretty flat for the door and window frames.

Next time: doors and windows.

This is the second in a series of posts about carving a little whimsical house from an old cedar fence post. See Carving a whimsical house, Part 1 for the introduction.

In the first part, I cut a piece of fence post into four blocks, each 2″ x 2″ x 3″ high, and drilled a 3/8″ hole in the center. The result is shown on the left.

I should note here that all of the carving on this piece is done with the Foredom power carver using various bits and burrs. It’s important when using these tools to wear eye protection, have some type of dust collection apparatus, and wear a respirator or some other way to protect your lungs. Power carving produces a lot of dust, and you do not want that stuff in your lungs. You might also want to wear ear plugs if your dust collection system is especially noisy.

I also want to point out that this series of posts shows how I carved one house. This isn’t the only way to do it. In fact my method is constantly changing as I become more familiar with using the tools. This is only the fifth one of these houses I’ve made, so I’m still just a beginner.

With that out of the way, let’s get started.

Oh, by the way, you can click on any of these pictures to get a larger view. Although the “larger” view might not be a whole lot larger. I seem to be having trouble currently uploading larger pictures.

I find it best to start with the roof. Establishing the roof line sets the stage for the rest of the house. Also, if you carve the rest of the house and leave the roof for last, it’s very possible that you’ll run out of wood to complete the roof you want. The style of roof I’m creating here can eat up quite a bit of wood. I had to throw a Cottonwood bark house away once because I didn’t leave enough space for the roof. I was carving that one with knives and gouges.

In the picture above, you can see that I’ve drawn a rough profile for the roof and chimney. Using a 1/2″ coarse Typhoon burr, I first outline the chimney.

The picture at the right shows how I begin to rough out the roof. The Typhoon burr is pretty aggressive, so I’m careful around the chimney, and I leave a lot of extra wood. I’ll come back later with a less aggressive burr and shape it.

Although the burr is aggressive, the cedar is a medium-hard wood and it takes some time to remove all that wood. Be patient and check your outline from time to time so that you don’t take off too much.

It took me about 20 minutes to finish roughing out the roof to this point. That’s okay. I’m not in a race to see how quickly I can carve one of these little houses. I’d rather take a little extra time than get in a hurry and either destroy the carving or, worse, lose control of the tool and injure myself. Running that Typhoon burr over a thumb hurts. Trust me.

Remember, too, that making a mistake isn’t fatal. These houses are supposed to be whimsical. They’re certainly not architecturally correct. If you inadvertently carve through the chimney, for example, don’t worry too much about it. You can always carve it to look like the chimney is falling apart. Carvers don’t make mistakes; we make adjustments.

Next, I shape the chimney using a smaller and less aggressive Typhoon burr. I also put a few dips and humps in the roof surface in order to make it a little less uniformly flat, although that turns out not to be necessary for the roof style I chose; the process of adding the roof tiles makes for an irregular surface.

The last thing I did before beginning to carve the roof tiles is go over the roof with a 120 grit flap sander to remove most of the scratches left by the Typhoon burrs. Again, that’s not strictly necessary because the next step has me going over the roof with a finer ruby carver, but it’s part of the process for me–something I do regardless of the roof style I choose.

I do all of the tiling with the flame-shaped ruby carver shown on the right. I’ve tried other bits, particularly for carving the lines between roof tiles, but they end up making deep narrow lines that I then have to spend time removing. I like the flame shape, but the ruby carver is a bit less aggressive than I’d like. It also tends to clog up on cedar, and I have to clean it now and then with a brass brush. Don’t use a steel brush.

I chose to do a tile roof on this house. This is something I’ve tried once before with a Cottonwood bark house, and also on an earlier Cedar house. Those two didn’t turn out so well. I experimented with one side of this roof to refine my technique. The photos and description I show here are from the second side. I think I almost have this roof style figured out.

Here you can see that I’ve outlined the first tile. The next step is to remove wood to the right and below so that the tile stands out from the roof. Then, draw lines for the next two tiles.

When I started, I found it helpful to draw lines for the tiles before outlining each one. I got the hang of it after a while and began just carving the next tile without first drawing a line. Do what you feel comfortable with.

Next, outline those two tiles, carve away wood to the right and below, and outline the next tile. Note that you don’t have to carve the whole rest of the roof down after outlining each tile. Instead, just carve down enough for the next tile. What you’re going for is a gentle slope from the top left to the center bottom.

Work your way down and to the right, outlining and carving away wood for each tile until you get approximately to the center of the roof. When you’ve completed the left side, it should look something like the large photo on the right.

The general flow of the roof should be towards the right and down. That is, tiles on the left should appear “above” tiles on the right. It’s okay if some tiles appear to stick up above where they “should” be; that’s part of the house’s whimsical nature. But do try to keep the general flow to the right and down.

Next, start at the top right corner and do the same thing, but work down and to the left. Again, take your time. When you get close to the center, where the tiles from the left meet the tiles to the right, you’ll probably have to make some adjustments. If there’s a trick to making that come out just right, I don’t yet know what it is. I will say, however, that this is the best I’ve done so far.

And that’s one side of the roof tiles, almost completed. You can see that I made a few mistakes, the biggest one being there on the far right where I have one tile sitting completely on top of another. It looks a bit strange, and is not what I had planned. Don’t know how I managed that.

If you have a smaller ruby or diamond carver, you might want to sharpen the edges between tiles. I suspect that with a bit more practice I’ll be able to get sharp edges between all the tiles. I did a passable job here, but some of the lines aren’t as clean as I’d like them.

That’s it for the roof tiles. Next time I’ll rough out the roof line and carve the gables.

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.

Part 2, in which we carve the roof.

When I was working on my 100 Birds Project, I saved the larger scraps from the bandsaw cutoffs. I nearly always had two cutouts that were in the shape of the bird’s side profile. The cutoffs are flat on one side and have the contour of the bird on the other side. Below are pictures of two cutoffs from a Juniper bird I did a while back, and then a bird cutout and the left side cutoff from a piece of Mesquite.

I had originally planned to take a belt sander to the curved side of the cutoffs to create a bunch of flat bird profiles that I could make into refrigerator magnets or hang from a mobile. I was working on those when my friend Mike took one and made what I call a “squiggle bird.”

He sanded the flat side to follow the contour of the curved side. The result is pretty cool. We made a couple dozen of those, the idea being that I could hang them from a mobile. But there are problems. Finding the balance point is somewhat difficult. If I attach a line just a few millimeters forward or back of the balance point, the bird takes a severe nose-up or nose-down attitude. I tried to solve that problem by attaching the line to the tail and to the head, but that just looked ugly. In addition, if I attach the line to the back, then the bird ends up tilted on the roll axis–as if it’s making a turn. I’ve yet to find a good way to attach the squiggle birds to a mobile.

Last week I got the idea to mount a couple of birds on a standing base.

The bird on top is mesquite, and the one on the bottom is pecan. They’re attached to a mesquite log with little twigs, also carved out of mesquite.

That looks okay, and I made another just like it. But it seems a waste to use such a large piece of mesquite for the base, and it’d look neater and more compact if I swapped the birds’ positions. So I made another one with the new design.

Both of the birds are mesquite, and the base is a piece of mesquite from which I removed the bark and then sanded away most of the sap wood. The birds and the plaque got two coats of Watco Natural Danish Oil, and then the birds got a couple coats of Deft Gloss spray polyurethane. The birds are attached to the plaque with mesquite twigs that are approximately 3/8″ in diameter. The plaque is flat on the back, and about 1/2 inch thick at its thickest. It’s designed to hang on a wall rather than stand on a desk or shelf.

I really like how this one turned out. I suspect I’ll be making more like it. My biggest problem might be picking out wood combinations that look good together.

Debra and I went to the Sherwood Forest Faire last weekend, and had a great time. I felt a little out of place, though, wandering around in costume and drinking mead from a plastic cup. Many people had wooden mugs, and there were mugs available for purchase at several shops. Although they were attractive, I didn’t get one. First of all, the least expensive mug I saw for sale was $45. That’s a lot for a hollowed-out piece of wood.

More importantly, the mugs they had for sale were too pretty. Most were perfectly turned on a lathe, had perfectly shaped handles, and were coated with a thick epoxy resin that turned the wooden mug into what was essentially a modern plastic mug that just looks like wood.

Sunday morning I went out to the wood pile and grabbed a hunk of mesquite that seemed about the right size. My plan was to carve a mug that would hold 16 ounces.

After cutting it to size and removing the bark with an angle grinder, I drilled a hole in the center to get started, and then used a die grinder and the Foredom power carver to hollow it. This turned out to be more difficult than I had expected due to the depth. It’s distressingly easy to lose control of the tool when you can’t see where it’s cutting. An aggressive bit spinning at 15,000 RPM will throw a piece of wood across the room when it binds up. I ended up putting a few cracks in the cup that way.

It took a long time to thin the walls from there (using a hook knife), and sand it smooth. I also had to fill the cracks that I made while hollowing. I didn’t take any pictures until after I’d completed the cup and put the oil and wax finish on it.

The finished mug is 4-1/4 inches tall and between 3-1/4 and 3-1/2 inches wide. The width varies because the mesquite log that it came from wasn’t perfectly round.

It holds just a little more than 12 ounces. I just couldn’t get it any deeper with the tools that I currently have. I’ll have to come up with a better way if I’m going to make another one of these. I’ve considered hollowing from both ends and then carving a 1/4 inch thick piece to fit inside at the bottom. The only difficulty would be getting that bottom piece carved correctly. I’m also considering a few other options.

The residue you see floating in the cup there is a little of the oil and wax. Not to worry: the oil and wax are non-toxic. After the oil soaks into the wood, it won’t leech out into my beer. I was impatient to try the mug. It really is a pleasure to drink from.

I decided not to add a handle. Maybe next time. I’ll probably come up with some sort of leather sling that fits around the mug and lets me attach it to my belt so that I can carry it around the next time we go to one of those Renaissance festivals.

This is a piece of Willow, from a tree down by the creek at the back entrance of our subdivision. I picked it up some time last year.

It’s very dry and has lots of bug holes. Turned out it still had some bugs in it, too, which I took care of later after I’d run across a live one while I was carving.

Wanting to carve a figure into the wood in much the same way as I did the Bristlecone bird, I chose to carve a gecko.

I first cleared the remaining bark and sapwood from the area I wanted to carve, then drew a rough outline of the gecko on it and used a thin cutter to make it really stand out.

I should note here that I did almost all the carving on this piece with my Foredom power carver. I could have used knives and gouges–the wood was soft enough–but I’m trying to get more proficient with the power carver. Plus, that dang thing can remove wood fast.

With the outline etched into the wood, the first task is to rough out the shape.

Roughing that out was a lot of work, and as it turned out I removed a lot more than I had to. Live and learn, I guess.

Granted, that rough shape is really rough. Time to start refining.

You can see that I’ve refined the shape and taken it down quite a bit. In the prior picture the rough shape was just a blob. Here it’s pretty obvious that I’m going for a lizard. But it needs more refining.

I removed an inch or to from the front of the branch, putting the lizard’s head over the edge. The primary reason I did this was to make it easier to shape the under side of the head and neck.

I goofed a bit. I somehow managed to thin the lizard too much. Instead of having a nicely rounded belly, it’s almost straight. But it still resembles the gecko.

I also cut off the other end of the log. I had originally planned to do something over there, but that chunk was making it difficult to work on the right rear leg and the right side of the tail. In addition, removing that end put the lizard in the center of the picture.

By this point I’d been working on the thing for four or five hours. I was tired. Also, I’d found a wood borer with the Foredom (bug guts on the carving), so I figured I’d better cook the piece in the oven for a few hours. Otherwise the bugs would end up eating my finished carving.

I had intended to let it sit until the next day, but after it was done cooking I was refreshed. So I went back out to the garage for another hour to finish up the shaping. Above is the final shape, with only a little more work left on the feet, and a lot of sanding.

The next morning I finished the sanding. I’m still not real happy with the feet. The toes are too hard-edged. I haven’t yet figured out how to round them well. I had the same problem with the standalone geckos I’ve carved.

I had originally planned to smooth and sand the base, but when I got started it was looking kind of boring. So I opted instead to try making something that resembles tree bark.

I’ll be the first to admit that it doesn’t look much like bark, but the random squiggles are more interesting than a flat smooth surface. I think it serves to emphasize the lizard.

With that done, I finished with two coats of Deft Satin polyurethane spray.

I’m a little disappointed that the wood cracked on the right front leg, just above the foot. That happened while it was cooling, after I’d cooked it in the oven (90 minutes at 200 degrees) to kill any bugs. I considered mixing some wood dust and glue to fill the crack, but figured I’d leave it alone.

It’s been said that carvers don’t make mistakes. We make adjustments. I made lots of adjustments on this piece. But it was a great learning experience and it turned out okay. Will be fun to keep around and look at in a few years.

It’s going to be a week or two before I can attack another project like this. My garage isn’t heated, so when the temperature drops much below 60 degrees it’s uncomfortably cold to be working in there. The combination of shivering and frozen fingers isn’t conducive to wood carving, and the forecast is for cold weather (some freezing, even!) for the next two weeks. If I do any carving it’ll probably be small basswood figures with knives: something I can do while sitting behind my desk.

A carving friend who vacations in Colorado brought me a piece of Bristlecone pine. Fred is quite an accomplished carver who I think started about the time I did. He’s concentrated on carving faces, mostly out of Aspen. He also does stylized carvings from many different types of wood. The sycamore gecko I carved is from one of his patterns, and his cedar armadillo was the inspiration for my mesquite armadillo, although I didn’t use his pattern.

The Bristlecone pine stayed on the floor of my truck for a couple of months while I tried to figure out what to do with it. I thought about carving one of my birds to add to the collection, but for some reason couldn’t bring myself to chop up that piece of wood just for a bird. Last week I finally figured it out: I’d carve a bird in the branch. It’s a kind of carving I hadn’t attempted before.

I think what convinced me to try it was the fragment of a small limb that was sticking out from what was otherwise a fairly straight and boring branch. I decided to use that limb as part of the bird’s tail. I wish I’d taken pictures from start to finish. Unfortunately, I just got two after spending some time roughing it out.

As I said, this was new territory for me. I’d always started my bird carvings with a bandsaw cutout. Not here. I had to carve around the bird figure with my Foredom power carver. Carving a figure that remains part of the larger piece of wood is quite different. It can be difficult at times because I can’t just turn the thing over and carve from a different direction. The uncut part of the branch often got in the way. Detailing the beak was particularly difficult because I couldn’t easily get the Foredom in there, even with the detailing handpiece.

Roughing out took me an hour or two on Saturday. Sunday I spent two or three more hours roughing out and then detailing the bird. The result is a little thin and not quite symmetrical, but I thought it turned out pretty nice.

The bird figure is very smooth and sanded with 220 grit. The rest of the carved wood is sanded with 120 grit, and not perfectly smooth. I left some dips. I thought about trying to texture it like a nest, but didn’t have a good idea of what that should look like. Rather than do something that detracted from the carving, I just sanded and called it good enough.

The finish is two coats of Watco Natural Danish Oil, which I applied to the entire piece–including the uncarved wood. I haven’t yet decided if i should add a couple coats of a spray polyurethane to give it a little shine. We’ll see.

I made plenty of mistakes on this piece, especially in the bird shape. But I understand how and why I made them, and figure I can do better next time. I especially liked doing this with the bird shape because it’s a familiar subject, just rendered a little differently. I find trying to do something familiar in a new way to be an effective learning experience.

All things considered, it was a fun project and a good learning experience. And I like the way it turned out.

I picked up a piece of Bethlehem Olive last year before Christmas, with the intention of carving a bird or two from it. I’d already finished the 100 Birds Project, so there was no big rush. Yesterday (yes, about 10 months later) I was making a few birds and thought I’d see what I could do with the olive.

The piece of wood wasn’t quite 2″ thick, so I had to use a smaller bird pattern: 1-1/2 inches wide and 3-3/8 inches long. The piece of wood, though, was slightly less than 6 inches long. How to get two birds out of that piece of wood?

It was easy enough to lay out the two birds so that they fit on the piece of wood:

The problem is making the top cutout. It’s real important to have a flat surface contacting the bandsaw table. Here’s what I need to cut out.

Were I to try cutting this out, I would have to be very careful when working on the tail. The saw would be pushing down on that tail end, and if I didn’t hold it tight then I’d lose control of the piece. Very bad things can happen then. And whereas it’s fun to say, “don’t do that,” I already know that I’m no match for a 3/4 HP electric motor.

I could turn the block over and glue the top pattern to the curved part, but that distorts it. The tail would be shorter because it would be going down at an angle. I made that mistake early in my time working with a bandsaw.

My solution was to trace the curve on another piece of wood, cut it out on the bandsaw, and use it as the base, like this.

I taped those together so I had a good solid flat base, and then cut the top outline. The result, after removing the base and turning the thing over:

I then turned the piece on its side and cut out the other view.

Doing this made me realize that I don’t have to cut out the entire top view, which saves me having to tape the sides back on before cutting out the side view. I had a few other birds to cut out (this time from full-sized blocks), so I gave it a try.

I cut the top view on one side from beak to tail, but don’t cut out the back of the tail. Then I back the blade out and cut the other side, again stopping at the end of the tail. Here’s an example with both sides cut out.

Note that I’ve lifted the guides so that you can see the work more clearly. When sawing, the guides are adjusted so that they are 1/8 inch to 1/4 inch above the work piece as shown in the next picture.

On each side, I start at the beak and cut down to the end of the tail, but I don’t cut across the back of the tail.

It’s important, when you get to the end of the tail, to turn off the saw. Hold the work piece securely until the saw stops. Do not try to back the blade out of the cut with the saw running. I can tell you from experience that backing out of a cut while the saw is running is a dangerous thing to do. It’s one thing to back out of a short, straight cut. It’s something else entirely to try backing out of a long, curved cut. The blade has a tendency to bind, which will pull it forward out from between the upper and lower guides. Then it catches the work piece and tears it out of my hand. Again, I’m no match for that electric motor.

I was lucky the one time it happened to me; the blade was kinked beyond repair. It could have destroyed the work piece, or the blade could have cut me very badly. It’s never a good idea to lose control of the work piece. Even a very small electric motor can do serious damage.

That’s one reason for putting the guides close to the work. The less blade exposed, the less damage it can do.

If you want to back out of a cut, turn off the saw. Then hold a small scrap of wood or a pencil against the front of the blade to keep it in place, and gently work the piece back along the cut.

After cutting both sides this way, I turned the piece on its side and cut out the other profile. I had to apply a little pressure when cutting out the beak, because the top side wanted to chatter a bit. But this was easier and faster than cutting the top profiles completely and then taping the sides back on like I used to. In the future I might try putting a thin shim up at the front and wrapping one piece of tape around the workpiece to hold the shim in place.

Now I just have to carve those birds . . .

A while back I posted a custom carved knife handle. That one went to the guy who made the knife and sent it to me. I finally sat down and carved the other, which I get to keep.

Nothing fancy here. Just a simple hillbilly. Now to put an edge on it and start carving.

On another note, I’m posting this from my Samsung tablet using the WordPress for Android app. Not too bad, although I don’t think I’d want to write a lengthy post with this on-screen keyboard.