Tutorial An easy introduction to making wood ornaments by Stephan Kertész (Steef66)

[Steef66]

@Masters Mate @Kilo66 @MunroIII @frankithanks for your visit and kind words of appreciation. They're more then welcome.
Thanks all for you visit and likes.

Hi, Stephan. Thanks for amazing and very inspiring tutorial. Special thanks for links to purchasing the tools. I immediately got cravings to buy all that stuff straightaway. I have some questions, inquiries on technics you are using. First I am still not quite sure of the method to transferring a picture to the wood. Could you please elaborate? Secondly I noticed you hold the wood workpieces in your hands while milling them. Would not it be more practical to have them somehow connected to some surface for stability and to avoid possible breakages?

Thanks YT, your welcome to.
There are several methods for transferring a drawing to wood. I like the method with carbon paper the most and therefore use that one, call me old-fashioned. Of course, there are other methods and you are of course free to use them. Especially if you want to be very precise. In fact, I usually only use it for the outer lines. But like I said, find a way you like.
As for securing your wood or workpiece, you may of course use a bench clamp, hand clamp, or something along those lines as secured to a larger piece of wood. Then it all depends on your workpiece, how big it is and what the intention is. You will have to find this out by experience, but I can tell you that most of it is just done freehand. Partly due to the fact that the method I discussed, with the nail studio equipment, you get very little force on the wood. But also the handyness you then have, you can approach your workpiece from all angles in an easier way and there is more feeling in what you do. With a fixed workpiece, you don't have that freedom. I do make use of my worktable, which I sometimes put the workpiece against and can then hold it in place better with my hand and have more control. Sometimes a small wooden box underneath to keep it more at eye level. These are not written rules, but more guidelines on how to proceed.
Hopefully this answers your questions.

 

[Steef66]

A little tutorial to get you started. Which router for which job you should use is quite a thing that you sometimes ask yourself. With the following simple example I want to make this clear. Of course you can do this job with a custom made scraper, examples enough here on the forum. But I want to show you that this can also be done with a router, out of hand. I made this example a bit fast. More to show how to do it. The quality can always be better.

This is what I want to make and I am using a piece of walnut for that. First I draw the 2 lines on the piece of wood where the deepest point will be and I use 2 types of cutters for that and a piece of sandpaper. A round needle file could also be used if you have this. Especially useful if you want to make a longer piece. The cutters I use are the drop shape and the flat T shape.



Because the handpiece of the nail studio end cutter is quite handy and you can hold it in your hand at the front end, it's possible to use the flat T-shaped cutter to pass it over the wood like you do with a mark-off pencil. This will give you a very small slot, notch to have your drop router guided into.



Then you can then use the drop shaped cutter to enlarge the notch and make it round. Again, this is using your fingers coming up the side of the wood to move your handpiece across the wood. See example. Start gently with the tip of the cutter first and then let it go flatter and flatter. You can let the router go 2 ways, but my finding is that a retreating motion (red arrow) gives more control. Do not use pressure but sweep across the wood as it were. To avoid catching.



Actually, this is a great exercise to get a good feel for your tool. You will have to practice this a few times to feel how much pressure you can apply and how fast the cutter should be spinning. Also how to handle the handpiece. By the way, I use 1.4 mm. cutters in the first stage and finish with a 1.8 mm. drop shape cutter in the last stage. I have the speed of the machine at about 70%. A little bit faster for the 1.8 mm. Then when you have reached the rounding at the deepest point of the wood, I finish the rest with sanding linen that you can hold nicely double, creating a round section. I used grid 400.



The final result (I'm not proud of it, but wanted to show a quick example).



Of course, to get a nice result, you can also grind a scraper to size and use that. But to make a scraper for a small part? This goes too and it's actually quite fun to do. You also learn a little handling of your cutters and handpiece. Something you have to if you are going to make ornaments. Practice and practice and that is best done with simple designs and parts. An earlier part I made this way is the wing transom of my Hohenzoller model.



Good luck. Maybe more examples will follow. And secretly I hope there will be some tips and tricks from other artists.

 

[Steef66]

On SOS there are a few topics I like to link to. They helped me in the past to understand the way how to carve.

https://shipsofscale.com/sosforums/threads/rotary-carving-and-its-tools.1225/

https://shipsofscale.com/sosforums/threads/english-lion-figureheads.3479/

https://shipsofscale.com/sosforums/threads/carving-videos.3299/

today I discovered this one, interesting reading material.

https://shipsofscale.com/sosforums/threads/carving-article-by-harold-hahn.7593/

Off course there are more parts in this forum where you can find how others members show their carvings and sometimes explain how they did it. You have to search for it in the building logs here. If you you know some just put the link in this topic of the post where it is start.

Just select the button in the post where the interesting part of the carving starts and copy/paste the link here in the topic.
In that way we get an topic where it is easy to find more info about this subject. It is also for me interesting to see how it is done by other members and to learn from them. Thanks.