The Best Wood For Wood Carving (With a Dremel / Rotary Tool)

Hey guys, in this video I made this relief carving out of oak. It's just a super simple project, really great for beginners, so feel free to follow along step by step. I'll kind of go through the process. Hey guys, quick carving today. I'm going to do this relief carving of a sort of fish skeleton on a board. I'm just going to use one piece. This is an inch thick by about a foot of white oak. I'm going to start off with Cutzall Extreme Burr going 20,000 rpm just to get this outline around the edges. The oak's actually a bit harder than I expected so I'm going to use the 561 to get the outlines. Okay, I got the edges gone. I'm actually going to stick with 561 and start to go down between where these bones are going to be to get the super rough depth. Okay, I got super roughed out with 561. It's hurting my hand now so I'm going to switch over to this less aggressive cutting bit to start to get around the bones and start to flatten it off a bit. Okay, making progress. I switched over to a flex shaft by the way. I'm using this spherical little cutter. I got a feeling it's going to look a lot better the deeper I go so I'm going to try to get it about as thick as this end throughout. All right, I'm switching over to a sanding drum with a pretty low grit just to flatten out these bits that I can reach with it. I'm going at 15,000 rpm for the sanding drum. All right, beveled the edges, flattened the ends with the sanding drum. It won't fit in these grooves so I'm going to move on to this little cutting bit here and hopefully that'll be good to flatten out the insides. That worked pretty well, kind of smooth in there. I'm going to use this cutting bit to try and finalize the shape for the bones. Okay, so I've stuck with this cutting bit and I've beveled the edges around the head, around the tail. Pretty high grit sanding drum. Let's see how much I can sand with just this 15,000 rpm. Okay, I think I've sanded it as much as I can with this. You want to spend as much time with this as you can because next we're going to the polishing wheels. There's four different grits I'm going to go down. Hopefully this doesn't take too long, pretty straightforward though. I'm going to use about 10,000 rpm and just try to finish this off. So just a side note, I've been using these polishing wheels. I'm not filming this whole thing because it's pretty boring but it's taking way too long. So I hand sanded a bit and then I'm actually going in with this wire brush and very carefully using that to buff out the bigger dents and tool marks. Then I'll go back to these and finish it up. Okay, all done, sanding, super smooth. I went up to 400 grit for this important piece that I didn't film. Once I finished sanding, I wet the whole piece, let it sit and dry so that the grain could raise before sanding it a final time. For context, I went through nine of these polishing wheels so it does take quite a bit of time but I'm happy with this. So now it's time to oil. I'm going to be using this butcher block conditioner. It's just mineral oil and mostly beeswax and then I'm going to put a pretty liberal amount onto there. Okay, that's pretty good, very covered. I'm gonna let it dry overnight and then buff off the extra wax. Here we are, final product, super shiny from the wax, super smooth. There are some tool marks between the bones which are pretty tough to get out just because the tools wouldn't fit in. But yeah, the oak's got this nice kind of golden color after the oil. I'm pretty happy with this. Alright, well thanks for watching guys. If you want to see more carving tutorials or how-tos, make sure to check out the channel if you're not already subscribed. I'll see you next time.