Make a Spoon Blank-Part 2

I start by drawing just a straight line along the spoon blank here. You can see my straight line compared to the actual line of the grain. It's a little bit off. It's going to make carving it just a little bit more challenging, but it's going to be manageable nonetheless. I'm placing my ruler just a little bit off to the side here and that's going to accommodate a little bit of the wainy edge here. It's going to ensure that I'm actually getting enough material. I have a little bit of play here so I'm not too worried about it. All I'm doing now is establishing a center line. Right about here I think looks good. A lot of people use a marker like I'm using right now. I oftentimes use just a ballpoint pen. I tend to press too hard with the markers and they get all smushed up, but this looks good. I draw just a line down the center. Now I'm going to draw in the bowl. This is like I said going to be a cooking spoon so it's going to have a flat surface even out a little bit further here and then it's going to come rounding in. I'm even making probably the bowl just a little bit oversized. I'm going to anticipate there's going to be some damage from my ax work and I'm going to need to correct that. It's fine to have it just a little bit oversized. A lot of people will use a compass or some sort of template to do this. I usually just freehand it and then struggle to make it look the same. I'm going to finish marking this out. I like this clear ruler because I can see right through it and kind of make a line that is the same on both sides here. It's certainly not perfect but that's all right. Also it makes sense here to have kind of this fan shape having it kind of wide at the top and narrow at the bottom here. That way as you're axing down you're descending through the grain once again and it's making it nice and predictable. We're at this point now. We're carving the handle and finishing up the bowl. Rather than just axing all the way down through here or chopping in sideways, both of these things can result in damaging the bowl. What I'm going to do instead is I'm going to cut in here. I'm going to make a relief cut basically using a handsaw. This will allow for kind of controlled cuts down the handle so that it doesn't split out and damage the actual bowl of the spoon. For that I have just a folding saw here. Sometimes it's handy if you have something you can actually wedge this against. Usually I have a spoon mule nearby or seat nearby. Oftentimes I'll actually put this down on the seat and put a foot on top of it but generally I can kind of brace it. You can see the relief cut there. Okay so I have the two cuts. They don't have to be perfectly parallel or straight or intersecting here. Again the grain of the wood is running this way so it's nice and strong so we should be able to split this out pretty easily. If I do have a nice straight grain piece of wood and again this piece is functional but it's maybe not ideal. If the grain is running nice and straight I can put my hatchet here, smack it with my mallet and that's going to drive a split right along the grain and this whole piece is going to just fall off to the side. Because this is not quite ideal I'm going to chop along it but normally what I would do place the hatchet here and smash down with my mallet. If I did it on this side it would split into the handle but maybe I will do it over on this side. The other alternative instead of actually smacking it with the mallet is to place your hatchet on here and then just use its momentum to drive down but you can see how that grain just wants to run right out to the side there. So I am going to just chop on down. I'm trying to keep this angle relatively sharp. I don't want to go too straight down because I lose control. I'm going to split that bowl right out. So rather than trying to create a flat plane by going kind of right down along it, I'm creating that flat plane by going in kind of steps up along and breaking the fibers free as I go. So I axe to that line, move up a step, axe to the line. Okay so now that I've got that mostly removed I can with a few controlled strokes kind of clean that up. So this is the key. You know I didn't want to smack down into this area, lose control of my axe and smack into this area. It would have split the whole bowl out. You can see too where I put that relief cut it's not right where I'm putting the shoulder of the spoon down here. I'm leaving you know a half inch maybe even more so that if I do err I'm not going to smash into the bowl and actually lose lose the bowl of the spoon. So now I'm going to do the opposite side. This is going to be reversed for you so you won't see quite as well what I'm doing but so I have a little bit of material here that I think I can waste away pretty rapidly just with a strike here. Okay so that cleared a lot of that material out. Normally I'm not axing in this direction but because the grain is so odd it makes sense to actually sneak right up on that line that way. Now I have a little bit of clear space to hold. Okay so pretty close to the lines there you know that's that's sufficient for what I'm doing. I'm going to clean up the sides. Okay so there I'm kind of dropping and using the momentum of the axe head to break free break free I should say and the grain gets particularly squirrely around the edges here particularly right in this corner. So I'm leaving a little bit of extra material there. Now I need to kind of reduce the shoulders a little bit both sides here. I do that by bracing the spoon getting that kind of shoulder set against my stump. I usually start by just kind of cutting a 45. You can see it there. I'll get a little bit tighter into the shoulder here but I like to have even a little bit of extra material there. It makes rounding that corner a little bit easier and sometimes there's a little bit of back and forth when you're carving that spot. So having a little bit of extra meat there I think is fine. You know most carvers will say you want to get as much material away with your axe as possible. That makes a lot of sense to save time and everything and also to practice your axe skills. This is an area I don't really want to screw with. I'm just going to leave it there. I'll just clean up this shoulder a little bit over here. Okay while I'm at it I might as well get that bark off of there. Okay now I'm going to do the opposite side same thing just going to flip it over. Okay axing down along that 45. Okay so you know maybe not perfectly symmetrical from side to side doesn't matter. I'm going to get to that a little bit later. I use a spoon meal to remove a lot of material at this point. For me I can tell already that this is a little bit thick in this dimension here. I'm not exactly sure though on which side I want to remove material. It's probably on the bottom. I think I will actually do that now but oftentimes I will leave that thick because I rely so heavily on my spoon mule. I can do it really quickly and with a lot of control over there but this is a little bit excessive. I like to have a wide handle but a thin handle at this point. The reverse is true in the neck. It's usually thin in this dimension and thick in this dimension. So I'll remove a bit from the back of the handle. Okay looks good easy. One thing I'm going to do just to kind of finish up I've already reduced the edge here. I know it's going to have a rounded bottom. I'll take a little bit off the the other side of the bowl. Okay see the angle there. I'm also you know I'm not going to bother like I said I still have a little bit of damaged area here. I intend to cut that off but I'm going to wait to kind of narrow down the bowl. This is excessive here. I'm going to wait until I'm over at the spoon mule or I'm actually using my knives. One last thing I'm probably going to do at this point is actually cut at least rough out this line here. Cutting across the end grain with the axe you know is going to kind of crush it damage it. You're going to have to carve even further back to prevent you know really severe damage. This is what the saw is for. It's for cutting across the grain so I'm going to leave a little bit of room. The saw tears up the grain. I want to have a nice finish in this area but I'm going to cut across leaving that little bit we've cut that angle on. I've left it you know extra room in here but you can see I've removed basically all that damaged area. Looks good. Everything's you know rough. I've intentionally left you know if I had a question of whether or not I was going to damage you know the actual area where the spoon is going to be I left it I left material in that area rather than making it too narrow. I could get a little tighter with this particularly I would try to do that if I straighter grain but I anticipate I'm going to kind of be chasing the grain back and forth with my knives later in the process so I'm leaving just a little bit of extra material. So basically we're looking at the finished blank here. Okay this is ready for the knives and you know kind of the key here is having that crank which is creating you know predictability when we actually move into using the using our knives. All right great.