Friday, July 27, 2007

Leg Carving 1B


I decided I'm most likely going to replace the first leg I carved for a few reasons: 1. I didn't rough it out finely enough, so the edges are too wavy; 2. I made it too deep, so the bases of the raised elements stand out and are ugly; 3. overall I'm more used to the tools and think I can do a better job.

In just three hours today, I got as far as these pictures show. Notice the band along the edge is a totally consistent width. The carving isn't nearly as deep (though I really can't decide if I like the carving deep or shallow). Most of the speed came from roughing out the shapes with a high-speed cutting bit on my Dremel tool. If I can get to the point where I finish a leg every five days, I'll be quite happy.

I still can't quite get the organic look to the carving that the original had :(. It's getting better though.

Please take a look at the first leg a few posts down. I'd like to know other people's opinions!

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Straight from the Mold

Here's the rose out of the mold. I now need to cut off the excess, thin the back (it's about 1 cm thick and only needs to be 5 mm) and file some edges so they're smoother.

(sorry... I'm too lazy at the moment to get my real camera out)

Edit 27-July: I decided I'm going to remake the rose, since it was fast. This time I'll tint the wax so I can actually see what I'm carving.

Casting the Rose



In the soundboard there is a 3" hole with a metal "rose" (medallion-like thing) in it. To make this, I poured a disk of wax, carved a positive rose, cast plaster around it, baked the mold, melted the wax out of the plaster, then melted a mix of lead and tin and poured it into the mold. (Actually... I'm not 100% positive what the metal is. I used plumber's bar solder, and it had the "this product contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer..." warning on it, so it really could be any mix of lead, tin, silver, antimony and copper. I was hoping to find 50-50 lead-tin.)

I haven't broken the mold off yet, as the metal is still hardening. But here are pics of the casting!

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Carving



Here's 90 percent of one leg. This took probably 100 hours. I still need to lightly etch the back sides, fill in the grooves from the roughing out (I roughed out with a band saw and intended to rough out more finely with a spoke shave, but never did, so the groves remained), finish smoothing out tool marks, and finally gild with 24 karat gold.

As always, click for larger images!

Tools used: V tool, four gouges of various sizes, angled flat blade, Dremel polishing wheels.

(I swear the leg looks better in person... these pics aren't great!)