carving chisels

[John]

getting started with carving letters what
chisels&knife would be good to get started ?

[Just Carving]

Welcome John!

What size letters are you interested in carving? Incised or raised? If you're just starting out, incised--letters carved below the surface of the wood panel--would probably be the quickest and easiest way to get started. You can see an example of my first signs here--done in the earlier part of 2005.

http://www.woodcarvingillustrated.co...to/642/cat/500

If you going to be carving letters in children's blocks you could be using different tools tool than what you would be carving in a sign. Bottom line is there are different ways to carve incised letters and it's up to the carver how he wants to do it. Some like knives, others like chisels and gouges. I like knives but I can use a good sharp chisel to clean up the cuts. I wouldn't use a v-tool. Too much trouble both in carving and sharpening. I find if you keep it simple, it's more enjoyable and less complicated.

Finally, you should wear carving gloves, and learn to sharpen whatever tools you'll be using. The carving gloves will protect your hands from the sharp tools. It's easy to say keep your fingers away from the business end of the tools, but quite another to keep the tools from biting you! Sharpening is easy once you learn. You can read all you want to know about sharpening. Search on "sharpening" and you'll be reading for hours! But ask, and our sharpening gurus will help you out.

There's a couple of articles I can point you to check out. The simplest one I've seen so far is in the first issue of WCI--"Carving House Sign Numbers with Greg Krockta". The back issues aren't available, but you can call Customer Service, and for a fee, I think they'll make a copy of the article for you. BTW--the article shows you how to carve with a mill knife. You can easily make a knife out of a putty knives, too. Here's a link to a drawing I posted on the forum.

http://www.woodcarvingillustrated.co...o/812/cat/500/

Here's a pic of my putty knives.

http://www.woodcarvingillustrated.co...to/795/cat/500

Another simple article is in the Nov/Dec 2006 issue of Fine Woodworking--"The ABC's of Letter Carving". Here the carver uses a 3/4" bevel edge chisel, and a #7 -14 mm gouge--which you probably could do without to start with.

Here's a link to the magazine and article:

http://www.taunton.com/finewoodworki....aspx?id=27064

A good sharp wood chisel could be all you need. If you're good at sharpening tools, you can easily turn an old machinist file into a nice sharp chisel. Here's a photo of some I did.

http://www.woodcarvingillustrated.co...to/780/cat/500

For carving letters in blocks, WCI has an article in the Holiday 2005 issue called "Heirloom Alphabet Blocks". Frederick Wilbur uses a number of different carving tools, but I think starting out with a good, sharp chip carving knife would accomplish the same results with some time, patience and practice, practice, practice.

There are some books available on letter carving. Greg Krockta's seems to be the simplest and easiest to follow. His article on carving house number signs came out at the same tiem--some of the pics are in the book.

Sorry to get long-winded, but carving letters is how I started out, and I've tried a little bit of everything. Eventually I'll work my way back to letter carving. It seems to be what I've enjoyed the most so far.

P.S.

One more article which is on-line. Read this article and I think you'll get a good idea of what you'll want to use. Here's the link:

http://www.signweb.com/index.php/channel/8/id/452

[Mitchell]

Welcome to the site John.

There has been some discussion on letter carving in the past - you might want to try the "search" function to go back into the old posts.

I will link a few:

Inverse Lettering

Lettering - Sppedball Textbook