The Shop (decoycarves roughout machine)

[Goody]

As promised here are some more pis of the roughout machine. I needed to find a way to cut hours out of the santa carvings to be able to keep up with the demand and to keep my prices where I wanted them. I tried some local and other duplicator services and the prices for blanks was not where I wanted it to be. One of my patterns was never returned and I have seen a santa blank out there suspiciously close to my original pattern. Being in the industrial trades all my working life I decided to build my own. I researched the decoy machines and the furniture machines as well as some commercial machines and the price was too high for me. Some of the machine s would only do part of what I wanted to do so I sat down one night and drew the plans for what I thought would work on a cad system. I showed it to a friend of mine that owns a machine shop and he said lets build it. It took about six months as we only worked on it after our regular work day. All total it ran me abot $2000. to build. It will carve from 12" to 60" in length and I can turn a 10 x 10 on it. Right know it is a manual machine, but I have left provisions to automate it in the future. It works on the basic KeyCutter principle. I follow the original carving with a stylus and the cutters do the rest. When I have one plane cut a have a drive motor that turns all the carvings to the next plane. When I get all around its pretty much done. I run 4 carvings at a time and if I back to back them I can run 8. It takes about 15 minutes to set the blocks up in the machine and about another 15 to run the set of blanks. I settled on Rotozips as the cutter motors and have only burned up one so far. I have about another $1500 in dust collection eguipment. I HATE saw dust!!!
Goody

[Hi_Ho_Sliver]

do you sell roughouts or just the finished carvings?

[Goody]

I was looking for a barbers chair to convert into a carving bench and was having a hard time finding one. I was talking to an antique dealer one day and he said that he may have something that I could use. He said bring a good truck and 5 guys with strong backs. Well we showed up in Chevy S10 with three fat guys. Back In the the back of his wharehouse sat an old dental chair from the state prison. It took every thing we had to get this thing in the back of my truck and every thing my truck had to get it back to my shop. We striped the actual chair off and saved the tilt mecanism. Ithen took some rock maple and some walnut and built a top bought some bench vises and assembled it. It goes up, down, swivels 360 degrees and the top will go from horizontal to vertical. A sore back and about $200 worth of materials and I ended up with a carving bench with a lot of history behind it.
I once had an Old Timer tell me to stop carving for about a month and learn to sharpen tools. I would sharpen a knife or a gouge and give it to him to try only to hear "Ya Call That Sharp, Go Back and Try Again" One day I handed him a gouge and he carved with it for a while smiled and said " Ya did Good Son, now get back to Carvin". Now that I am an Old Timer I look back at those lessons and sometimes think it was the best piece of advise I had ever got from any one. I built this sharpener as I still don't like to sharpen and it gets me back to carving quicker.
Goody

[Goody]

Originally Posted by Hi_Ho_Sliver

do you sell roughouts or just the finished carvings?

I built it as the means of my retirement. I use it to rough out my own carvings and for blanks for a class once in a while. I would probably rough out something for other people or have them come to the shop and run thier own. But I am not in the business of selling blanks or my patterns.
Goody

[Old_Gord]

Hi Goody, thanks again for the informative posts and pics.
Got a couple of questions about your sharpening station.
Is that a variable speed motor, can't decide wether that's a capaciter or a controller I see mounted on the motor? Red Face
How about a run down on the various wheel sizes and their surface material?
I started to make one similar to yours in the past but got bogged down and just let the project drop.
The sharpener station I use curently is my home made belt grinder type , works good but, I wouldn't mind taking another look at a unit like yours again though...if I ever can get around to finding the time and the energy, heck I still have most of the parts. Idea
As for the belt grinders if anyone is interested, they are quite easy to make and don't take up much space.
OG

[Goody]

OG,
The motor is an old dc motor that they threw away at work. I have a variable speed deive hooked up to it. The larger wheels are the Laminiated carboard wheels available thru most woodcarving suppliers. The serrated one uses compound and the other one you glue grit to and then load it up with wax. I usually run the grit wheel at a low speed about 200 rpm. The compuond wheel I run at about 1500 rpm. The other two wheels are the koch wheels. I bought them from Nora Hall at a carving class. I like the one for doing gouges but have never really mastered the one for knives. There is a small buffing wheel mounted between the Koch wheels that I use to clean the coumpound off the blades and put a final polish on them. Every once in a while I need to resharpen my knife blades on something flat like a stone or a belt sander. The wheels have a tendacy to round the angle a bit. The rest was just parts I had laying around.
Goody

[Old_Gord]

Thanks Goody, good info to have on the sharpener station, never know when I might need it.Smile
I didn't ask anymore about the duplicator because from your comments it appears all though the cost was not prohibitive having access to a metal shop or having friends to help out together with your own technical and mechanical knowledge made it possible.
Thanks for taking the time to explain and post the pictures.
Much appreciated.

OG.