Tiger stripes

[GuedeNimbo]

Hey,

I just started roughing out a tiger I'm going to be carving.
It is about 5.5in H 8.5 in L and about 2.5 in W
Basswood.

While there is still more material to be roughed out I thought I would get out the wood burner to see how this wood would take to burning the stripes.

I am using a detail master 7-A tip since it's wide and flat.
I don't think this will work, this tip just doesn't get hot at all, it hardly browns a .25 inch strip before it totally cools down.
I know it's not my machine because I had just signed a finished piece with a different time and it got red hot and burned nicely.

Any idea what other tip I should try?
Or any suggestions in general on how to make this come out well?

Thanks.

[Irish]

Wide, flat tips take the same amount of heat from the burning unit as a narrow writing tip but they spread that heat over a much larger area. So narrow tips have all that heat concentrated into a small point where flat shaders distribute it over the entire surface.

Most likely your burner is working properly, creating and delivering the right amount of heat to your tool tip. But since you are using a shader your tonal value will be much lighter than if you were using another tip.

I would grab a scrap piece of basswood and do a little experimenting with each of my tool tips to see which will deliver both the temperature setting that you need, and the depth of the burn into the carving that you want. You may find that by going to a smaller shading tip may be the only change you need to make.

Susan

[GuedeNimbo]

Thanks!
I thought I might be losing some heat to the larger surface but wasn't 100% sure since I'm still learning how to add pyrography to my carvings.