Need help with spoon carving

[jator]

This is a spoon carving I have been working on for a while now. I haven't much experience with wood this hard. I believe it is Walnut, however for a long time I thought it was Mahogany. I'm not sure how to hollow out the scoop. In the last spoon I carved, It was cherry, so it was a lot easier. I just used an exacto knife for that believe it or not. The scoop was also a lot shallower.

It is a very basic spoon, for use, not decoration. It is still in rough shape, I'm not even close to finished with it yet.

I just need some advice on what tools would work good for the scoop. As you can see, I tested it out with my knife, And that didn't really even dent it.

-Thanks
Jason

EDIT: Excuse the chess set, I have many things going on in my work area!

spoon1.jpg

spoon2.jpg

spoon3.jpg

spoon4.jpg

[Iowa Carver]

Kind of hard to tell but it looks like mahogany to me. Both are very open grained woods with mahogany being more so. From what I have seen here most carve spoons using scorps. I suppose gouges could be used as well but I think scorps are what most use.

Corey

[Claude]

A ball-shaped carbide burr for a Dremel works well also for the inside of the bowl.

Claude

[mark yundt]

I'm leaning towards Walnut,,the grain and color is what makes me believe that. As far as hollowing out the bowl area,,a Dremel will work as will regular gouges.Working with and across grain,,considering the size and depth that you can have in this piece either should work well.Even using relatively flat chisels ( not knowing what you have at hand) you can get a nice deep bowl carved in this.

[Robert Cahill]

When I do a bowl on a spoon I drill a hole in the center to the depth I want and then use a gouge to carve around it. There are probaly better ways but so far this has worked for me.

[Keoma]

I am also thinking walnut.
I start my spoons with a forstener bit then carve away the rest.
OR
i have a 3 inch sanding drum on my drill press...Look oooout! This makes a quick nice bowl in moments...and it's already sanded Good luck! I am glad to see someone make a servicable spoon!

[meipo]

If you think you are going to make more spoons in the future, investing in a hook knife may be a good idea. I have one and it works wonders. If you go on YouTube, you can find a video posted by Del Stubbs of Pinewood Forge. It's a short but great video on how to use the tool correctly. He is very good at using it to hollow out the bowl. It looked more like peeling a potato than carving wood. In the video, he also points out important principles that you can borrow even when you are using a spoon gouge. Very educational. Give it a try!

meipo

[cut up]

Jason, I'm with the camp that's thinking its walnut. I ran across a piece of walnut last week that had some extreme hard places in the bowl part of the spoon. I just made sure my knife was sharp, and attacked the problem from all angles with shallow cuts. Had I been where I could have gotten to my dremel, I would have used it with a round burr bit.
Don't give up, and good luck with it.

[mark yundt]

Well as usual my curiosity got the best of me. I only guessed at the size of your spoon as far as dimensions and depth go. Now I didn't make an entire spoon as only the bowl area was in question but here is what I came up with.

I don't own any type of scorp or hooked tools as I don't believe they are necessary so I only used one chisel that seems rather ordinary that most people might have. I used a Swiss #5,12mm to create a bowl over 1/2 inch deep ( that's probably deeper than you need) and you can see the overall dimensions from the scale.It's approx. 1 1/8 X 2 1/4 inches. Want to see a bigger or smaller one let me know.

Now if you need a deeper bowl that could easily be done using only this one tool. Shallower,,,well that happend along the way so I could have stopped at any time.
The wood is Walnut and this took me less than 5 minutes to do. It's not sanded at this point,,but as you can see clean up would be minimal,,it's basically done.

If you or anyone else want to see a step by step on how I did it,,again,,let me know.Or let me know the dimensions of your bowl ,,and the depth you need,,and the tools you have available,,and I'll carve it with those same chisels to whatever dimension you need. This carving a bowl issue in a spoon seems to come up often so here is a solution to everyones' question.Sound fair?

[Keoma]

Great MArk! PLease start a thread! I would love to see!