Bob Easton

Gratitude: being able to eat dessert first.

Yes, carving is my dessert, and I’m enjoying it. In fact, going purposefully slow drags out the work for more enjoyment. OK, that’s an easy excuse for being a slow carver.

There are now three segments of egg and dart moulding that will be set aside until other parts are done. The side pieces will end up being shortened by about 3 eggs, eggs that I used for “warm up” or practice as I carved.

Details…

Since the last entry, I abandoned those vee-blocks and got a 4 foot long bar clamp to hold the workpiece. Taking a tip from Paul Sellers, I place the bar clamp in the carving bench’s vice and have a lot more flexibility in adjusting the workpiece for the best carving angles.

I laid out two of the eggs a bit wider, only about 1/8 inch, to allow for the miter cuts for the corners.

After carving, I got out the decades old Jorgensen miter saw and tuned it up with some trepidation. It is actually a very smooth running tool, but the incident of a 93 degree miter left me doubting whether to use it. Long story short, after a lot of practice I have learned that the two edges of the workpiece that rest in the miter box must be as close to absolutely square as possible. A workpiece that is out of square by only a degree or two, will result in an unacceptable miter. These miter cuts had to be “right on” because I intentionally left little extra room for trimming to fit. I wanted to get the fit right without long interruptions in grain pattern. Care in the initial squaring of the workpiece really paid off! One joint is virtually perfect “off the saw,” and the other needed only a few swipes of correction to get a good fit.

Next, I think I’ll do the harder of the remaining moulding pieces. The long sticks will be easy in comparison to the mouldings on the edges of boards, which include edge grain moulding runs. Boards next.

Gratitude: I’m always grateful for having so many choices.

Whether it is carving wood, making boxes, creating websites, or building boats, I have so many choices that things sometimes get set aside.

My original article about this clock was 3 and 1/2 years ago. The clock has a mechanical movement, one that is fine enough to be categorized as a “regulator.” In the age of mechanical movements, regulators were used as reference sources for setting other clocks. Building a regulator clock is a “bucket list” project for me. I watched the clock catalogs as fine, robust mechanical movements faded away, being replaced by quartz crystals and cheap Chinese plastic. The very few fine brass mechanical movements still being produced are becoming ever more expensive. So, I grabbed one a few years ago before the price became stratospheric. Once I acquired the mechanical movement, I roughed out some cherry lumber and set the project aside.

Now, I’m getting back to it. The cherry lumber is well acclimated. I still have the original drawings, 8 large sheets. The movement and other parts are still in their original boxes waiting to go to work.

Most of it will be built according to plan, except… I’m a woodcarver and wanted more carving detail than the original plan. More than the original, but not as much as the baroque Vienna Regulators. I have redrawn the stack of top moldings, replacing the dentil molding with egg and dart.

• 

• 

This is where we come to eating dessert first. The moldings will be the most fun because making them is building new skills. So, moldings are the dessert I’m eating first, especially the egg and dart. Then, the other molding profiles, and lastly the case. About half of the moldings are directly on the edges of parts of the case, on boards. The rest are on sticks that wrap around the case. Let’s start with the sticks. To get to the desired dimensions, a couple of them are laminated. I glued them up long ago with hide glue and have oriented the profiles to avoid exposing join lines. (click photo to enlarge.)

Now for the most fun, the egg and dart. Prepping the wood for the egg and dart is relatively easy. It is basically a stick with one corner rounded over. After 4-squaring the stick, a #9 hollow does most of the work. I added extra shadow lines along the top and bottom of the egg and dart pattern by first using a marking gauge and then deepening those marking lines with a rebate  plane tilted about 45 degrees. A pair of dividers and a plastic pattern (Thank You Mary May) helps with laying out the carving pattern.

• 

• 

• 

After that, it’s a simple matter of carving. Well…. my carving bench doesn’t hold a 40 inch work piece. The answer is a pair of vee-blocks and some creative clamping. The last picture in this episode is of a practice piece. It has promise and I learned from it.

• 

•