Due to the World Cup and our unusually hot weather I've been pretty slack over the past few weeks getting into the workshop and making much at all. With holidays coming up that'll probably continue until mid-August and then hopefully we'll start to kick back into gear on the Gothic Kitchen and get some other things moving too...
This week however I was able to muster some energy do a production run on a re-vamped version of the "Che's Board" Cheese Board. I changed to a slightly larger wedge shape which fits its use better. I also curved the text and moved it above the face - I'm much happier with this design and the production process went quite well albeit I'm still playing with feeds and speeds to minimise chipping out the small details, so I did have to re-cut some of the walnut pieces. You can see the board and inlay being cut and a finished board with one coat of oil in the first row of photos below...
Tom, who I share the workshop with had some 20mm holes in a stair case that he needed to plug and thought it would be interesting to make a feature of it rather than just use rounds of the same wood. So he asked me to carve a set of very small (40mm diameter) poppies with a 20mm cylinder on the back of them (to act as the plug). I used a tapered 1/16 inch (1.5mm) diameter tip radius tool to get excellent detail and these ended up coming out really well and have got me thinking about other very small projects I could carve... The second row of photos shows the back of these, a close up with a finger for size and the finished carving of all 10 poppies.
The last row of photos show a Corian memorial plaque I made for my sister's friend in the first two images and the carved Caravaggio maquette I made the other week with some oil on it - which brought the tight grain of the Sapele out nicely.
I have made a few additions to the website recently to add some projects that were finished a while ago to the Portfolio. I've also created a number of entries on this blog that detail photos from various jobs, if you scroll down from here you can browse them at your leisure.
