Vol. 65, No. 4 winter 2020 350


10. A #11 blade chisel cutting the sheave in a fi ddle block.


dry, by a harder fi nish—cyanoacrylate or a varnish— to lock everything down.


Second are the full carvings and bas relief panels. Apart from roughing out the basic shapes with saws and rasps or fi les, my primary carving tool is a no. 11 Xacto blade. I use this as both a cutting and a scraping tool and stress the latter method. Scraping, with the blade held perpendicular to the surface, or slightly reversed, is to me the best way of fi nal shaping a form and detail. It is slow but allows one to see the progress and make small adjustments along the way, and it produces a clean fi nish that may need no further refi ning. I should add that I almost always hold pieces being carved in my hand rather than in a vise. T is allows me to turn and bring portions of the


piece to the blade as needed. Of course, I try to leave extra wood on until the last to act as a handle.


One virtue of the no. 11 blade as a carving tool is that it is sharp, but not as sharp as a scalpel blade, which I fi nd tends to over-cut and risk mistakes. Also, the no. 11 is fairly rigid, which is essential for the scraping technique as it avoids chatter and a rippled surface.


T e no. 11 blade also makes an excellent chisel, particularly for forming the sheaves in blocks, discussed below. I grind the front as shown with a Dremel bit, and because the blade goes from an almost zero width at the tip to 0.020-inch at the back, I can create several useful chisel widths for small scale.


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