This is the basic process I hope to follow. My starting piece is much smaller than the one shown and my tool set is different... I did buy a draw knife this weekend though. And I want to make a shaving horse which is a traditional tool for this kind of process.
I have some short pieces of redwood that should get the job done.
Making a shaving pony
A shaving horse is a combination seat and clamp. I don't really have room to store such a thing so I'm going to make a variation called a shaving pony that attaches to a workbench or sawhorse. I have nice sturdy saw horses so...
I'm using 1/4-20 rod for the pedal-clamp pivot. Rather than drilling a hole through the base, I'm screwing a block under the base board which will hang off the end of the saw horse and I'm cutting a small dado for the rod to pass through.
Here's the base with the block and pivot hole. The top piece is the work pressure surface. The clamp will press the workpiece down onto this surface.
On youtube, I saw different ways of making the pony adjustable. Hinging the pressure plate looked like the easiest to me so that's what I'm doing.
The brace on the bottom of my saw horse interferes with the swing of the clamping arm. I ended up building on a longer base board so I could get more clearance.
The vise attachment I made for the saw horse gives me a nice counterweight to hold things down. There is a lot of force exerted when carving.
Here's the finished pony.
Using the pony and starting the spoon
Here's my first use of the new tool:
I'm not committed to hand tools as a way of life so I did use a band saw to rough out the basic shape. But this is a carving project, so I stuck with the few carving tools I have and didn't dig out my dremel tool.
I took this project up on a whim. I pruned a tree on my yard and came up with a branch that I thought would work and at the same time was feeling inspired by the fine work I was seeing on line.
The truth is though, I have other work I want to get done. In particular, I'd like to have my telescope gimbal done in time for my eclipse camping trip in August. So I'm going to leave this spoon as is. Kind of a proof of concept.
To finish it I'd probably want to use some cabinet scrapers. I have old blades to make them but it would add hours to what was essentially a lark. I felt lucky to get the shaving pony done in a reasonable amount of time.
