Arbortech Power Carver and Precision Carving System

You and I have both done a fair bit of power carving and kind of fallen in love, or not even kind of, but have fallen in love with this whole approach, this whole concept. So what we're ready to talk about now are we've got a couple of things going here. The Arbortech Power Carving Unit here, and then one of the things that I used ahead of time was the precision carving setup, which is here. And then also the turbo plane, which has been in the marketplace for a while. but the power carving unit is relatively new.

The precision carving setup is, is quite new. So what just in this category, what is it that you enjoy about doing this? It's so appealing, I think for a number of reasons. First, it gets you kind of as a cliche, I guess, out of the box, right? So one thing you notice on these projects that you've done, there are no straight lines.

And it's really fun to be able to just be adventurous with your woodworking and be able to, you know, get into this carving mode, follow contours that, you know, kind of reading the wood and, and getting more into an artful state rather than a lot of the box building that I probably do in more of my woodworking. And same for me. It's I like - well, Paul as well, we both turn a lot of bowls on the lathe and that's a similar feeling where you're just, you're not looking at dimensions on a plan, you really are just doing what the wood allows you to do. And here, what's neat, something like the big platter is you're not limited to the idea that you have to turn it round. You can make it whatever shape you want 'cause we're not spinning this thing on a lathe.

So with the power carving unit, one of the things that's cool about it is the leveling shroud that it has. And that can be used both with the turbo plane under the shroud, as well as with the sander under the shroud. And it acts like a little outrigger and it does a great job of helping you move along the material without digging in. You'll see that in the video we're going to watch in just a second and then there's another shroud with it. That'll protect the cutter and still give us dust collection like we have on the leveling shroud.

And would you say this is one of your more dusty hobbies? One of your messier hobbies? It certainly can be. This time of year is really nice to be able to get outside and do it, but it's really great that there's some integrated dust collection here as well. And then the dust collection works really well on these.

So in order to prove that point, let's have a look at the video with this product that we shot ahead of time. I think one of the coolest features of the power carver is the leveling shroud. I'm going to run it across this walnut here. And what it does is it really prevents me from being able to tip in and dig and leveling a great name for this, 'Cause it's exactly what we're going to do to a chunk of wood like this. Imagine this is the back of a bowl or a platter or a huge live edge slab that you're working on.

As I turn this knob, I can increase or decrease the amount of exposure that the turbo plane has beyond the shroud. And that's what gives me the control I need to really dial in my depth of cut. Now, obviously I've got a long way to go on this and I'm going to keep working on this to get it nice and flat. But what I'm going to do on this next round is I'm going to intentionally rock this a little bit and just watch for that because with a leveling shroud on there, I can't dig the edge of the turbo plane in, and again, that's one of the things that makes this very user-friendly. All right.

Lots of leveling to go with the turbo plane here, and then I'm going to switch to sandpaper. When you come back, I'll have that in here and show you how well that sandpaper disc works. Well, that's pretty cool. 60 grit sandpaper on there. One pass, chasing the turbo plane and look at how nice that already looks.

Here, rinse and repeat. You can keep progressing up through sandpaper grits, depending on where you're trying to take this. What I'm going to do right now is get this cut to a rough shape. I want to flip it over and start showing you a little bit of what you can do with the power carver and the turbo plane on the hollowing portion of things. At this point, we're starting to take away everything that doesn't look like a bowl or a platter.

What I've done here is I've swapped shrouds. That's the leveling shroud with this shroud on there's a cutaway here on the front corner that lets me be a little more deep reaching with either the turbo plane or the sander so that I can get in and start doing some concave here. I could also use this on the outside to produce convex and shape the outside of the bowl or platter, whatever you're working on. So, sequence of events here would be, get this all roughed out with the turbo plane. And then when I switch to the sandpaper disc, which is hook and loop, then I can start sanding that inside again, starting with an aggressive grit, a 60 or 80, sanding that up through a 180 or 220, wherever you want to finish your project.

That's a good look at the power carving unit, the turbo plane, and the sanding disc. Now pretty cool. This precision carving setup is a pretty neat way to detail your work. I've switched now to the precision carving system. This is pretty neat, three different cutters, two cutters and sandpaper here.

And what I'm going to do is keep this component in the power carving unit throughout, and then we simply swap what we're doing, the business end of it here. What I'm going to do to get started is use this in order to define my cuts, work around the pencil lines and then bowl out in between them and then come back and clean everything up to a point where she starts to look like this. We're starting out with detailing the just following my pencil lines here and developing the outline of the area that I want to carve in. And there's going to be some toggling back and forth between the tools just as you see what each tools capabilities are. Once I've got the detailing done and I've created the outline that I want, then I'm going to switch to the ball so that I can start hollowing in between.

And again, you're probably going to toggle back and forth between tools because the ball may not get into some of these tighter inside corners. So I'll work my way around the recess, taking material away, and then in spots where I can see that I need it, I'm going to switch back again, detail around those inside corners just to get a little bit more precision here, a little bit more accentuation on the branches. Once I've got the overall look that I want, next thing I can switch to the sander and then start to clean up tool marks that are left behind. And of course, if you like how it looks with those toolmarks in the background, and I do, I don't want to eliminate those because I like the carved look that they provide, but I just want to maybe clean up any rough spots that were left behind. I love how that's coming along.

I want to show you one more thing here, and that's the idea of texturing and especially on something like this, where I have a tree, it's pretty cool to use this tool, just and give a bark look like this. Very free form, very free flowing ability to just scale up that just a little bit to give it some texture. Those could, that could be bark on a tree, those could be veins on a leaf, pretty neat ability there. So overall, I'm not much of a hand carver at all, but power carver, this precision carving system is pretty cool. It let me do some neat work here.

So after that video was done, and before today, I want to have a little show and tell because I took the time to finish the projects that I had started on that day. And man, this, the chunk of Walnut is just a beautiful piece of wood. The apples, I think, create a lovely contrast inside there. And again, I just love the free form. You know, it's clearly not round, it's kind of egg-shaped and it's even not consistent across the transition from side to side.

It's really cool. And then that little tree of life, this is, this started as clip art that I grabbed off of the web. And I love the fact that you can see the uneven background that was done with the ball cutter, and then that look of bark on the tree that I did with the square rounded cutter in order to give it this, that little bit of texture. And I'm pretty proud of how those came out. I would be as well.

I think one thing that really stands out on this one is how deep you are able to go with that. That's a lot of material that you're able to remove and it looked like it was going along pretty quickly. The other thing that's remarkable about this is how smooth that is. It really looks like a turned ball to me, other than the fact that it's not exactly round. Well, and one of the things I like with the power carver is its variable speed.

So at 60 grit, which is where I started the sanding, I'm running full bore. And when I get to the finer grits, especially in a hardwood like this walnut, I love the fact that I can slow it down. Cause you don't, you don't want to run a real fine grit at a real high RPM cause you're going to burn. So that ability to control that. And then two, when you get to areas where you still want to remove material, either with the terrible plane or sanding, but you want to be a little bit more gentle or take it a little bit more conservatively, that ability to lower the RPM pays off there too, because clearly you're not, at a lower RPM, you're not going to take material off as quickly.

Well, that does a good job of wrapping us up. wrapping us up here. Easy for me to say on these, on the Arbortech product.