ArborTech Wood Carving Power Tools

One of the things I've always been really intrigued by is carving, my good friend, George Johnson, was a great Carver and I've always wanted to do stuff like he does and power carving tools like I've got here are a great shortcut to being able to do carving and sculpting. So here's what I've got going. This is a cypress root. In fact, it belonged to George and for a project I've got going on, what I need to do is create a recess here. Eventually, it's gonna have a square flat ledge across the bottom that I can display things in.

So it's gonna become a little nook that items can go into. What I needed then, was a way that I could free hand form this recess and get that ledge across the bottom, cutting it out of this cypress. This tool has a great example for this, tools like this in the marketplace, make power carving, power sculpting, pretty simple to do. It attaches to a die grinder, carbide cutters on the bottom. What those carbide cutters are gonna do, of course, is remove the material.

I'll do some more cuts here. One of the things that really amazes me is how quickly I can hog wood out of this thing but I don't find it grabby. It's not like trying to freehand, run a router bit or a drill bit, the engineering of this thing has it so that yes, it takes a lot of wood out, but you do have good control over the tool. So it doesn't feel like it's getting away from you. Another thing that's cool about this carver, it's got that long shaft with the cutters at the bottom.

And what that'll let me do is reach under, let me show you on this wall right here, where you'll be able to see it. And what's cool about that, is I can reach, I can come around and create these undercuts on the side. Now, I was talking about the idea that I want this bottom to be straight enough, that I can get something to sit there, a little display item. So here's another thing we can take advantage of. I'm gonna clamp a board on here that'll act as my guide.

I'm getting that parallel to the bottom of my cypress. Okay, now the reason I did that, is because on thi shaft, the cutters are at the bottom. They're not on the shaft up here. So I can use that as a guide in order to keep this going in a straight direction. I don't mind the top of this, looking , that's pretty cool, but here on the bottom, I want that to be nice and straight and here's how I'll make that happen.

So the shaft lets us take advantage of a straight edge, that in mind, you can imagine how if I wanted to create a template or a pattern, I could use the shaft to follow that pattern in order to get a nice uniform shape. The other thing we can do if you want real consistent depth of cut, I can put this collar on, the collar would act as a depth step by riding against the pattern to make sure that I could only penetrate so far. So another option to control what you're doing there. So we've got a bunch of stuff going on here. We can free hand, follow a straight edge, follow a pattern, makes access to power carving and sculpting pretty cool and really lets your creative juices flow which is a really neat aspect of this.

I'm gonna get back to my chunk of Cypress here and following in George Johnson's footsteps, do some more sculpting and carving here and finish up my recess.