Week Six

We have finally finished carving the Bowery bank panels, all that's left is crating, and then they will be shipped off to fend for themselves in New York. I can see how stone carvers must maintain an emotional disconnection from their work because once complete, they will always have to let it go. This doesn't ever seem to be a problem. It's not like the painful separation felt by a mother who sends her baby off to college. Rather, a job is like an expensive, high-risk, dysfunctional son whom the father can't wait to kick out of the house as soon as he turns 18. So, with a "good-riddens" we are sending the job away and beginning the next task.

For the last week and a half we have had to put our carving on hold to make some necessary preparations for fast encroaching winter months.  This includes framing, insulating and sealing the whole shop with plastic sheets. We are also setting up two wood burning stoves that will be used to heat the shop.

I hadn't any interesting photos of stone work to put up this week, so, I thought I would show and explain some of the many different chisels used.

An assortment of Nicks Chisels

These are flat chisels, they are composed of a single flat blade that adopt a variety of names and uses based on there size. For example a 3/4 in. Flat chisel is often called a drafting chisel and is used for making the initial outlines and edges of a carving. A 2 in. flat chisel is sometimes called a Drove and is used for making a flat consistent plane.

Toothed, (or Clawed) chisels are essentially scarier looking flat chisels. They are used for many of the same purposes as flat chisel but will bite deeper into the stone and remove material much faster then there corresponding flat chisels. In this photo you'll notice the chisel and the left have pointed teeth where as the chisels on the right have flat teeth. The pointed teeth are much more effective on harder dense stone such as marble, the small sharp points are all that is required to cleanly chip the desired stone off. The flattened teeth of the chisel to the right are used for softer more porous stones such as limestone. When a pointy tipped chisels is used on soft stone it has the tendency of digging deeply into the stone rather then popping the piece off. The flat teeth make stop the the teeth from poking to deep and make the cut more clean and consistent.

Points, are the real work horses of a carver when it comes to roughing out. Their sharp point efficiently focus all the energy of a mallet swing to a singe point. This causes a fracture in the stone. A few well placed strikes on a point are capable of removing a large chunk of stone with little time. The sharp tipped points are best used on a dense stone like marble

 Punches are basically tiny flat chisels, but perform the same function as point, only they are best on soft stone like limestone.

Bull-nosed chisels are basically flat chisel with a rounded end. Their round end diverts energy from the hammer blow in many direction rather then just straight forward as seen in flat chisels. Because of the wide radius of destruction these little babies are capable of, they aren't always best for planing or careful drafting but they do a mean job in removing mass quantities of stone. Bull-nosed chisels are also useful in carving the interior of curved cuts and can be an effective solution to some awkward carving angles.