As promised, when I get a moment to add items I will.

I am still working on a large piece which I hope to enter into an exhibition at the end of the month and over the last couple of days the tone of my point carver changed.  Its tone became irregular and louder.

New noises on a piece of equipment are not good!  I checked the temperature of the bearings and bushes - normal.  Just to be on the safe side I oiled the bushes and greased the bearings anyway, and waxed and re-tensioned the belt, but it still made the same louder and pulsating noise.  I checked all the nuts and they were tight.  Then I  tried the grub screws in the stepped pulleys.

One was loose!

I applied Loctite and tightened it, and instantly, the old hum returned!

So please take note of the noise of your equipment - it is telling you when something is wrong!

This is a busy year for my wife and I as she approaches retirement, we try to make-up time lost to travelling as the result of COVID, we prepare to move into our house near Canberra which entails quite a lot of toing-and-froing to meet with overworked tradies to help upgrade the place, and we have the actual pack-up, move and unpack which will keep us busy for months as we embrace a new chapter in our lives.  It's all very exciting!!

What I'm trying to say is that due to spending less time than usual in my workshop, from where I garner ideas for my monthly carving tips, I'm reluctantly letting you know that I'll be less regular on this blog for the rest of this year.

But I'll continue to answer your emails, and if a suitable query comes in I'll answer it here.  In the meantime, I hope you stay healthy and enjoy life as best you can in these still-strange times.

​Thanks for your past support and ... happy carving! 

A couple of short points for you this month -
 
1. I was grinding a thin piece of stone recently and applied it to a previously-used sheet of 600 grit Wet & Dry (W&D) on my lap.  The stone was whipped out of my fingers and bounced harmlessly off the back of the splash box, happily.
 
The next time I tried it gave me the same result.
 
I stopped the lap and checked the W&D and found it to be more worn than I had thought.  Being flat, the stone was being dragged out of my fingers by osmotic attraction between W&D and stone.
 
By replacing the W&D I finally got to grind it down.
 
2. A few days later there was a lot of squealing when I started the motor.  I added my usual wax to the inside of the belt with no reduction in squeal, so I checked the belt tension and found it to be a bit loose.
 
The tension needs to be “just right”: too tight and you eventually wreck the motor bearings/bushes; too loose and you get excessive belt wear because of the slipping/squealing.
 
The moral of the stories is: you need to keep on top of these matters with your equipment.
 
Happy carving!

Large, deep holes can take a long time to grind out if you start with the finest burrs and gradually work up in size.  But here is a situation where I saved myself lots of time, by using a large, coarse burr, set in my drill-press, where I could apply more pressure to the work.

Pointers:

• use a suitable container and affix the stone items to a piece of wood with four or more pins (hammered into the wood as above) to save your fingers if anything snags as you are grinding
• the upper surface of the stone (see Figure 2 below) needs to be covered by water so a certain amount of topping up and emptying is necessary with different thicknesses of stone
• it is best to grind for a few seconds, then lift up the burr and allow the water to cool and clean the hole
• if the water becomes too foggy to see what you are doing (see below), change it
• centring the burr is important, but by holding the stone off-centre and using less pressure it is possible to get any deviant holes back on track
• it was a clean operation with no splashing and in a couple of hours I’d created all of my holes.

​When I assemble the eight pieces of stone I’ll use a piece of threaded brass with nuts attached to hold them all together.  To help them hold, I ground out the top and bottom holes with a keystone shape to make sure everything will stay together once it’s assembled.  Now all I need to do is make the time to complete the piece!
 
Happy carving!

Phew, just made it this month!  Warning: this month’s blog is about NOT carving.  Shock, horror!  Has Nigel lost his marbles?  Well, maybe.
 
Life isn’t always quiet and ordered, and this last month has been a particularly busy one for a variety of reasons – though I’d stress for all the right ones.  So, no, I haven’t caught one of the many variants of COVID (and I hope you haven’t either as it can be a really nasty illness) and I haven’t abandoned my workshop.  I just haven’t had time to do as much carving as I’d like to, and there hasn’t been much worth capturing in pictures or words to pass on to you.  Life happens!
 
So, do I become frustrated when not carving?  Yes, a little.  And how do I manage that?
 
I figure a happy and meaningful life is about making the right decisions.  So, below is a list of how I weigh the various factors in my life, starting with the most important people or activities and going to the less important further down:

• personal and family health/relationships (keep your family happy)
• career (you need to pay the bills)
• sport/gardening/repairing the house/studies/friends (whatever is very important to you)
• hobbies/volunteer work/attending concerts and parties/other activities (the fun stuff)

 
Life is about priorities. You have to decide what your own are, but at different times in your life some activities will rise in importance and fall again later.  To quote the old proverb, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, so hopefully you can spread your time over several activities each day?
 
But for the last few weeks I’ve rarely been relaxing in the workshop, sadly.  Even when not there I often think about the pieces I’m carving, and about the pieces I’m going to carve.  Sometimes I dream about them.  I have a book stuffed with ideas on loose pieces of paper scrawled during my travels or occasionally on the pages themselves.  Most will not see the light of day, but others are just awaiting that special piece of stone or opportunity.  So all is not lost and I hope to have something to show you next month.
 
Until then, stay calm and healthy, and I wish you happy carving!

Thanks to Greg for his query on grinding with laps.
 
To summarize:

• Wear eye protection
• Your laps need to be perfectly true and flat, and firmly attached to the point carver
• 1500 – 1750 rpm is fine
• Keep the flow of water low into the centre of the lap because otherwise you wear it – just one drip every few seconds is generally enough.  If the stone becomes too hot to hold then increase the flow rate
• Always grind points and sharp edges trailing on the Wet & Dry (W&D) paper to avoid their catching and flicking up in your face, as well as damaging the paper
• Grinding at the edge of the lap will naturally cause the stone to heat up more due to the higher speed there and more friction
• But use the paper in the centre of the lap too!  It is slower than using the outer areas but just as effective
• If you are grinding a large slab it seems to take forever to get it flat the first time.  But resist the urge to try to grind down high spots on your diamond belts first when using laps – I end up taking longer in trying to grind out the low spots afterwards than if I’d just kept going with the laps!
• Be gentle!  The harder I press the stone onto the lap the more it depresses the rubber facing under the W&D and then rounds the edges of the piece being ground – it also wears out the paper more quickly
• If the stone starts to slip out of my grip it’s better to let go rather than try to hold it by pressing harder, as it will eventually be thrown off onto the back of the splashguard and I run the risk of losing parts of my fingernails on the W&D
• Don’t rush the coarser grades of W&D paper (100/120 and 240) as these give you the basis for your form
• Rotate the pieces through 90˚ and move them across the lap continually so concentric arcs don’t form, which then take a lot of grinding out
• Turn the pieces over regularly to keep the piece square and even
• 400 grit W&D paper doesn’t last very long with nephrite, and 600 and 1000 even less.  Remember to add these costs into your calculations when pricing a piece of work
• As you reach the finer grades, scratches and grooves appear which can’t be seen with the coarser paper before, causing you to return to that coarser grade to remove them.  Get used to it!
• The quickest way to remove a scratch or tool-mark is to grind across it at right angles

 
 
Happy grinding!

​Thanks to those of you who sent me your queries - I’m getting through them as I have the time.  And if you haven’t sent in your questions yet, please feel free!
 
This month I want to talk about mass production in my workshop.  Well, it doesn’t happen!  I make batches instead.

​If it takes longer to change the tools for the next stage of the process than it does to complete the current stage on the pieces in the batch, then it’s worth making a number of similar pieces: time is valuable and needs to be used wisely.

​So when carving simple pendants which might take 1 – 2 hours to finish each one, I make batches of 8 – 10 at a time.  But with more complicated pieces which might each take 15 – 20 hours to complete I have batches of 2 – 4 because if there are too many in the batch and I never seem to be making progress, it can drag me down mood-wise.

​So what I’m saying is, it’s important to make progress during each work session.  The progress makes me want to come back to do more in the afternoon, or the next day.
 
It’s all about planning.
 
Happy carving!

Hi there!

Maybe I'll regret this (!?) but you've put up with me telling you about carving for more than 4 years now, and maybe I missed some facet or only skimmed over a subject.

So why not tell me what you want to know for a change?

I'll do my best to answer every serious question, and I'll post the ones with more general interest on this  blog in the coming months.

Thanks in advance for your interest!

​Keep safe and keep carving!

​After a few quiet weeks caused by my point carver motor being re-wound, these last few have been busy in the workshop.  The motor is going really well again!  This just goes to support my oft-mentioned exhortation to keep your equipment in tip-top condition, because a breakdown can stop you in your tracks for weeks, especially in lockdown, as we are in Sydney at the moment (and we are not alone in Australia or the world).
 
I reassembled my point carver, oiling and tightening a few parts as I went, and got to work happily.  I started by trying to catch up with a few commissions – a very good place to start I thought!
 
I had some bone-work to do, and after trying Kudu horn-inner for one piece, and finding it too soft and brittle for the design (it broke), needed to obtain some fresh beef bone for the work because I could not find the old beef thigh bone I carried around for years.  It just goes to show – you should only throw-away things you will never, ever, need again!
 
I can thoroughly recommend Steve Myhre’s book on bone carving (it’s listed in the references at the bottom of the About Jade page in this site) to give you all the information you need to know about cleaning and preparing bone for bone carving.  It’s not a quick process though – I took me about a week to clean and de-grease mine.

​An important point: once you have your bone cleaned and ready, you need to cut it the correct way to give you the thickest bone just where you need it for the design.  Uncooked beef bone (the central section of either the fibula (lower leg) or tibia (thigh/upper leg bone)) are what you need for carving.  I cut the first one the wrong way and dissected the thickest portion of the bone, which I needed for the design, so had to buy another and cut it correctly!  Whilst that bone was soaking, I made a couple of trial pieces to test the design and techniques I wanted to use and was happy with the results.

​However, whilst bone is softer than my more usual nephrite carving medium, great care needs to be taken in the grinding and polishing process.  Every scratch needs to be ground out or the finish is spoilt.  Similarly, any imperfections in the bone show up in a very negative way.  You can’t do anything about the thickness of the bone – there is only the good, solid part to use.  This then necessitated careful study of my piece of bone, much as I do with my stone, to find the best orientation for the design.

I’m taking a short break from bone carving and am happy to get back to carving nephrite to complete a small batch of koalas, one of which is increasingly becoming a bit of a rush job.  I’m trying a new pose for the creature, and wasn’t sure how the head would relate to the shoulders, having only one picture of the koala in that position.  So, as I often suggest, I made a model out of Plasteline/plasticine modelling clay.  This will, I hope, prevent me from adding to the selection of “failures” at the back of the bench awaiting a new design to help them rise, Phoenix-like from the proverbial ashes!
 
Happy carving!