Last week I mentioned some of the characteristics of a good carving wood in response to a question about which wood I use in carvings. Another important part of carving is having a sharp knife, and keeping it that way! "How often do you sharpen your
knife?" or "How do you keep your knife sharp?" are common questions.
Thankfully the Scary Sharp Knife Sharpening kit is a great and easy way to sharpen your carving knives, as well as other knives, too! If you've struggled with keeping your knife sharp, or wondered if you're doing your current sharpening method correctly, I'd highly recommend looking at the Scary Sharp Sharpening Kit!
Another important step in keeping your knife sharp is frequent stropping. I typically strop my knife after every 15-20 minutes of carving. This helps rejuvenate the edge back to scary sharp! I'll use a leather strop with White Gold strop compound, and strop each side of the blade six times to start with, and then five, four, all the way down to one. By doing this I can keep my knife sharp for quite a long time. If it seems like it's lost some of its edge, I can quickly
touch it up using the higher grits of the Scary Sharp system and get back to carving!
How often do you sharpen or strop your knife when carving?
Made up entirely of 3 corner chips, it is fun to find the variety of shapes found in the carved and uncarved areas. I finished it with 2 coats of clear matte acrylic spray and then applied a Candlelight gel stain to the entire plate, followed by a Georgian Cherry gel stain on the larger carved areas. The center is 3" in diameter.
Do you want to carve one for yourself, or as a gift??
Hello Troy, I live in Melbourne Australia. Boxwood is rarely available here, almost never in significant thicknesses. I of my friends found a timber merchant who had some. We bought that and split it up amongst a few of us. I still have some of that. I use a lot of jelutong. It is readily available and not too expensive. Best of all in this country is Huon
pine. That is very expensive, available in very limited quantities and sizes but carves beautifully. I also have a small supply of boxwood I use for netsuke carving. Those pieces are only about 50-60 mm diameter. Occasionally I use other wood such as walnut. I hope this is of interest to you. Kind regards Charles
I always find it interesting to learn about the woods used in other world areas. The mention of Jelutong reminded me that I had purchased some of it years ago at a local woodworking store and still need to carve it!
