 Welcome back to section 3 with Whittling with Salty. Last time we were working on carving this cylinder in a cage and we were just beginning to finish up with carving the first post on the first side. So we've carved our way through and we will begin to round off this post and again we will make a little stop cut on each end and carefully make a few shavings. Be sure to follow the grain of the wood so that it doesn't split on you all the way down and you're working back and forth from side to side so you get about halfway around then you do the same thing on the other two corners your way from side to side till you're about halfway around you see we start to getting a nice round looking post and we would do the same thing over here on the other inside edge and you will notice that the grain will change as you go from one position to another it's always important to pay attention to which way the grain is running so that if you don't split the wood and ruin part of your carving now the inside corner will leave until the very last because that way if you bump up against it with your knife blade as you're carving the cylinder inside you would not ruin your outside of your carving as you're carving inside here using kind of the front edge of your knife you're going to have to make very very small shavings this takes time that's the best thing I can tell you is that carefully, carefully make small shavings and work your way around if you don't have to go too far against the grain you can work your way up and then switch around from one side to the other so that you can finish off it's a matter of carefully working here we have it down a little ways here you can see there's a little bit of a hump we don't have it down it's not round, it comes up to a kind of a peak so we have to be careful and you can shave a little bit off by going cross ways if you're very careful little bitty cuts you don't want to cut your fingers you have to be careful that you're not cutting where you're going to be slipping and hurting yourself as I mentioned once before this is white pine I like to carve white pine other woods that are easy to carve are butternut, aspen it's fairly easy to carve basswood is preferred by many carvers it does not show any grain and it's fairly easy to work with it depends sometimes on what type of basswood you get the best comes from northern grown basswood it's more dense the southern basswood that grows around here is apt to be quite coarse grained and it's easy to carve but it doesn't hold the detail quite as well so you can't make fine so that's the way that you work inside of your cylinder to carve the cylinder but it's important for us also to begin working on carving our chain links that's what's really the heart of the matter this is what we want to have we want to wind up with something that looks like this now I have a couple of chain links that are loose and the others are still fastened together that's why I can show you how that works first of all we have to lay them out we have to make a pattern and we want to split that size of the wood into three the reason that I use a stick here that is an inch one and one eighth inches in size is that it's easy to split one and one eighth inches into three eighth inch pieces three eighths and three eighths is six eighths and another three eighths is nine eighths that's one and one eighth inches you can use any size wood that you want I've known carvers who have carved chain links out of four by four timbers well that's a lot of work but the fellow that did that had a special reason for doing it you can take your ruler and measure or you can use a pencil and split it I prefer that you make patterns and you will need a couple of patterns one just for a straight link and one that looks like a chain link actually you don't need the whole link but you need to make something that looks like that if you take your pattern that you used to begin with your circle pattern that should be the same size as your stick and if you lay that on the edge of your cardboard or your little board and draw the circle right at the corner now if you overlap that just a little bit now here's a good place to use your ruler make a mark two inches long and put your pattern there so that the chain links or the circles overlap just a little bit at the center now then you just draw a line straight across and you have the outside pattern of a chain link just like that now if you want to estimate you know about 5.16 of an inch and you could draw the inside of your chain link not absolutely necessary because the first thing you're going to do is cut that off anyway but if it will help you visualize make something like that cut it out and then on your stick we will measure measure these out I start off well we'll use our stop mark about a quarter of an inch or a little more lay a chain link down your pattern mark it along the edges now move it down and skip about a quarter of an inch or about 5.16 of an inch something in that neighborhood leave a gap there and mark another pattern and then do the same thing again mark another pattern then you take another little pattern that's the same thickness as your chain link and the same length 2 inches and you lay that right in the center I made a little pencil mark right in the center so I would know where it was in between the spots where you marked the chain links here and here put my center mark right in the center of that and mark on both sides all the way around that's where the other chain link is going to be the faces in the other direction and you do that again down here and then on the end you would put your pencil mark on the stop mark and again mark that off because this will only be a half a link and that will be fastened on now you would turn your stick completely over and mark those patterns exactly the same way start at the end of the stop mark mark skip at quarter of an inch or eight to an inch it would do well when you're beginning to use your pattern to mark that so that you get them exactly the same and mark it again down here then with this pattern again marking right in the center mark those off you will have to use a little square or you can use a card and at the end of at the end of where you marked this pattern lay your cardboard up against the edge so you get it a square make a little pencil mark just at the edge lay it up here and make a little pencil mark in the center and you know where to put your first chain link so you would put your first chain link down and mark again use your marker there and mark a second chain link there and then a half a chain link down here then you would turn it completely over and do the same thing put your chain link on this end and don't forget to use your square and make a pencil mark so that you get them lined up in the proper position so that you have chain links marked on all four sides of your stick now the first thing we're going to do is take our knife and start to cut those chain links off cut the marks off that you have put on there this is what I mean turn that around we're facing in the same way you can see where the marks are here where the chain links we've got the half link down here we get our chain links marked one, two, three, one, two, three and the other chain links are here so that we have to cut the corners away for purposes of clarity and filming I marked this with a pen rather than a pencil so that you can easily see how these are laid out and again I didn't mark the inside of the chain link because that's not important at this time I just marked the outside and so we will cut away those four corners as we cut away one corner then take your chain link pattern you can either make another one or take the one that you have and clip it in half a little less than half and when you've cut it away lay that down there so that you can mark the ends again mark the end on the stick after you've got the corner off then we know where to make our next cuts because in order to make a chain without getting mixed up the easiest way is to lay it all out ahead of time when you're cutting these corners off again, make a stop cut on each end I find that it's not too difficult to do if we work on the corner like this we slice that off down to the center mark that we have you can see that we're cut right up to this mark and right up to the mark on the other side here now the easiest thing that I have the easiest way that I've found to do this is to make a cut, a slicing cut right down the center somewhere close, not critical and then take out little cuts just like we did when we were carving that cylinder in a cage only this time we want to wind up with a square we'll have to make sure that we keep making our stop cut down here on the end if I were doing this as a project of course I would have made this cut all the way one end to the other but for the purposes of illustration here it's enough to do a little bit we get that down close to close to the center mark close to the mark on this side now we have a we have enough of a space cleaned out here where we've cut away our pencil marks we can redraw them here's the half of the link here and we would have to do the same thing on this side on this side here then we do the same thing over here on this side and then that's how we would this is the chain link that runs the other way so we make a stop cut in the center and a stop cut down here so we can follow our pencil mark and there you begin to see how we have wound off the chain link and we do the same thing down on this end all of these steps are laid out quite easily in the book that I wrote and if it would be a help to you you might want to get a hold of it I'll talk about it sometime later but that's the way then that you begin to lay out your chain links so that we can finish carving and wind up with something like this we will have to continue that on our next session but in the meanwhile always remember to keep your knife sharp check it often to make sure that it's good on your sharpening stick go out a few times this way a few times the other way and on your leather to do the final polishing that's about all the leather does is do a little final polishing and sometimes you have to wind up with a little bit of a wire edge and the leather will break that off because it bends it back and forth which will wind up with a nice sharp edge so we've learned a little bit about doing a chain link and next time we'll finish up on that and we'll start working on our project which is the real crowning glory which is the ball in the cage so welcome to having fun with wood carving don't forget to keep your knife sharp and we will see you when we start our next session then