 Welcome to the wonderful world of whittling. I'm Salty Regan, whittler for a long, long time. I started when I was a child, and I've been whittling all my life. I taught Boy Scouts in various civic groups for many, many years, and it got to the point where I hated to go out at night, so I decided to write it all down and put it in the book, whittling for beginners, just the basics of whittling. There are many people out there teaching who would like to teach you how to carve a sailor or a dog or a horse or something, and those are all fine, but I'm only interested in teaching the basics, and that's what this series of programs is about, basic whittling. Since the beginning of history, I suppose when the first cave man or cave woman took a piece of antler and scratched ag in the handle of his or her chopping axe or knife, that was the beginning of whittling, and we've gone a long way since. We use knives. Some people use funny-shaped knives called chisels, and they call themselves sculptors, but basically it all begins with a knife. There are a couple or lots of different kinds of knives that you can use. This is a typical whittler's knife. It has three blades. There's a spay blade that's shaped like this, a sheep's foot blade that is used for incise carving, and then there's a long blade which is never used for whittling. That's used for opening boxes and cutting apples in half and various other tasks, but it's much too long for whittling. There are various manufacturers that make knives. The one that I used in my book is a Boy Scout whittler's knife. For the purposes of this show, I'm going to use a bench knife instead of a jack knife. There are, in the very hardware stores, you are able to pick up jack knives of various makes and manufacture. I would steer clear of any that are stainless steel. Stainless steel is quite difficult to sharpen by hand. It can be sharpened with a machine and get very sharp, but by hand it's very difficult, and let's face it, most of the time when you're at home, when you're whittling, you're not going to have a five or six hundred dollar machine setting alongside of you to enable you to sharpen your knife. There are a couple of easy tools that can be used to keep your knife sharp. If you have to begin sharpening a knife to get it into shape, the easiest thing to use is a little diamond hone. You can pick these up at various hardware stores or general stores for five or six dollars, and they will last probably a lifetime. The one that I like is called a super fine. It's probably about six or eight thousand grit when it starts out, and it feels like silk almost, but it does a very fine job of cutting. There are a couple of other tools that you can use. One that I make myself, that comes from way back in Boy Scout days when whittling Jim was teaching, whittling is what he called a sharpening stick. It's just a piece of wood and it has wet or dry sandpaper and a little piece of leather. You can see there are some little red strips in here. That's foam, craft foam from one of the craft stores. Whittling Jim advised using a piece of inner tube. Well, inner tubes are not as easily available now as they were when I was a child, but this craft foam works very well. It does the same job. The trick in keeping your knife sharp, I use a 400 grit, a 600 grit. This is a 1500 grit or maybe 2000 grit and a little piece of leather. The trick is putting your knife down. If you don't have the foam, then you have to tip the blade about the width of the back of the blade. That's all the farther you have to tip it up to get the right angle and then you will draw the knife slowly over the wet or dry sandpaper. I sometimes wet my paper at home and I do that four or five times in each direction. Then I move to the 600 grit four or five times in each direction then finally to the 1500 grit four or five times in each direction and then finally to polish it a little bit on the leather strap. And if you do that quite regularly while you're whittling, you should never have to use a stone or anything else to keep your knife sharp. It will stay nice and sharp. One of the tricks if you're having difficulty, if you take your fingernail and run it down the blade this way, you will find if there are any little nicks in the blade because they will catch on your fingernail. And then you can get back and sharpen your stick and start over again. There are a couple of other tools that are handy to have when you're whittling. One is either a circle gauge like this which you can get in an office supply store for various sized circles or perhaps a compass. Various kinds of compasses that are available to mark circles. Many of those are handy. Worst comes to worst, you can use a quarter or a 50 cent piece or anything else that's round to draw your circles to make a pattern. Another tool that's handy to have is a coping saw. Now when you buy a coping saw the teeth will be facing away from the handle. Take the blade out and turn it around so that the teeth are facing the handle. The trick is that when you're sawing and you could study this in physics class, when you push on the handle if you're pushing harder than the tension up here the blade has a tendency to bend and then it will it will cut on an angle. It will not cut straight. If the teeth are pointing toward the handle then it has to cut on the pull stroke and your cut will always be nice and smooth and straight. This is handy for cutting out waste wood on a piece of wood that you're going to use to carve something. The other type of knife, the one that I used to teach for for many many years is a Warren brand knife. They make handles of wood plastic and all of the holders are the same, the brass holder and they make various size blades. Here are the six small blades and they come in various shapes. Now when I was a child it was not unusual for the older men that were sitting downtown on the park benches to have two or maybe three knives in their pockets and each of the blades would have been sharpened a little bit differently so that they could more easily do the carving that they were attempting to do. One of their one of their contests that they used to have with each other I can remember was seeing who could make the longest apple peel. They would all start with an equal sized apple and peel it and the one that had the longest peel would be the winner. Of course everybody got to eat their own apple anyway. Another thing that's handy to have is a little ruler, any kind of a little ruler. I have another one that I really like and that is called a centering rule. It measures from the center in both directions. This one measures both in inches and millimeters and this is really handy when you're working on a project and you want to check it to see if it's equal from the center line on both sides. You can lay the center line in there and then you can check to see if your carving is the way that you want it to be. That you can pick up usually at a graphic arts store or maybe an office supply store that one is called a see-through and any kind of a ruler will work fine. The project that I devised over the years for teaching the basics of whittling is composed of six different carving projects. These are all done on one stick 24 inches long and it's a progression of skills. First of all we learn how to carve a ball. Everybody has played with balls of all sizes all of their lives. We know what a ball looks like but some people find it very very difficult to get a nice round ball so we'll learn how to do that. Then we'll learn how to carve flat planes that look alike because often in carving it is the shadows that are as important as anything else because they help to define the shape for people who are looking at things so we carve flat planes that look alike. Then we then we learn how to do some interior carving carving a cylinder inside of the corner posts. Then we put those skills together and we carve chain links. That's a beginner's project that frightens a lot of people but it is a beginner's project and once you learn how to lay that out it becomes quite simple and it's a lot of fun. Then we put all those skills together and we carve a ball in a cage and then we'll finish up the project doing a little simple in size carving or chip carving. We can carve your initials in there we'll do a little decorative chip carving of one style or another and maybe a little in-size carving just to get used to making things happen. For the balance of this show I'm not going to use one long stick I'm going to use a number of small sticks just for the ease of working with the camera so we're going to go through the steps just as I did for teaching. When we start out we want to make a ball first of all to carve a ball on the end of our on the end of our stick so we'll need to make a pattern. Three by five cards are excellent you can use the back of a of a greeting card or almost anything but that's a good weight and you want to use a circle that's exactly the same size as your stick so if you're using a circle gauge you can you can check and get the the size circle that that you want then you lay that on your on your piece of paper I like to mark things with a with a number two pencil I do not like to use ink on wood because ink has a tendency to soak into the wood and sometimes it'll soak beyond where you want it so if you use a pencil you you can always erase that the beginners pencil that they use in first and second grade I like that for marking because it's large it doesn't point doesn't break as easily and it's soft but any pencil will do fine you mark your your circle and then take a scissor or you can use your knife if you didn't have a scissor handy and you cut out your circle and proceed to mark the end of your stick now I could use the marking gauge also if you if you have one but if you're using a compass then it's easier to make a little pattern like this and mark the end of your stick can you mark it all the way on all four sides and also on the top then you can scan across from corner to corner and make a pencil mark in the center of your stick that's so that you can gauge when you get to the center of your ball what we want to do first of all is make a cylinder like this we have the center mark on the top and you will notice that there's a pencil mark in the center of the cylinder that's important so you know where to start carving up and down to get the center of your ball so we'll do that we take our knife and we always have to make a stop cut when we're cutting towards something so that we don't so at the bottom of the ball we make a stop cut just rock your knife back and forth cut a little chip out cut a little chip out cut a little chip out now now we can begin rounding off so we'll start up here always take small shavings never try to take great big shavings because that's how people get hurt it is possible to cut yourself with a sharp knife but there's no need to work your way carefully taking small shavings from side to side until you get about halfway around you will begin to notice as you carve that in one direction the wood wants to split and the other way it carves fine that's how you learn to work with the grain of the wood and not against it it wants to split you're working against the grain of the wood once you have rounded off a corner then you want to remark that center line so you still have a center line on both sides to work from so it's easy enough to to mark and you keep doing that on all four corners until you have a nice cylinder so now you have the start of a ball you've got it absolutely round here our second step now is to round off the top of that ball and the easiest way that I have found to do that is to work around the ball to start with take your knife in your hand and taking a little shaving off the top edge carefully work your way around this reminds me that it's always important to be able to clean up the chips that you make after you're done carving it helps to maintain domestic tranquility if you don't have chips all over the house in my little carving corner I have a linoleum floor so it's easier to sweep up work your way back and forth from side to side you want to make sure that you keep rounding this off and not making a a point out of it one of the things that you can do to help yourself is to make a a gauge and you have a you can just use a piece of the cardboard where you cut your circle gauge out of and now you have a a half gauge and you can lay that on there to see how close you're getting to having a nice round ball so we can keep on rounding that and on the top you can see that you're working equally in all directions toward that cross that you're made in the middle take little chips don't take don't try to take great big ones because sometimes you'll cut too deep now you can begin working from the line up toward the center and i find that the easiest way to do that is to start just a little bit above the line gradually tipping you can begin to round off that top of the stick so that it begins to look like a half a ball you notice i'm using what's called a thumb push cut the thumb acts like a fulcrum for the knife to rest against and i push with the thumb rather than push with this hand because that pushing with the hand with the whole arm you lose control of your knife then because then it can slip off and cut too much or injure yourself or hit something that you don't want to hit so this is called a thumb push cut the other cut that i was using before would be called a paring cut when you're cutting pulling the knife toward your thumb and of course if you're doing that you have to be a little bit careful that you don't cut yourself if you have a tendency to do that you know they make they make little bandages the trick is to put one on your thumb first so that when you're cutting like we're like we were doing before then it touches the bandage and not your thumb so we'll check again and see how we're coming here with our ball what is beginning to look nice and round so then all we have to do is do the finishing cuts you know and then again you can do use use a paring cut because you're making a little tiny cuts i i don't use any sandpaper when i'm woodling if you make little tiny cuts your your cuts are close together and you really don't need sandpaper unless you're making a face of some kind and you want to smooth off the cheeks or the nose or something but otherwise woodlers generally don't use sandpaper woodworkers do but that's a different story all together what you smooth that off is kind and so your last cuts then would just be right up here where you're where you made that cross in it in the end of your stick and you work that off and then check it with your with your gauge to see how you're doing oh we're a little bit high on the sides here yet so we have to feel off a little bit along the edge on the top here and then we will be in good shape there we go so we have a half of a ball we have the top half of the ball now to do the to do the uh bottom half of the ball is is similar but not quite the same we want to have a ball that looks like this and so at this point we have a ball that looks like this it's a half a ball and we're going to work again from the center down toward the toward the bottom but we'll save that part of the show for the for the next session we're kind of coming to the end of this session here and let's see there's something else that i wanted to point out to you uh when you're carving don't be afraid to stop once in a while and drop your knife you don't always have to start with the with the courses grit i often just start with the 1500 grit and if i'm using this foam i don't have to tilt the knife at all i just lay the knife flat and with a little bit of pressure push down on it and go a few times in each direction and then stop it a few more times and you can always check one way to check the sharpness of your knife is to get underneath of a fairly strong light and tilt the blade so it's pointing right at you and if you can't see any light reflected from the edge of your blade chances are that it's quite sharp and just tilt it a little bit and you can also tilt a little bit from side to side because if there are any little wire edges they will catch the light and there will be a little glint of light that will show and then you know that you need to touch up your blade just a little bit more but it's it's quite important that you always keep your knife blade good and sharp that's what makes carving easy and fun so for the for this show we have done a half a ball and we're going to wind it up for this show and next time we're going to start by doing the bottom half of the ball