 Welcome back to Whittling for Beginners, Whittling with Salty. This time we're going to put all of our skills together that we have learned so far, and we're going to work on carving the ball in the cage. Now in order to do that, this ball is going to have to be a little bit smaller than the one that we carved on the end of the stick. And how do we figure out the size? Well, that's not too difficult. On the end of one of your sticks, on either end, draw your little quarter inch square sticks that are the cylinder, the cage on the outside corners. The largest that your ball can be is the distance between the two corner posts. In this case, it's 7 eighths of an inch. Now round it off, it could be a little bit bigger, but we'll stick with 7 eighths of an inch. Now the smallest that it could possibly be is 5 eighths of an inch, otherwise it will slip out between the posts. So you have a little bit of slack from 7 eighths of an inch to 5 eighths of an inch. So we'll draw a little circle the size of 7 eighths of an inch, and we would lay that out on our stick. We have drawn the quarter inch corners all the way around. So when they are our circle pattern, right in the center and mark, and that will mark over the top of your corner posts, of course, but that's immaterial, you're not going to carve there anyway, mark that all the way around. Now at the top of the circle pattern, make a straight mark and of course a stop mark up here where your spacer is, and the first project then is to empty out that space in between. Everything in between on the top has to be emptied out. To do that, we'll have to finish drawing our quarter inch mark on the side of our stick. We'll sketch, make a little marker as their edge. We want to get the top edge of our ball and lay it on there, space it about in the center, bound it with your pencil, and taking your knife, make stop cuts. This one is partly done already. We'll make stop cuts and cut down, first cutting out the corners, as we did before when we made our first attempt at doing interior carving, carved down so that you free up that corner post, and we have to do the same thing here. This is what we did in the beginning, we'll make a stop cut on each end and take out a little chip, and take out a little chip. Another stop cut, another slice, just keep repeating the process. Be careful not to take too big a chunk. We had a little accident there, see that little piece broke out? It was not supposed to do that. That's one of those flaws in the wood that I was talking about before. Now if this was a good project, we would recover that piece and glue it back in before we went any farther. That's another reason to always try to keep the top of your workbench fairly clean, because if you break something off and your wood chips are six inches deep, it's really hard to find something that's that small. If your workbench is fairly clean, then it's not too difficult. In this case it doesn't make a great deal of difference. Now we do the same thing on the other end, finish cleaning this out, make our stop cut, a slice, another slice, and we get down to where I went too far there. I want to do the first one up here on the top of the ball. You could do it on the other end too, it wouldn't make that much difference, except that you have to be very careful where the center of the ball is that you don't cut too deep. It's more prudent to empty out the top half above the ball first and then the bottom half we can do later. Once they have those those down, then it's a fairly simple task of making a slicing cut, taking out a chip, another slicing cut, take out a chip, make another slicing cut. And there we are through. And then we would do the same thing on the final side. And then finally of course what we have to do is just chip out the rest of this by making a little stop cuts on either end and you can clean out that space above the ball. Just small chips and just keep working away at it from side to side and we'll have to clean out these other corners anyway so we might as well do it now. Work that down, have the corner free before you know it and have that whole piece out of there. This is kind of putzy work, it takes a long time because you just have to get a little bit out of the time and you kind of have to break things loose and you don't want to spoil your carving as you're doing that so you have to be a little bit careful. But that's the key to doing good work all the way through is to be careful. Not much left, we just have to clean out the corner here and we can start working on our ball. Actually as you get more skilled you won't need this much room. You could probably in this space here you could probably carve two or three balls, one on top of the other but when we're beginning and it's nice to have a little bit of extra room. Learn how the knife works and how the wood lays and clean out the little corners. Now we have the whole top cleaned out and at this point we'll have to take our pencil and kind of carefully mark an X right in the center that will be the center of the top of our ball and of course that's easily done because you can sight across from post to post. What we're going to do now is to start to work on rounding the ball and we have our pattern I'm going to outline it here just the corners that we can work on it's going to be that all the way around so we can kind of cut the corner down like we did when we started on the end of the stick with our first ball we do the same thing all the way around like a little bit at a time it wouldn't hurt at all if you did like you did on your first ball if you made a center line right across the ball so that you wouldn't get confused and cut too far down on any one side we will just work the top of the ball just the way you did on the end of the stick except that you have corners that you're going to have to clean out and that's not going to be too difficult because as we do the bottom then we'll begin to round the ball in this direction also when we start on the bottom half of the ball then we will be working a little bit differently we'll make a stop cut on the bottom we'll clean out our bottom corners just like we did up above and then we will start cutting the bottom of the ball and working it down all the way around so that we cut down toward the center so that the ball is sitting on a peg afterwards you can actually cut that corner completely loose from the bottom of the ball all the way to the stop so that the ball is sitting on a big fat peg we'll do the same thing then on the other side we'll just work that down but I think you should have the idea while you do that then you do the same thing on the bottom half when you get these cleaned out then you would start carving your ball and as you round it off then you begin to carve down so that you take off that peg don't forget to use your gauge you can reach in there and you can gauge whether or not that's getting round and you can do the same thing on the sides as you're rounding that ball off when you get the bottom and the top and you can mark those off from the center of the ball and begin to round that off then it's easy enough to get in there and round off the top and the bottom of your ball just in case you don't get this done by the next show we will be able to finish up our ball clean out the corners first and always when you're doing this then you have a good solid stop so that you don't break anything out and so we're coming up to the end we'll have to finish this carving the ball project in our last session but if you want to get started on it work carefully take your time use the same skills that you learned on the first few projects and you will not have any trouble so until next time be careful keep your knife sharp and we'll see you there