Advanced Carving: Venice Room 76

A wood carving vise is only as useful as the angles it lets you reach, and the one holding my small pieces is an inexpensive Bessey clamp vise from Home Depot, mounted on a block that sits inside my Veritas carver's vise. Two vises, one inside the other. In workshop 76 of the Venice Room I showed the whole thing on camera while I carved a small separate piece for the room.

You don't have to spend a lot here. I said it straight on the recording: you really don't have to buy an expensive vise. A little modification, and a cheap one works just fine.

Is your piece too small to clamp down? Does it need turning every few minutes while you carve, so you can reach each side? Should the finished part stay unmarked? Then look at how this setup is put together, piece by piece, and copy what fits your shop.

The small piece setup in a few lines

• A cheap clamp vise rides inside the big carver's vise.

• The block it sits on carries a Veritas plate on its back, and those plates come in two sizes.

• Thick leather lines the jaws.

• A waste handle shaved to eight sides clamps at any angle, which four sides would not allow.

• Pipe jaws below give a second grip.

• Setting the work lower than the metal keeps a slipping gouge from ever touching steel.

Does a carvers vise have to be expensive?

No. The Veritas is the real carver's vise in this setup, and it stays. But the small vise that actually grips the piece is a Bessey I bought at Home Depot. It is not expensive at all, and after one change to its jaws it holds solid.

How solid? I clamped the handle and said so while the camera rolled: it's really, really solid. I can apply a little more pressure if I need to, and I can work on it with no problem.

A vise made for carving rotates. My words on the recording were plain: just because it's a carver's vise, I can always rotate to whatever position I need. A normal clamp vise like the Bessey only grips. So the big vise does the turning and the little one does the gripping.

That split is the whole idea of this page. Already own a carver's vise? Then the second one costs very little. Without one, you can still start with the cheap clamp vise on a block and grow into the rest.

How does a vise sit inside another vise?

Through a block of wood. The back of that block carries a Veritas plate, which is what the carver's vise is made to take. Veritas is the tool line of Lee Valley. The brand wins me over for a reason I gave on camera: you can buy the plates separately, three inch and two inch ones, about 76 and 51 mm.

I keep spares, and several are already mounted on different pieces. The cheap vise went on the front of the same block. It comes off anytime. The block itself goes into the Veritas, and now a small piece sits in a vise that can swing to wherever I need it.

I use that same block for small details on other jobs too. And it is one of several. I've got multiple jigs I use like that.

The big vise stands on a sheet of plywood held by a couple of small clamps, on what is really a bank of drawers. The pillar page for this course, the Part 7 overview, tells more about that tower, so I will leave it there.

Why glue leather inside the jaws?

Leather lets me put a piece in the vise that is already partly carved. Steel jaws would bruise it. I glued really thick pieces of leather inside, and I used the clear Gorilla Glue, the kind that does not foam.

Lined like that, my jaws can hold the handle or a somewhat finished part of the design. It still grips solid. The leather is only there to keep steel away from wood that is already carved.

Why shave the handle into an octagon?

A square handle only clamps four ways. If I would have only four sides, I said, I would be limited to clamp in just those positions. With eight sides, I can clamp it at whatever angle I want.

I did it with a number one chisel, a straight one, just taking off the corners of the handle. Nothing fussy. A chisel isn't required either, by the way. A knife would work.

Is it strictly needed? Not really, and I told you that too. Even with a square handle, the carver's vise rotates, so I could still get round the piece. I still called the eight sides a good idea, and said they would help me a lot.

Why leave a handle on the piece at all?

The handle is what the vise holds. When I sawed it out, I left one end untouched as waste, on purpose, so I could clamp it easily. Later on I chop that part out. I called that handle one of the secrets of Grinling Gibbons style carving, and said it is really important for holding the piece in the vise.

Which end becomes the handle matters. My design faces one side, and the back of the piece will sit against the carving it goes into. So the handle had to stay on the side closer to that main body. The other side was waste, so off it came.

I also left about a quarter inch, roughly 6 mm, of extra wood in one spot. Gouges take that off easier than a saw would.

What is the pipe jaw on a clamp vise for?

The Bessey has a second set of jaws below the main ones, shaped to hold a pipe. That is part of what I like about this vise. The handle can go down in that pipe jaw and clamp there, and it gives me some stability too.

Why mount the plate off to one side of the block?

Room. Here I mounted the plate closer to one side, and that gives me an advantage. I can change how I clamp the secondary vise to the block, and nothing gets in my way while I work.

How do you keep a gouge off the metal?

Be careful not to hit the metal part if you set it up like me. Be wise about it.

What I did was lower the piece down a little, below the jaws, so that even if my tool slips it goes underneath and never touches the vise. Then I turned it back and carried on. A small habit. Sharpening, the hardest part of this whole craft, has a course of its own.

What about the clamps and the dowel with holes?

Those hold the plywood the big vise stands on. The small clamps are Bessey too, which I called a German brand, and they are not holding too good. But they're okay. Midway through the channel I stopped carving just to show them to you.

They grip around a dowel that has holes drilled all along its side, from every direction. Any clamp can go into any hole, and so can any jig or any plate I need to attach. I hold my furniture panel on that workbench with exactly the same system.

What does this setup let you carve?

Most of it, from every side. After repositioning the piece I said it out loud: I love that it lets me attack and work on the piece from any point. I also said the setup is good for 3D carving. It even helped the camera: when I was carving on a side you could not see, I looked for a new position so you could.

My first tool was a number nine, 20 mm, and I started carving a channel down the inside of the piece. I kept paying attention to the grain, how it runs, and I carved with it. The mallet brought some vibration when I helped myself with it. It doesn't bug me.

I left about 20 mm, three quarters of an inch, on one side of that channel and about the same, 19 or 20 mm, on the other. The channel runs down to roughly half an inch, about 13 mm, above the bottom. Not all the way. The leaves will fold both ways out of it, with some waviness, and the main stem lives deep inside, so the channel had to be as deep as I could get it. Sawing that whole waste section away on the scroll saw or a band saw was an option too. The leaves are meant to fold, coming out from inside the channel and opening up, and I called it a really interesting project.

I did not want to rush it, and I did not want to take too much wood yet either. The channel mattered more to me than the outside shape. Partway through I turned the piece a different direction, because that way it was easier to work, and the vise let me do it. From there it went little by little, and that is how I said it too.

Then I switched to a smaller number 11 veiner, 10 mm. Sometimes, for work like that, smaller tools are actually better than big ones. If you feel too much resistance, it's a good idea to switch to a smaller tool, and I went down again to 7 mm.

Why carve a separate piece at all?

I could have carved this spot out of the solid like most of the room. I left it on purpose for the school. I wanted to show the Grinling Gibbons way, a secondary layer carved apart and then glued inside a cavity. On camera I put it as plain as I could: he just did multiple layers, sticking on inside, gluing, and so on.

The piece came from an offcut, two inch eight quarter stock, about 50 mm, left from the ceiling part. The wood is basswood, and it will be painted, so I did not care which way the grain ran. On a stain grade job I would have picked a different piece. The Grinling Gibbons class goes much deeper into his work than one workshop can.

I traced around the cavity so the piece would roughly repeat that shape, then took it to the scroll saw. It does not have to be perfect. I could have sawn the twisted back face too, but I don't like how much dust that makes. A stem with some leaves and no flowers, and I told my students it could be a project on its own, set on an oak background just as well. When I first held it up to the cavity it looked a little too tall. That's not even a problem, since the height is easy to fix.

Who is this setup for?

Anyone who carves small parts. No shop full of machines is needed for it, and no new bench either. One block with a plate, a cheap vise with leather in its jaws, and a handle with eight sides make up the whole setup.

If your pieces are big, height matters more than grip, and the lift lesson covers that. If a piece is too small or too fragile even for this, gluing it down to a board is the other road. And if you want to know which tools go into the channel once it is held, the tools course is where I would start you.

Workshop 76 sits between workshop 75 and workshop 77, a few steps past workshop 74, where I talked about paint. Earlier in this same workshop I finished the flowers off camera, because I had already shown that on the Hashemi flowers and explaining it again would take too long. The room itself started long before, and Part 6 is right behind this one.

Would you like to see the handle get its eight sides? Want to watch the piece swing round while the big vise turns? Every workshop in the school sits behind one tuition plan, and the map of every lesson is open to anybody first. If you have never held a gouge, start here.

Shall we carve?