Lift for Wood Carving

Work you cannot reach is work you will carve badly. I put the piece up on a cabinet lift, lock it into a carver's vise, and line the jaws with leather so nothing I already carved gets crushed. Then both hands belong to the gouge.

Have you ever finished a long day bent over a bench with your shoulders burning? Stood on your toes to reach the top of a panel? I did that for years before I fixed it, and the fix was not a better gouge.

What to fix first

• Bring the wood up to your hands instead of bending your back down to meet the wood.
• My lift is a cabinet lifter. Sold for hanging kitchen cabinets, never meant for carving at all.
• A carver's vise turns the piece so you can reach three sides instead of two.
• Glue thick leather inside the jaws. Steel on a carved surface leaves a mark you cannot sand out.
• A twenty dollar Bessey vise does most of this once you screw it to a block.
• Keep two or three tools on the bench. Not thirty.

What is a carving lift, and do you need one?

A carving lift is a post with a crank that raises your work to whatever height you want. Mine came out of cabinet work. A Gil-Lift, sold for hanging upper kitchen cabinets, and I used it that way for years before the day I set a carving on it instead. Nobody at that company was thinking about carving when they built it.

It was never built for carving.

You do not have to have one. I want to say that plainly, because I am not selling you a lift. I found it is an excellent piece of equipment and I use it all the time. Which is different from telling you it is required.

Why does the height of the work decide how well you carve?

Your arms work well inside one narrow band and badly everywhere else. Raise the lift to any level you like and details that were out of reach come to you. The top of a big carving can sit above your eyes while the block stands on a bench, and then you are carving blind, by feel, on the part everybody looks at first.

I carved some big pieces this way. There are photographs of them online, and what none of the photographs show is that half of that work happened at a height I picked on a crank.

Plain ergonomics, and carvers ignore it for a hundred years, then wonder why their backs are finished at sixty.

Can you sit down and still carve properly?

Yes, and the chair turned out to be the best thing that lift ever gave me. Some days my back tells me that today is a sitting day, and rather than argue with it I wind the work down until it meets me where I already am, and the carving does not suffer one bit for that.

A chair is not weakness. It is arithmetic about how many hours are left in your hands.

What actually holds the wood?

A carver's vise holds it, and the lift only carries the vise. The two jobs are separate and people mix them up. I use a Veritas carver's vise. It mounts on a piece of plywood that I hold down with a couple of small clamps, and that plywood is fastened to my tabletop. I should be honest about that tabletop. That tabletop is not a real bench. Drawers.

Those drawers have held every panel I have carved in this shop for years. A real bench would be nicer to look at. It would not carve any better.

Why bolt a plate to the back of the block?

The plate is what lets the vise grab your work without the vise ever touching your work. On the backside of the block of wood I mount a plate. Veritas sells them separately in two inch and three inch, and I keep several, each one already mounted on a different block. For a big heavy chunk the three inch plate comes out, screws about two and a half inches long, because the front of that piece gets carved away and the weight shifts as you go.

Then the block drops into the vise head and comes back out when I want the bench clear.

Why glue leather into a metal jaw?

Steel prints itself into a carving and leather does not. I glued mine in thick, straight onto the faces of the clamp vise, using really heavy pieces of clamp vise. The glue matters here more than people expect. I used clear Gorilla Glue, not the regular one, because the regular polyurethane kind foams up and pushes the leather off while it dries.

With the leather in there I can hold a piece that is already shaped and still put real pressure on it. Solid. And if it is a finished design piece, not just a handle, it comes out unmarked.

Leather is cheap. Carvings are not.

Think about what you are asking those jaws to do. Hold hard enough that a mallet blow does not shift the piece, on a surface that already has undercuts and thin edges in it. Steel cannot do both jobs at once. Leather can.

Can a twenty dollar vise really do this job?

Mine does, and I want you to hear the number. Mine is a Bessey from Home Depot, about twenty dollars, a normal clamp vise, nothing special. A little modification and it works just fine. You really do not have to buy an expensive vise to start carving properly.

It stays mounted to a block, comes off whenever I want the bench clear, and that same block does duty for small detail work.

I am not getting paid by anybody to say that, and I want it on the record. The number is just the number.

How do you clamp a round handle at any angle?

You shave the round part down to eight flats first. Take any straight chisel, a number one is what I reach for, and knock the corners off until the section is octagonal. A knife works too.

The two minutes are worth spending. With four sides you are limited to clamping in those four positions. Once it is octagonal I can clamp it at whatever angle I want.

Professional carvers do this to handles constantly and never mention it, the way nobody mentions tying a shoe.

Why does reaching three sides matter?

Carve only from the front and the result looks like a photograph of a carving. With the piece up on the plate I can attack all three sides. If I place it just flat on the bench I can carve two sides, and I am not going to be able to see what is going on at the back at all.

I will admit the setup is a little flimsy on a tall block, and it is hard to film over. It is still the only way I have found to get at everything. This is how Grinling Gibbons worked too, in layers, gluing pieces on and carving them in the round.

That is the whole argument for the plate.

A trained eye goes to the back of a carving first, which is exactly the part a flat bench hides from you.

Is there a second grip most people never find?

A second grip sits directly under the main screw, and almost nobody finds it. My vise carries a jaw for pipe down there, so the block drops in and clamps the way a plumber clamps pipe. That is stability the top jaws never manage alone. Cast right into the body of the tool, and most carvers never once think to look down.

I also mount the plate closer to one side of the block instead of dead centre. Sounds fussy. It means I can swing the second vise round to another position and nothing is in my way when the gouge has to come in low.

What do you do when the wood fights the tool?

Change to a smaller tool before you change to more force. When I feel too much resistance I stop and pick something narrower, maybe seven millimetres, and the same carving that was fighting me goes quiet. A wide sweep has to move a lot of fibre at once, and all of that load travels through your wrist and through whatever is holding the wood.

Poor holding shows itself right here. Locked down properly, you feel the wood. When it rocks you feel the fixture instead, and then you push harder to make up the difference, which is how edges chip and how hands slip.

What carries the vise itself?

A drilled plate and a handful of small clamps carry it. I have holes drilled all along the side of my bench, so a clamp goes in from almost any direction and carries whatever jig or plate the job needs. Those clamps are Bessey too, a German brand, and on their own they do not hold all that well. Backed by the holes they are plenty.

The same system holds my furniture panel when I am working flat, so I am not building a new fixture every time a job changes shape.

What does it cost, and what do you give up?

Each way of holding work buys you something and takes something away. Here is how they compare in my shop.

How many tools belong on the bench while you work?

Two or three. Five if the job is awkward. I own something close to half a thousand gouges, and laying that collection out across a bench would cost me twenty minutes a day hunting through my own tools. A few stay close. The rest live in the storage unit and I walk over for them.

My bench is not a display case.

Lay them with the edge pointing toward yourself, which sounds backwards until you have tried it. You read the sweep stamped on the blade at a glance, which matters because not every maker marks them the same way, and when you pick the tool up the blade is already travelling away from your hand.

That second reason is the one that matters at the end of a long day. You are not rotating a live edge past your own forearm forty times an hour.

Leave a hand width of space between them as well. You are going to grab one in a hurry with a mallet in your other hand, and a crowded bench is how people open their thumbs.

Does any of this change on a small carving?

Less than you would expect. A small piece still wants to sit near your eyes and still wants to turn. What changes is the size of everything, so the plate drops to two inches and the block gets light enough to lift with one hand. A small block sits ready with its own plate for exactly that.

Fingers are not a vise.

The mistake I watch people make is holding small work in their fingers because it looks easier. Your thumb is behind the wood and the gouge is coming toward it. Put it in the vise.

Where does this leave somebody just starting?

Start with the vise and the leather, and forget the lift for now. A twenty dollar clamp vise, a scrap of basswood screwed to a plate, and thick leather in the jaws will carry you through your first relief panels and your first acanthus leaf. The lift is what you buy when the pieces get big enough to fight you.

Get the holding right and the rest of the school starts to make sense. The sharpening course gives you the edge. Where the lines actually belong is the design course, and what to buy runs through the rest of this tools course, which also carries a full lesson on bench organization and another on choosing tools. Then the bevel for hardwood. Back bent tools and scrapers each get their own. The holding shows up doing real work in acanthus over moldings and in the Byzantine acanthus. New to all of it? Start here.

Shall we carve?