Carving Hashemi Flowers 44

You can, and the tool that goes is almost always the smallest one you own. I say it out loud twice in this lesson. Please do not break your tool. Losing one is possible. Feel how far the edge will travel before you ask it to travel further.

Ever heard that dry tick from inside a cut? Then found half a millimetre of steel sitting in the chip?

It happens in the same place every time, and the place is not a mystery. Lesson 44 of the Hashemi flowers panel works petal by petal down a peony with a gouge narrower than pencil lead, driven into end grain, in a corner with no room. Those three together are the whole recipe.

What goes wrong

• The small ones break. Number eleven at point five has almost nothing supporting its edge.
• One forced pass is what snaps them. Several light ones arrive in the same spot.
• Levering the chip sideways loads the tip in the one direction it cannot take.
• Breakages cluster in two places: end grain, and tight inside corners.
• A dull edge needs pressure, and pressure does the damage.
• Go back to the V tool while it still fits, and only then step down.

Can you break a wood carving tool?

Easily, on the small ones. I tell you plainly in this lesson that the area I am working is a tricky area and you can break your tools there, and I add that I do not want to break mine either.

Nobody snaps a half inch number seven. The tools that go are the ones doing the fine work: a number eleven veiner at one millimetre, then the same profile at half of that width. There is barely any steel supporting that edge. The profile is a U narrower than the line a pencil draws, and it goes into the deepest, tightest, least helpful place on the whole flower.

What actually breaks it?

Asking for the whole depth in one pass. One habit sits behind most broken tips, and there it is.

My own instruction in the video is short: it is better to make multiple passes. Feel how deep you can go. A micro veiner has a working depth of a few millimetres before the shoulders of the cut start gripping the sides of the tool, and past that point every extra millimetre of pressure goes into bending steel rather than removing wood. The wood does not tell you when you crossed the line. The tool does, once.

Does levering the chip break tools?

Second great cause, and in this lesson I catch myself doing it and name it out loud.

Crank it out, hook it out, hoik it if you like the British word. The chip is already severed and sitting in the trench, so it feels harmless to twist the tool and flick it clear. A gouge is built to take load along its length. Twisting loads the tip across its width instead, which is the one direction a tapered U profile has no answer for. Down a deep flower groove the chip is often wedged, so the lever arm is long and the feedback arrives too late.

Why is end grain so hard on small tools?

Fibres stand up to meet the edge instead of lying along it. On this flower there is end grain on two sides, and I say so every time I reach it.

Cutting with the grain, the edge slips between fibres. Across the end of them, it has to sever every one, and resistance climbs immediately. Which is why a bigger gouge is worse there, not better: more edge in contact means more force needed, and I switch down a size whenever the resistance builds. There is one consolation. End grain in this wood takes a darker, richer colour than the face, and it looks beautiful. Carving detail in end grain covers the technique properly.

Does a dull tool break more often?

Yes, and by a wide margin, because a dull edge makes you supply the difference in force.

A sharp veiner enters on its own weight and a little push. Let that same edge go and you start leaning on it, then twisting it to free a chip it should have released by itself. Every one of those habits is a breaking habit. This flower never meets sandpaper, so the cuts have to come off the tool clean anyway, which means the edge has to be right before the tool touches wood. Sharpening is not a separate chore from not breaking tools. The two are one job.

The places where a tool actually breaks, and the reason

How deep does the veiner actually need to go?

Until you cannot see where the cut ends. That sounds like a flourish and it is a literal instruction.

My goal on every petal join here is a trench so deep that nobody finds the bottom of it. I take the V tool round first, and the moment the V stops fitting I move to the one millimetre veiner, then finish with the smallest one in the roll. What that buys is an illusion worth the risk: from above, each petal looks like a separate piece glued on. It is not. The whole flower is one piece of wood, and the grain proves as much if you look, but the joins read as joins because the shadow runs out of light before it runs out of trench.

Should you carve deep where nobody will look?

Underneath, yes, and I get asked this every time somebody watches me do it.

You are right that the eye will never catch it. Light will. Light travels into the space under a petal and comes back as shadow, and the deeper that space runs the better the flower reads from a distance. So I excavate from below on petals whose undersides face a wall. You do not have to. Concaves and convexes sets out what those shapes are doing to the light.

What about breaking the carving itself?

The other half of the risk, and on this lesson it worries me more than the steel does.

Late in the hour I make a curl on one petal and then say something I mean: I have to control myself not to overdo it, because if I overdo it I can break it. A petal that has been hollowed from above, undercut from below and separated on both sides has very little wood left holding it. How thin a carved leaf should go answers the same question for foliage, and the number is smaller than people expect.

Which tools do I reach for in this range?

Veiners in the number eleven profile, one millimetre and point five, a number three and a number five for blending, a number nine for the deeper hollows, and a knife for most of the cleaning.

Pfeil numbering is what I quote, since it is what sits on my bench. Ashley Iles make the micro tools I like best for flowers, and Henry Taylor cover the same sweeps. For the very smallest work, Dockyard make small tools I rate for flower work. None of them survives being levered by a careless hand.

What do you do when one does break?

Regrind it. A broken veiner comes back a few millimetres shorter and perfectly usable.

A snapped tip is not a dead tool. You lose a few millimetres of length and the profile has to be reshaped and honed back to a working edge, which takes an evening. What you cannot recover is the carving it broke into, because a tip left buried in a deep flower trench has to come out somehow, and there is no gentle way to dig for it. The real cost sits right there, which is why the habit matters more than the tool. What to do when you make a mistake carving takes the wider version of this.

Does any of this get easier?

The hands learn it. You stop finding the limit by crossing it and start feeling it half a millimetre early.

Carving lime or basswood helps, because it takes a micro gouge more kindly than oak or walnut ever will. Beyond that it is repetition. Go and look at the flowers in the V and A sculpture rooms and think about how many trenches like these are behind one panel, all carved by somebody who had learned exactly where the steel gives up.

Does carving against the grain break tools?

Not on its own. What breaks tools is what a carver does about it.

I work against the grain several times in this lesson and say out loud that it is fine. You can even hear it: the sound changes, and my cut stays clean anyway. Sometimes I can attack the same spot from the other side and get a cleaner result, and sometimes the shape simply will not let me. The danger is not the direction. The danger is the extra pressure a carver adds when the tool starts to tear, because pressure is the thing that snaps a tip. Change the angle, change the side, or change the tool. Whether carvers have a favourite gouge is the same argument about habit.

Is there any warning before one goes?

After enough of them, yes. The instruction I give is exactly that: feel how deep you can go.

What you are feeling for is the moment the tool stops removing wood and starts wedging. The sound goes dead, the chip stops curling away, and the handle begins to push back instead of travelling. Everything after that point is stored energy in the steel. New carvers miss it because they are watching the carving. Watch the handle instead, or close your eyes on one pass and just listen. Whether to wiggle a gouge as it cuts covers the other half of what the hand should be doing.

Why keep going back to the knife?

It survives what a veiner will not, and on this flower I pick it up again and again.

A knife has a wide, thick blade behind its edge, so it takes twisting and prying that would finish a micro gouge. It blends, it cleans, it takes a preliminary shape, and it does most of the work between petals that does not actually need a trench. My habit through this lesson runs the same way every time: knife first for the form, veiner only for the last few millimetres where nothing else fits. Fewer minutes on the fragile tool means fewer chances to break it.

Why risk a tool on something nobody will see?

Knowing it is there is the whole reason. Not a noble answer, just a true one, and I say it twice while my hands are on the work.

One petal in this lesson gets a curl worked into its edge that is almost invisible from above. I take the finest veiner into a fragile spot to do it, which is exactly the situation where tools break, and I do it anyway. Small details like that make me happy. Every curl of that kind creates a movement in the light that a flat petal never gives you, and enough of them together are the difference between a carved flower and a shape. Tool steel is replaceable. An afternoon of your attention is not.

What this lesson leaves you with

One ring of a peony, every petal shaped on its own, and trenches between them deep enough to swallow the light. Also a small correction I make on camera, because I said a thirty second of an inch and the tool was actually point five.

Then it goes further down. The vanishing point cut takes the same idea past what a veiner alone can reach, and the hardest flower to carve is where this peony began.

Shall we carve?