Speaker A
[snorts] Oh. Hi. In the last video, we started work on this miter saw station.
Watch as Bourbon Moth Woodworking attempts hand carving on oak for a custom miter saw station, sharing challenges and creative solutions.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Hand carving on oak is challenging for beginners due to hardness and grain.
- Image transfer can be effectively done using tattoo stencil transfer paper and gel.
- Patience and practice are essential when learning new woodworking skills.
- Starting with softer woods is recommended for novice carvers.
- Creative problem solving and adapting techniques from other crafts can aid woodworking projects.
What the video covers
- The video continues the build of a custom miter saw station, focusing on adding hand-carved decorative elements.
- The creator has no prior wood carving experience but draws on past block printing carving skills.
- Oak is chosen for the project despite being a difficult wood for carving, adding to the challenge.
- The creator explores methods to transfer images onto wood, ultimately using tattoo stencil transfer paper and gel.
- Initial carving attempts reveal the difficulty and slow pace of working with oak and basic tools.
- The video documents trial, error, and learning in real-time, including equipment reviews and carving techniques.
- The creator emphasizes the skill involved in hand carving and openly shares failures and successes.
- Plans to complete multiple carved pieces for the station but acknowledges time and skill limitations.
- The video includes tips for beginners, such as starting with softer woods like basswood or poplar.
- Future videos will continue the project and finishing touches on the miter saw station.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Project Overview
- 01:15Challenges of Hand Carving with No Experience
- 02:21Design and Carving Concept Discussion
- 03:24Material Choice and Oak Carving Difficulties
- 05:42Image Transfer Methods Explored
- 06:54Tattoo Stencil Transfer Paper Setup
- 09:19First Image Transfer Test
- 10:38Carving Techniques and Tool Review
- 13:49Carving Progress and Challenges
- 18:29Project Wrap-up and Next Steps
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
And in this video, we're going to finish it. We're not going to finish it because I have ADD and I get distracted and I do crazy things.
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But, we are going to do something really cool that will advance the project forward a little bit more.
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So, let's do that. [music] So, I was looking at the overall design. Now, the next step after building all of our cabinet boxes naturally is to face everything in oak and do all the drawer faces and the cabinet doors, put a top
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on, and at that point, we could be done. And that would be the smart thing to do.
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But, I like to do things that are just self-punishment, I guess, is the best way to describe it. I was looking at the design and I thought what would be cool is if I added a little hand-carving element to fancy it up a little bit.
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There's just one problem. I've literally never done any sort of wood carving in my entire life.
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Now, when I say I've never done any wood carving in my entire life, that's completely true. I've never carved on wood before.
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But, it's not true to say I've never done any carving. In fact, my wife and I, before I was doing woodworking, we ran a printmaking business. And when we started that business, we actually started out doing hand-carved block
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prints. And I used to do all the carving myself. It was something I'd never done before at that time, but as I got into it and taught myself how to do it, I actually ended up really enjoying the
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meticulous hand carving process of carving out all of the different blocks. It was a lot of fun.
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But rubber is very easy to carve. It's soft, it does what you want it to, and well, I'm just doing a very flat surface so that we can transfer that image with ink onto something else.
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Where in wood carving, you're dealing with a much harder substrate. You got grain direction, and I don't want it just to be flat. I'd like it to have a little bit more dimension, which is a whole new ballgame, and it's
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probably a really bad idea to do this for a video because this could be a huge failure.
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So, here's what I'm thinking. If you take a look at the design, once I get it all trimmed out, I'm going to have these base trim pieces that are these big flat rectangles. And I thought that would be the perfect place to add a
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hand carved element. Now, the problem is, well, there's six of them along the front, and then there's two on each side. That makes 10 different flat surfaces.
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I don't even know how long it's going to take to carve. So, trying to do 10 hand carved images for the front of this thing seems like an insane challenge.
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But I'm kind of an insane person, so I'm just going to go for it. Now, there's a very good chance that I'm going to get partway into this and realize, nope, this isn't going to happen. Not that I'm
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going to give up on the carving, just that I am way too inexperienced with carving, not to mention I'm probably going to be really slow at it, and there's just no way I'm going to get 10 of these done in time for one video to
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put on the front of this. So, I'm just saying that up front. We might not make it through this.
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But like all my videos, they usually start out with me not knowing what I'm doing, and then we figure it out throughout the video. And I'm going to bring you guys along in that process.
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Just remember, I'm completely new to this. So, if you have any tips or suggestions or things that I'm doing wrong, I am all for it. Let me know down in the comment section.
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[laughter] I just thought it would probably be a good idea before I started to look up if oak is a good wood for carving. And this is what Google has to say on the matter.
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Oak wood is generally not recommended for beginners because it is very hard, heavy, and has uneven coarse grain that chips or splits easily.
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Well, that kind of sucks considering my entire project's out of oak. But, it's too late to change now. So, full send. But, maybe if you're going to attempt hand carving stuff at home, you should start with something softer like
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basswood or butternut or poplar. Basically, according to the internet, anything but oak. Which is what I'm going to try and do.
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10 blocks of wood. I mean, how hard can that be? Now, I cut these down longer than I need them to be because I obviously have to miter them and everything. The plan is to do my individual carvings, and then when I get
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to trimming them out, I can just use these pieces to trim out those front pieces.
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Right? This could be a bad idea. Okay. I got all of my blocks cut. Now, am I going to be able to carve 10 of these? I don't know. Maybe we'll be lucky if there's just one hand carved
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thing. Challenge number two is getting the image I want to carve onto the wood so that I can carve it out. Now, when I used to do block printing, the way that I would transfer the image onto the
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block, well, I would just sketch out the image by hand with a pencil, and then if you laid the pencil drawing down onto the block and you etched the back, it would just naturally transfer the image onto the
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block and you could carve it out. You could essentially do the exact same thing with the wood, I think. This is the image that I want to carve onto the block. I made it bigger so that you could see it. So, obviously
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not going to be that big. But, you could go over this image by hand with a pencil and then lay it face down, etch the back, and it probably would transfer it pretty good onto the block.
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But, I got to do 10 of these and I want to make sure that they're perfect. So, I was trying to think of another way that I could easily transfer an image onto a block. Now, the easiest way would be if
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you had a laser or somebody you were friends with that had a laser, you could give them the image, take the blocks over there, they could just put it on there with a laser, and then you could carve it out.
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I don't have a laser and I hardly have any friends. So, I had to come up with another solution and that's when I started thinking, you know, I've gotten a lot of tattoos over the years and when you go
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in for a tattoo, they come up with the image, they put it on this magic stencil paper, they put a liquid on your arm, they lay the paper down, and it transfers the stencil onto the arm or whatever body part you're getting
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tattooed, so the tattoo artist can follow the stencil and give you a tattoo. So, I was like, maybe I could just get that same paper and use that on wood.
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So, after a quick search on Amazon, I found this guy. Now, this is a tattoo stencil printer. That's what it's advertised as on Amazon.
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And it comes with this special tattoo stencil transfer paper. What you got to do is you got to tear off this back yellow sheet like this.
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And then you load it into the printer like this and close the lid. All right, the printer comes with this app. You can upload your own image.
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There's a bunch of stock images in the app. You can take a photo and turn it into a stencil.
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You load it into the app. You press print. And it just magically puts the image onto the transfer paper.
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And just like that, we got a transferable image. Now, I tried this originally with just using water 'cause I thought like, oh, it's like a temporary tattoo. So, I got some water and I stuck put water on the surface of the wood and
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then I tried to transfer this. And it did not work at all. Then, I did some more research and realized that you actually need a transfer gel that goes with the paper.
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So, back on Amazon, I bought this tattoo artist transfer gel. It comes in a little like deodorant stick.
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You put this all over the wood or your skin and then it allows it to transfer properly. But, since we're going to be carving this out and we want it to be uniform, I got to make sure I get this right in the center of this
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piece. So, these are exactly 8 in. So, 4 in is the center. But, my board is only going to come up 4 in. That's how big my piece of trim is. So, I don't want it going past that.
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I only did one test of this with the tr
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this lined up if I cut this down so I'm not dealing with a full sheet of paper.
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Got this JessEm ruler and I'm just going to put some lines right there from the transfer paper onto the wood and then I'm just going to kind of roughly trace out the shape of this.
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Now for the delicate part. Going to take my transfer gel. It's nice to see that it doesn't remove the pencil marks.
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Just like a tattoo artist. Make sure you rub over all of the image places.
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Like I know what I'm talking about. And then once you feel like you got it all you just got to peel it up.
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And just like that I got my image transferred onto my wood and it looks pretty nice and even.
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Now I just got to carve it out. I don't know if anybody else is using a tattoo printer to transfer images onto wood to carve them out but it made sense to me and it honestly works really well. And the cool thing is
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you can literally do any image you want. So I'll put a link not sponsored at all.
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I just found this on Amazon but I'll put a link for the printer. It's only like 125 bucks which isn't bad if you do a lot of carving and it came with 100 sheets of transfer paper and the gel is like $4.
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Now there's a couple different ways that you can carve. Say this is our image.
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You do a relief carving which basically is you leave the image as you see it and you carve out all of the background. So you drop the background down below and you make the image stand out.
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Then there's something called a sunken relief carving. That's where you basically do the opposite. You carve out the image into the flat surface and that is your image. It's just carved into, in our case, oak.
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I think it'll look cooler if I do a true relief carving, so I remove all of the white background.
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I think that's going to be harder, but I mean, why not? The other thing is that the size of this is so small.
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I'm going to have to be very, very delicate. And I don't know how this oak is going to carve because the internet told me I was an idiot for using oak.
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I don't know. All right. I don't know if this is a thing, but I made a little jig so that I could hold this piece firm when I'm carving.
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Make sense? Now, because I don't know what I'm doing and I've never carved before, I did what any novice person would do. I got on Amazon and I bought a carving set.
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I will also put a link for this down in the video description. Don't know if it's a good one. Wasn't super expensive, but it came with all sorts of little carving tools. Think the trick here is going to be keeping things sharp because
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well, oak is very hard. Along with this carving set, I actually have this one. I picked this up when I was in Japan not knowing I was going to do this project, but these are really cool. These are
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some sort of carving chisels. Saw them in a woodworking store in Japan. Not sure their exact intended purpose other than, obviously, carving, but they are very sharp and it was just a cool box and set of chisels, so I had to get
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them. And then, of course, I got some like random chisels. I mean, I got chisels all over the place. So, I'm sure between all this stuff I can at least do some damage.
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And if all else fails, I have the Shaper Origin, so I'll just CNC it out. No, we're not going to fail.
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We're going to do this. Enough procrastinating. Let's get to carving. [music] [music] Okay, real talk.
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The chisels I bought on Amazon suck. These ones. I will not put a link in the video description. They're garbage.
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The ones from Japan, not surprisingly, uh cut really nice. All that aside, this is going to take for flipping ever.
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I mean, I'm sure if you knew what you were doing, half of it right now is just learning how the chisels going to react with the wood.
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Long process. But, I don't know. I don't I don't know. We'll see. [music] [music] Oh.
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My back already hurts. I got all of the free space around the stuff lightly carved out. I'm going to have to go over it again and go deeper.
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I'm starting to think there's no way in hell that I'm going to get 10 of these done though, because this one is going to take me like all day.
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Man, people who carve, hats off to you, man. You guys are skilled. It's a lot harder than it looks.
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[music] [music] [music] [music] [music] Well, I have the image all carved out. I won't say it's the prettiest thing ever. I mean, I got the detail pretty good. It's just the oak is so freaking hard to carve.
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Google was right. I'm really curious how much easier it would be on a softer wood, probably significantly. The other problem is the grain. It just if you don't cut it just right, it wants to tear out all over the place.
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I'm just going to call it right now and say there's no way that I'm doing 10 of these.
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My goal, I think, is one. [laughter] I'm going to try and get this one as good as I can.
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It's been a learning experience. And then, maybe I'll figure out a more practical way to carve out the rest of them.
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But for now, try and get this thing cleaned up. Well, sh- I'd like to think I don't have a lot of epic failures, but this is definitely a huge failure.
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I thought that I carved all this plenty deep to lightly sand over the top. I had the whole image carved out. I thought, "I'll just lightly sand, and then I can see it, and then I'll fine-tune all the
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detail." I barely touched it with that sander, and it looks like trash. Pretty much took away all of the detail.
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I really suck at this carving thing. So, now what? Plan B, I guess. But, that's the question. What is plan B?
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The oak was a failure. I think it was a multitude of things. All right, number one, oak is ridiculously hard to carve, and I'm a beginner, okay? I'm sure that an expert carver would have done a fantastic job.
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An expert carver, I am not. Number two, not only is it oak, it's rift-sawn oak, which just makes matters so much worse.
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So, that was probably a really dumb thing for me to try carving for the very first time on.
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So, I think for the sake of the project, the only real solution with time and everything is to upload that file into Shaper Origin, and carve it out with the Shaper.
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But, I refuse to be defeated by this wood carving task, because more than anything else, I really just wanted to learn a new skill.
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So, I'm going to try this again. But, this time I'm going to use walnut, which from what I understand should be a lot easier to carve. I mean, ideally I'd use something like basswood or butternut, something super soft. But I
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don't have any of that. So, walnut it is. And if I screw up this time, well, guess I'll just have to do it a third time.
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[music] [music] Would you look at that? The funny thing is that this one on walnut took me about 35 minutes.
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On the white oak, it took me about 2 hours. Maybe more. It is crazy what a difference it makes with a easier to carve wood.
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With this walnut, you can actually move the skew around in different directions and just kind of lift it up and the wood pops free. It doesn't tear out. You could not do that with the oak. So, this was much much easier.
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The only problem is my flipping workbench is not made out of walnut. It is made out of oak. And I know some of you were like, "Why don't you do some walnut accents?" Cuz I don't like mixing wood like that.
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So, I'm going to keep practicing carving cuz it's a lot of fun and I am going to figure out some way to implement this into a project at some point.
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It's just not going to be this project. It's going to be a project that I make out of a softer wood.
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Yes. [music] [music] [music] Well, technology it makes things much faster and easier. Kind of easier. It's still took a really long time to get the file on the program, get it to cut right uh each one of these because I have to use such a
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small bit to get the detail takes about 45 minutes to cut out. But, as you can see, it's pretty perfect.
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But, I didn't want perfect. I really wanted it to kind of have a hand-carved look. So, after cutting these out, I had an idea. If you look at this from lower down, you can see that it's just a very flat
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look. Now, when you look at it like this, it doesn't look too bad, but I really wanted it to have more depth than that. That's the whole reason behind hand-carving it out.
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[snorts] So, what I've been doing is taking this image after it's cut on the shaper and hand-carving on top of it to give it more of a handmade look. So, these leaves, for example, if you go in and
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you just very carefully kind of start to shave them down and change them from sitting all on the same plane to just rounding over the edges, sloping them down towards the background a little bit more, changing all the heights,
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you can really give everything more of a hand-carved look. So, you can go from this one, which I barely carved and you can see is like very flat on the top, to something like this, which has a lot more depth,
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has a more hand-carved look, even though I did most of the work over on the Shaper Origin.
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[music] [music] Am I still a huge failure who didn't do what they said they were going to do at the beginning of the video and obviously isn't very good at carving? Yes, absolutely. But, like all of my videos, we have a
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problem, we figure out a solution, and I think this is a pretty good solution.
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It's the equivalent of getting a coloring book versus freehand drawing something. The lines are all there, you just got to kind of make it your own. It is a good practice in carving. I mean, you still got to be really careful. The
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nice thing about this is you can, for the most part, just go with the grain, which makes it a lot easier on the rift-sawn oak, but I think it gives it a pretty cool look. It's a lot faster.
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Takes about 45 minutes for me to carve one of these out, but in that time, I can do all the hand carving while one is rocking on the Shaper Origin. So, I was able to get six of these done last
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night. Only got four more to go. And that's that. And then we can move on to actually finishing the miter saw station, which, of course, will be the next video.
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So, this isn't exactly the way that I wanted it to turn out at the beginning of the video.
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But, we're getting it done. And I think it's going to be a cool element to fancify the miter saw station. I know that sounds a little ridiculous. Like, why make your miter saw super fancy?
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Because I'm in a wood shop and I can do what I want. That's why.
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Uh I'll put some links in the video description if you saw anything that you want to check out. And if you're not signed up for our Patreon, you should go over and sign up for that because you get a bunch of behind-the-scenes
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footage. You'll see me fail a lot more than you normally do in videos cuz I show everything over there. We do a biannual Patreon contest where twice a year you could win a chance for me to come out to your shop and build a
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project along with you. And we do an annual Patreon summit where we invite all of our patrons to one spot. It's going to be in Portland, Oregon this year with a special meet-up at my shop.
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So, if you're signed up on Patreon, you can come hang out at here for a night.
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So, go do it. Unless you're a serial killer, then please don't sign up and come kill me or my family.
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Okay. That's it for now. [snorts] Back to carving. Oh hi. This video is sponsored by our good friends over [music] at Squarespace.
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Speaker A
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Speaker A
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Topics:miter saw stationwoodworkinghand carvingoak carvingtattoo stencil transferDIY woodworkingwood carving toolsbeginner woodworkingBourbon Moth Woodworkingwoodworking project
