Post #225711 by Bay Park Buzzy on Sat, Apr 8, 2006 10:00 AM

Thanks for all the nice comments and being so welcoming. Here is tiki #2. For this one I used Queen or coco? palms. This was when I still had no idea about what kind of wood to use. I found this type of tree to be limiting and frustrating. I originally dried out some test logs to see what kind of structure these logs were composed of. I found out that I could only use about two inches of the outer surface because the middle just kind of cracks and rots away. Orginally I tried to hollow them out but they warped and ended up being figure 8 shaped and unusable. So after discarding two or three futile attempts, I carved this tiki out of a dried log that seemed to hold its shape.

despite all the challenges in dealing with this type of wood, I did like they way that the texture and appearance of the log changed every eighth of an inch or so. Here's a close up:

For this attempt, I splurged and bought myself a dremel tool. I still did not have any chisels yet and the whole thing was carved with two different dremel bits. I messed up on the body so I removed it and hollowed out the inside.
I burned it with a hand wood burner and stained it with a floor sealer.


Each tiki I do I use as a learning experience. From my second attempt I learned the following(mostly the hard way):
#1 Using only a dremel tool took about 10 times as long as it should
#2 Using a hand wood burner is even slower than a dremel tool
#3 Spending more time prepping a log than carving it isn't much fun
#4 I hate being limited by the medium I'm using
#5 these type of logs have their own distinct charm, but I need to find something I can carve into deeper