Howdy y'all.
Kia ora Hewey, loki & GMan (Im getting there!) Its nice to be here!
Loki: Im sure there are at least a couple of beers, beds & guides to show you around if you make it down these parts!
*Not gonna muck around, heading straight into...
Lesson 2: a fast/furious tour of the small but chaotic workshop before getting down to business...
Happy to get as technical about processes as you like, but will wait for questions before going into too much detail. Will also show a 'demo' of tools being used at a later date, but will need my lovely assistant for that one. Shes out with the kids at present...
MY TOOLS!!!
Dirty ol trimsaw... The most abused piece of machinery in my workshop! I really need a much larger 'dropsaw', where the blade sits on top of stone and slowly cuts its way down. Dont have one so this wee fella gets used most 'creatively' for whacking down large stones, often having to attack the cut from several angles & doing my best to have them line up... 12inch diam blade.
Dirty ol grinding unit... 'Peripheral' wheels
The main waste-removing machine. I have two 8inch wheels set up with different degrees of agressiveness, 100grit being the heavier & 360grit for finer work. The gritsize being how many diamond specks per square?? inch, cm, not too sure... Working face is about an inch & half wide! (chainsaw!!??) They dont look like much but it is amazing what you can do with them. Many carvers also run diamond coated 'flatwheeels' which are more aggressive again due to a greater surface area touching the stone, but more limited in their range of use.
Dirty ol handpiece... As with Paipo, I use the magical NSK, Nakanishi. They have become pretty popular with the local jade fraternity, with one friend telling two friends, who told two friends etc... Very controllable, speed wise & a hell of a lot simpler/smaller/quieter than running compressed-air tool.
Dirty ol 'point-carving' unit... For most people this is an engineer-adapted motor, which has had a long shaft turned/tapped to extend out further & carry a 3-jaw chuck. Mine is an ordinary drill-press lying on its side, haha! Does the job smashing good with the added bonus of variable speed & can be stood upright for its intended purpose when using diamond 'core'-drills (we 'pop' out small round discs from slabbed stone as a quick way to achieve perfect circles for pendants, or for removing large amounts of waste when tackling larger sculptural work... The main use of the point carver is however for spinning diamond coated 'points', basically larger versions of the tiny handpiece burrs... The chuck can also hold rubber 'drums', which we load with 'diamond-cloth' or wet n dry/carborundum paper for use in sanding (beats trying to move your hand back and forth at 6000rpm, but only goes so far). Points, drums & diamond cloth shown at front of bench.
On with the project...
I was going to bring this wacky fellow to life for you, but as you can see the stone I wish to use is a bit small & I need to photo-ruduce before I can go any further. Will be another ongoing project...
SO, HERE is the project that we'll be starting with. Fairly tradional Maori hei-tiki design but the way in which I tackle it is pure 21st century. (A great run-down on pre-contact Maori pounamu technique can be seen in the Russell Beck book mentioned earlier)(The 'prize-winner' I mentioned was produced with a combination of old & new technique...)
About half of my pieces are worked out on paper & then transferred, while the remainder (mainly trad. hei-tiki)are drawn straight onto stone (this one 'freedrawn' this morning -sevral times!) These freedrawn tiki tend to 'evolve' more than the carefully worked out pieces & Ive got a feeling that some serious jiggery-pokery is going to be necessary with the head of this... There is an unwanted angle at the top edge of this slab, but Im going to blaze on anyway & cross that bridge when I come to it...
Ive already trimmed this out on the trim saw & will concentrate on the carving evolution...
Damn, look at that head! Drops off like a cliff, doh!
First the outer profile is achieved with the peripheral wheel. The only place I cant fully reach with this is between the arm & hand/knee.
The only wood-shavings youll see in my workshop are from my pencil, haha Plenty of good sludge though... My sinks all run straight out onto path outside, hell of a mess but havent found time yet to drill a hole through the concrete to hopefully drain away (am only guessing that this will work, haha)
Onto the next machine. The handpiece is used to drill through stone to open up internal spaces. Being such a hard stone I generally start with a small hole (2 or 3mm) & progressively open it up with larger burrs... Got that wee bit under the arm too!
So theres the 2-D, profile sorted!
Im afraid thats all you're getting today as I really do need to get 9-5 production rolling again! Have to get all this intro out of the way & can then concentrate on sharing the work... I will endeavour to keep this ball rolling over the next few days. Hope this has sparked your appetite...
'Back to the grind' :) Tama
[ Edited by: Tamapoutini 2006-09-03 18:23 ]
