Well, today involved a lot of learning about carving a recess into real pine. You are dealing with grain at a very practical level when digging out a recess. There will be places where the grain runs away from your edge, where it runs into your edge, and the slack tide between the two. We are working with a shaping tool called a travisher. It's a graceful tool and delivers a very gorgeous surface off the blade, when you have it tuned properly.
We learn about how to control the cut, skewing left or right, when to swoop in or out. Pine is soft, which makes it fairly easy to cut, but also the fibers will tear out unforgivably if you are not paying attention. Curtis has a library of travishers to work with and we tried them all.
One plane that i Really LIKED was a "heal shave" used for boots at one point in our history. It has a fairly aggressive dish to the blade and an openness to the cutter that makes it really useful for situations where you really want to see what your cutting into. This particular model is a Snell and Atherton with I think it's handles removed.
Some hours later we had our seats dished out pretty well, and now they needed to be cleaned up using a scraper, and then sand paper to 150grit where applicable.
Curtis demoed his card scraper sharpening magic to us at his bench. and, NO IT IS NOT MAGIC. It's a very practical way to get 'er done and keep going with the work.
I periodically checked my seat's front curve using this trick from my fiberglass plug building days to see the angles off a tangent. It was useful when looking for symmetry between both sides of my seat's pummel, but also to compare to what curtis did with his.
And then there was the fun part of going to town on the underside of the seat to lighten up the look of the front. Most of this work is achieved with a draw knife, followed by a finely set spoke shave to clean up parts.
Oh, and yeah, if you were waiting around for something to do while stuffing tomato custard pie into your gob for lunch, you were refining your spindles.
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