How to Chip Carve

Video transcription

Hey I'm Curtis Martin from Wilmington, North Carolina and today I want to show you how to do a little bit of chip carving with a chisel and a hammer and little piece of wood. We've marked out a little area on the wood here in a rectangle and we're going to start with the chisel. And we're going to carve down about an eighth of an inch. Say we're going to set a keyhole in a door or maybe a lock in a door. You want to put your chisel right on your line, stand it straight up and just tap gently down. You're going to tap all the way around the outline. Standing the chisel straight up, vertical at 90 degrees to the wood. When you're going across the ingrain you want to tap a little bit harder than when you're going with the grain. The chisel goes in very easily with the grain. It's a little bit more difficult with the ingrain. You want to make sure your chisel's fairly sharp. Now we can come back and start chipping it out. We want to come in at about a 45 degree angle and chip the wood all the way across as we go. Just slowly taking little pieces off. You don't want to take a big hunk at once. This keeps our depth the same. Keeps a very manageable piece of wood coming out. And also something that the force of the chisel can handle. We don't want to hit it too hard. It could damage the wood or damage the chisel even. Now once you've gone through one set you can come back and mark your depth again. Go a little bit deeper this time. All the way around the perimeter again. Once you get around the perimeter. All the way around, you come back. You could almost go in the same groove and chip out a little bit more. Actually you could continue to repeat this process until you went all the way through the wood.