Notes From The ‘Net

Ques­tions and Answers About Carv­ing Gath­ered From Pop­u­lar Carv­ing Groups

 Edit­ed by Matt Kelley

Wel­come carv­ing friends to NFTN, ver­sion 2.0.   In this ongo­ing series we will gath­er the best ques­tions, answers and com­ments from the more active Face­book and mail list carv­ing groups, such as the Wood­carv­er List, Wood­carv­ing 101 — The Joy of Wood­carv­ing, and the Inter­na­tion­al Fish Carvers & Painters Asso­ci­a­tion, and present them here.

Enjoy, and Carve On!

On Woodburning Tools

On the tra­di­tion­al email Wood­carv­er List, James Nor­ton wrote:  I am a novice wood­carv­er who has start­ed a some­what ambi­tious bird carv­ing. I am near­ing the point where I will be detail­ing the feath­ers, and wish to get feed­back from more expe­ri­enced carvers than myself about the best wood­burn­ing tool.  I am look­ing for a set that allows pre­cise tem­per­a­ture con­trol and that has a vari­ety of tips for dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es. Sug­ges­tions wel­come, thanks in advance.

Faulkner2206 replied:  I find the cole­wood “detail­er” works great for bird’s and is rel­a­tive­ly rea­son­ably priced. Tips are easy to change and you will find you need to use just a few dif­fer­ent tips for most birds.

Ear­land­Barb wrote:  Per­son­al­ly, I think all the major brands that you will find in a wood­carv­ing store are pret­ty much equal. Some pre­fer one, some anoth­er. I am hap­py with my Nib­s­burn­er but I don’t think they are mak­ing them any more. For­tu­nate­ly, I can use Cole­wood tips with it.

Stephen Blak­ley added:  I take class­es from a guy who uses Razor tips.  He believes the tips are bet­ter than the Col­wood.  To do the quill, I pur­chased a Razor tip pen and tip, with an adapter to fit the Col­wood.  He honed down the one tip on my Col­wood  so that it was thinner.

Faulkner2206 replied:  I always hone my burn­er tips, both Cole­wood and Razor. Sharp­en them like a knife for real­ly tight feath­er barbs. Much of this becomes a mat­ter of per­son­al pref­er­ence based on what you get used to.

Byron Kin­na­man wrote:  The trou­ble with mak­ing the tips thin­ner is they burn up faster.

The tech­ni­cal aspects of wood burn­ing tips — any con­duc­tor (the tip is a con­duc­tor) the small­er the cross sec­tion­al area, the high­er the resis­tance, and the hot­ter the tip.  The more frag­ile the tip, the soon­er you’ll have to replace the tip.

One con­sid­er­a­tion is the mate­r­i­al the pen is made of.  You want a pen that does­n’t trans­fer heat eas­i­ly.  This will allow you use it longer than one that made of mate­r­i­al that is know for it’s abil­i­ty to trans­fer heat, like alu­minum.  Plas­tics can be made to either slow down heat trans­fer or speed up heat trans­fer.   Most wood burn­ing pens that are plas­tic are of the slow down heat trans­fer type.   The alu­minum pens trans­fer heat rapidly.

Anoth­er thing to watch out for is hype.  There’s a cou­ple man­u­fac­tures that hype their prod­uct and demand a high­er price.  A cou­ple hype capa­ble of 150 Watts, typ­i­cal wood­burn­ing hap­pens below 30 watts.  2000° tip tem­per­a­ture, what are you try­ing to do?, melt the tip, start a fire?  There are sev­er­al good wood burn­ers out there with­out buy­ing the hype.

Faulkner2206 added:  When burn­ing feath­ers  low heat and sharp tips make for bet­ter birds. Tips are not per­ma­nent, they are expend­able just like glue and paint.

That’s it for this edi­tion of NFTN.    If you see a post on one of the FB groups or Mail List­servs that you think should be pre­served in NFTN, please use the form below to sub­mit your suggestion.