My Kingdom for a Knife

Every person who starts carving has to start somewhere.  I am only going to cover the absolute basics here on how we started.  Mainly because I don't have the knowledge to go into heavy detail about obscure types of carving.  The tools you will use depends on the "type" of carving you want to do and your experience level.

The type of carving is important since usually "whittlers" only use a knife or selection of knives.  Different carving genres have different tools, i.e. whittling, relief, chip, power, etc.

The experience level comes into play as you become better at carving you start to buy or utilize more specialized tools.  Instead of making do with a select number of gouges you may go buy a few extras to do special tasks.

Combine the experience level and carving type with personality and you get an even bigger variety.  Someone who loves to carve Santas will have slightly different tools from the person who loves to carve Duck decoys. The methods used in each will become specialized over time.

We started with whittling and moved on to start using gouges and chisels as we determined the type of carving we wanted to do.  Today though, I am only going to talk about knives.  There is a large variety of types depending on your preference.  There is the folding blade, fixed blade, or interchangeable blades to name a few.

A folding knife or blade is as simple as a pocket knife.  It comes in locking and non-locking blades.  There are different sizes that will affect carving comfort especially if you plan to carve for long periods of time.  There are many blade shapes but usually for detail work a sheepsfoot blade is really good to have.  This blade type has the tip of the knife  aligned with the cutting edge which is straight and not curved.  The blade design allows for carving of small details that a typical curved drop-point blade will not.  There are two issues I have with a pocket or a folding knife:

1. The factory ground bevel is not shaped properly for carving.  I personally don't have the patience to re-shape the blade bevel.   This can be done easily with a sharpening stone, diamond stone, or even sandpaper.  
2. I tend to push the back of the blade with the thumb as I carve.  The blade doesn't lock so there is a risk it could close even if this is unlikely.  As a result we moved on to fixed blade knives.  Once we started using them we never went back to the pocket knives.

Fixed blade knives have the benefit of stability.  Usually you can also purchased them pre-sharpening with the bevel correct for carvers.  Also a very common secondary benefit is the handle is typically shaped for extending carving session comfort.  Our preference is a fixed blade knife.  We own the Flexcut "Whittler's Kit" and a Flexcut Roughing Knife and love them.

There are interchangeable knives like Warren Cutlery's Interchangeable kit or X-acto Woodcarving Set.  I have never used a knife from Warren Tools.  I do see in magazines and other blogs a number of carvers using Warren Tools.  I have used X-acto knives and my preference is with the fixed blade knives.

Whatever blade you find works best with you or for you is the one you should use for you.  I will be following up with a more detailed blog on a review of the knives that we own and have used.

-Dave