Custom Sculpting Tools

Buying Christmas presents for all your friends is generally not the easiest thing to do. If, however, some of your friends are sculptors, and you have skill using a lathe like imgur user volpinprops, perhaps you could make them custom carving tools.

The result, as seen in the gallery below, look great. These shaping tools are made to be wider than normal, so they are easy to grip after hours of use. Once the circular work is finished, flats are added to some of the handles with a belt sander, then finished by hand. Though they certainly took a good deal of patience and skill to complete, the steps involved don’t look beyond the grasp of a someone who could turn a pen or bowl.

Besides normal lathe work, the trick to making these shapers is forming and attaching the cutting surfaces. The larger hoops are made out of miniature hacksaw blades, which are hammered over steel stock, while the thinner hoops are made out of brass stock hammered over wood. Each type is attached to the handle using a brass ring pressed on over the hoop, then epoxied into place to keep things secure.

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