I sold this plane to a chap on eBay a while back. When I sent it off, I didn’t quite register the name I wrote on the parcel. A couple of months later, browsing the website of David Barron, I was very pleased to see the SAME PLANE! With it, David had photographed and written a lovely blog post about repairing the broken spur on the plane. Well worth checking out the post and indeed David’s whole blog. He’s a fine craftsman and furniture maker, and his enthusiasm shines through.
Funny how things go. I’m very pleased to see the plane went to such a good home, and I’ve learnt something myself, seeing how David goes about a good repair. Some good tips there.
I’m currently reading ‘The Lost Carving‘ by celebrated wood carver David Esterly. Whilst I have to admit to speed-reading large chunks of it, (I just want to read about the technique and tools), it’s a nice insight into a wood-carver’s life.
When fire destroyed a good chunk of Hampton Court Palace in March 1986, the damage also reached a number of celebrated carvings by Grinling Gibbons.
Having turned away from academia, Esterly had already dedicated his life largely to carving, and the opportunity to help in the Hampton Court restoration was too good an opportunity to miss. So starts quite an interesting read (if a little over-romanticised for me personally), where David struggles with technique, the balance of recreating parts of the carvings, and the internal politics that surrounds the various societies responsible for organising the restoration.
I’d recommend the book, to a certain extent, if only to learn more about the techniques that this sort of deep ornamental sculpture demands. The incredible deep-foliage relief and ‘under-cutting’ achieved by David is very clear in this piece. David generally uses limewood for his carving, for reasons explained in the book. Image copyright of David Esterly.
David has very helpfully compiled a list of supplemental images, which illustrate the book very well, and I personally found them very interesting.
First post in a while, because I’ve been concentrating on setting up pages dedicated to selling tools on my own site. Ebay’s charges are getting pretty heavy, so I figure I’ll start migrating now. Over the next few months I’ll be adding items to my site, and seeing how things go. I’ll continue with eBay for some items, and will flag those up on the blog, whenever they go on. Happy 2013!
