I Have Been Painting
on Totem Again
I am closer to
finishing the totem. It looks like I might
finish by the weekend, if I get my butt in gear. Need to get the totem sealed
up as it is cracking pretty well. Nothing major but enough to let me know I need
to move on with this project. Time to start something new anyhow, for me it
seems like it has been forever since I only work on it a couple of hours each
day. I think the last time I had did a total tally of the hours I have spent on
the totem to date, and it was 22 hours , and since then I know I have spent
another 12 hours painting the totem to date. This would make the total hours
spent so far to be around 34 hours and at the 1600 price tag would make the
price per hour around 47.00/ hour. Again there are hidden costs involved in
that, as I had to source the wood.
The wood came
from the tornado in Mineral City, Ohio the same day it took out the fire house.
The guy I was able to get the wood from had about ten trees down on his
property and gave them to me for cleaning up the mess. I spent about 2 weeks
down there cleaning up his property. I received a lot of wood, but as I watch
the carvings I produce I wonder if the wind didn’t whip and internally stress
the trees causing more cracking than normal. I like the idea of cleaning up and
reutilizing downed wood as opposed to going out and cutting down a tree for
carving. In fact most of my wood is salvaged wood I use for carving. But if the
tree was subjected to high winds then it may have been twisted before it fell. Winds
such as you would get in a tornado.
The pine trees
seemed to just snap off at ground level leaving a stump behind. Their wood
structure didn’t seem to hold up well due to the twisting motion. Whereas wild
cherry and other hard wood trees would stay together and pull huge root
structures up out of the ground stump and all. After cutting the log out, the
stumps would settle back into the ground.
Salvaging these
logs require a tractor and heavy chain sawing to cut into length and deal with
the brush afterward. A lot of firewood was gleaned from this operation and just
recently I used that firewood at the family reunion to cook a hog over grates. Before
it is over I will have used a good bit of the three loads of logs I transported
back home, either for carving or for firewood. Nothing is wasted that I think I
can use.
Considering the
cracking going on with some of my latest carvings though I might have to
reconsider using trees downed by storms, instead look for trees downed by
natural means instead. It may be due to the size of the log and not being dried
completely through to the core as it has been only a year since the tree was
salvaged. My earlier work was the Santa Claus in a wild cherry log and I think
that tree may have been green yet also, as it cracked also. Sometimes it is hard to tell if trees
are going to be ready to cut as time is no indicator as to when it is dry. All you
can do is hope for the best.
Some cracking
gives the carving character, but a lot of cracking indicates a log to green or
something else going on like internal stresses. So is there a way to reduce
cracking? Not necessarily, as it seems wood has a mind of its own especially as
it you cut deeper in one area and less in another. But there are ways to fix
cracks if you need to. In fact you can add pieces to your carvings as I did to
the totem to make a more complete carving than before. I added the wings and I have
seen where people glue all kinds of things to a larger piece of wood and then
carve away to form hands, halos, and whatever one would imagine. This is no
different than fixing a crack.
Another way to
help reduce cracking and that is to seal the carving as soon as possible after
painting and burnishing so the outside doesn’t dry out to much. This is
probably the source of my cracking on the totem as the cracks seem to be
equally spaced around the totem. Hopefully by the weekend I will be able to
seal it all up.
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