i will talk on repairing the arm today on bear i was working on yesterday

You Can Put It On

Part-2 of Repair of Bear

 

volunteer snapdragons

       Yesterday I went told you I would repair the bad area on his right arm, a place where I had taken off a knot and was hoping it would be alright but it wasn’t. Rather than throw away the whole carving I opted to fix the carving. Well yesterday I started the first step to repairing and that is removing the affected area in a clean cut that I can easily match a piece of wood to. 

 

before beginning repair . you can see where i dug out rot with the chainsaw. 

 

     After making the cut I searched the ground around where I was carving and found me a piece of the very same piece of wood that was cut off when I made the bear. I had to trim the end and you can see it in the pic and then I saturated both surfaces with water by soaking a towel and then applying it to both surfaces till thoroughly wet. This is important with the gorilla glue I use, because it reacts with water. After soaking then I apply a fair amount of glue to both surfaces. It doesn’t have to be a complete coverage, instead apply to 50 per cent of exposed wood on both sides, dabs of the gorilla glue. When pressed together in place it will usually cover 90 percent and as it reacts with water it will blow up to 150 percent of the original volume. it expands almost 3to 1 so be generous with the gorilla glue to get a good bond , but don’t get too overzealous otherwise it will be just wasted. 

 

you can see i have made sort of a notch cut and increased the exposure to help hold the piece in place  

     After applying the gorilla glue, you will need to start fitting the piece of wood to the sculpture. I did this by grabbing a strap an using it to apply pressure to hold the piece of wood in place. You will want to apply pressure in one way or another to the piece to get a tight bond. A clamp used to glue boards together may work also. But since the girth was so thick, I figured the tie down strap would work better.

 

you can see the gorilla glue before it starts to activate with the air and the oisture where i soaked the sculpture prior to applying the glue. 

 

     So I will let it sit till this morning or about 24 hrs. And if dry then will take the chainsaw and reshape the wood back down to where I think the arm should be. I will also install the eyes , and use the chainsaw to carve my brand which is my initials on it and that should finish the carving. I would like to think that would be the extent of the carving but we will have to see after finish carving of the arm. After that will be the burning of the exterior of bear. This takes off any splinters or slivers of wood and gives an overall appearance of being darker than it was before. As I wire brush the fur area and the soot will come off but some is embedded into the wood and acts like stain albeit natural. The wire brush leaves tiny hair like scratches in these darkened patches further enhancing the bears overall appearance. 

 

 here i have the strap in place plus an extra piece to help hold the larger block in place and then it is secured by the strap. this is probably the hardest part to hold the strap and blocks till you tighten it up and apply pressure to the block. 

      As to the eyes, I will use a drill and set the eyes (black marbles) ,with the drill size one larger than the marble so the fit is snug. You can always ream it by twisting the drill out of center wobbling out the hole. Care should be taken to make sure the hole is not too large and both eyes are set at same level.  To do this, I locate  the eyes and I usually err for being pointed more to center than having them too far apart. But usually by this point their location is also somewhat predetermined by the sculpting process as I leave hollows where the eyes are to be located. Sometimes you can still fudge them a little toward center. 

 

you can see i have textured the bear down to his feet. after i re-carve the arm and add my brand i wll be done carving with this bear and ready toi start another. 

 

     At this point I usually take a grinder with a flap disc and smooth the area around the nose and highlight the hair and take off any splinters I have. if you mess up you may have to reburn the bear. So  light touch on the grinder is always good. I will leave the rest of the finishing process till tomorrow’s discussion