Official Luthiers Forum!

Just discovered a fun new carving trick today. I've always been annoyed by the difficulty of creating clean curvy trenches with a nice sharp corner to the bottom of them, as I often desire in relief carvings. So, it occurred to me that a chisel blade could be used as a scraper, and get in much tighter places than a card scraper. Works like a charm.

So, pull and scrape, rather than push and cut. In the picture, I'm pulling toward the camera, toward the flat side of the chisel.

The bridge still needs a little smoothing, but the trench bottoms are much better than I could get by cutting and sanding

Dennis, it's easy enough to make yourself a set of special carving scrapers just for this purpose. You can give them custom shapes to work with the design motifs you like to use. Blade material can come from worn out old files, industrial hack saw blades, old table saw blades--lots of things that are easy to find. You've stumbled into a technique that has been around for a long, long time. It's always fun to discover something like this for yourself. I'll bet a lot of people who haven't discovered this technique are glad you posted this.

Dennis next time you visit your dentist ask for his worn out dental chisels. I have a large collection, they can be reground to your desired shape