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I've been relief and incise carving heels, pegheads and resonators on banjos and a few hundred other for 30 years and this is my first guitar heel. The biggest issue is always wood type for me. The spanish cedar classical neck (experimental for me) shown below is a LMI preshaped neck. Very soft wood and hard to add a fine detail. Not my best choice, but I wanted a preshaped neck for this project. So...I kept the design fairly traditional and simple. I sometimes stipple the background (as in this one) to offer contrast to the design. I have several sizes of nail sets I use for stippling that I hollow out to a sharp edge with a small round grinding bit with my foredom. I attach a wood handle to the nail set and using only palm pressure is sufficient to leave the round indention stipple. These allow for different size nailsets for different design areas to be stippled. You can also stipple background by using a fine round bit on your power tool of choice. Beware...power tips tend to leave a wood burr and are difficult to remove. Direction of bit rotation to grain must be observed at all times to minimize this. Many use a darker dye in the background area to give the detail contrast during the finishing process rather than stippling...or dye the stippled area.

Happy Carving woods are a Honduras or similar mahogany, walnut or even a maple neck that are medium hard with good grain for detail. Fiddle back or curly species are tricky because of constant grain directional changes. Patience is required and slow moving...but final results can be highly exciting. There are many other species that will work...but I'm not familiar with all of them as neck supporting woods. The trick (in a good carving) is to pick a good structural wood without a hard ring grain. Rosewood varieties are usually a bit hard grained and even though I occasionally carve in rosewood on Banjos, the detail not only gets lost in the hard grain lines but you also loose detail in the darkness of the wood. If you are using a hard grain wood, keep the design simple and void of all tiny detail.
I use carving tools ...not rotary bits...so toxicity of wood dust is never an issue. You CAN carve in any wood...but there is a huge difference in carving ability.
I also try to leave a fairly wide uncarved area ( neck centerline of 3/8 to 1/2 in.) between each side of the heel carving sides for the thumb to smoothly glide when playing. Nothing worse than a design that ripples under the thumb when playing.
Practice your design on a scrap heel. You will find laying out you design (mirror image) on each side is a challenge in itself. The heel is not flat, so your drawn design on paper and reversed does not lay out well on the curves of the heel. I rough in a design with pencil and after it looks like everything is right on both sides, I use a XFine tip marker on only the outline of the design and carve in the detail after the outline of the carving is complete...comparing it to the other side at every cut. Leave the design cuts shallow. You should never exceed 3 /32 in total depth anywhere. The trick is to get it a shallow as possible and still get the depth enough for detail. After carving, I lightly hit the design with a 320 grit sanding pad to remove any tiny burrs that may be present.
I would recommend a beginner carver practice your carving technique and design on a Basswood block and then on a scrap of your proposed wood so you get a feel for what you are about to take on.
At this point, I'm at a loss as to how to fill a pourous wood with a detailed carving. I guess I'm about to find out.....since I am going to be doing the finish on this heel.

If I ever get a camera on my computer, I'll post a "how to" video.
Kent Bailey

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Wood Creations by Kent A. Bailey
EXCELLENCE IN SCULPTURE, CARVING, LUTHIER, ARCHITECTURAL MILLWORK AND DESIGN

http://www.kabart.com

that is seriously beautiful! excellent workmanship. thanks for sharing.

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sweat the small stuff.

DANG! That is nice work!

You mentioned sealing porous wood. You might try some scrap of what you are carving on, do a small test carve then try brushing thin super glue to see if it will set in the wood grain and give you a stable base for a top coat. May take a coat or two.
The top coat will be another issue since you don't want to build too much material and fill in details. Again, experiment. Perhaps shellac in the carved area will work and you can lacquer or varnish the smooth area of the neck for better wear resistance. Or french polish the entire neck, but that is really a learned skill that takes some practice to master.

Meanwhile, for us less artistic luthiers who know our limitations, do you do contract work?

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Hank Mauel

Heath summed it up pretty good. Awesome work man
Mat

hi kent.......awsome work......a how to vid on this would be greatly received...........i will send you my camera....

Wow that is amazing Kent.

Very nice carving Kent; I'd second Joe's request for a video tutorial;
Regards,
jack

Yay Kent,

very nice work indeed.

thank you for posting the pics, they is good for getting me worked up and inspired for doing the neck / headstock and rib carvings on the NO NOthing Build.

again very nice indeed.

blessings
the
Padma

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Audiences and dispensations on Thursdays ~ by appointment only.


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That's really beautiful work, Kent... Thanks!

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"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” -Heraclitus of Ephesus

thank's Kent,
very, very inspirativ

I was going to say awesome, but someone beat me to it. I think I'll go with really cool.

Mike

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Mike Lindstrom

Hank,
I do contract for individuals and businesses. That's what I do for a living.
Kent bailey

_________________
Wood Creations by Kent A. Bailey
EXCELLENCE IN SCULPTURE, CARVING, LUTHIER, ARCHITECTURAL MILLWORK AND DESIGN

http://www.kabart.com

Sure do like stuff like that!

Love it Kent. I've been wanting to do carving for the past year or so. Could you recommend any good books or video on carving tecnic. I'm thinking gun stock relief carving tecnic would also lend itself to guitars well.

I got to ask: is that even comfortable to play?

Great-looking work, regardless.

Very clever with the nail-set idea. My attempts to cup-carve divots was a dismal failure Have you ever tried a partial stipple, the kind of C-shaped ones with this nail-set trick? If so, how did that work? How about all the various leather tooling sets for background, some of those are very fine edge?

Are you using small palm type gouges for this work like you would for metal engraving or longer push type gouges? Inquiring minds and all that...

Alan D.

Let me try and answer some questions here.
Books:There are multiple books on relief carving...but they don't really relate to actual luthier work. Good General carving info. Good to learn the basics, but... Very,very few woodcarvers who carve instruments write to tell you about it. There are tons of "Carving in Relief" books and I don't like most of them. Books on carving gunstocks would be a good place to get info. closely related to luthier carving. I can't recommend any of those either. Sorry! I don't really look for info. on how to carve anymore. If H. Krieghoff (gunmaker) has a website (West Germany) they have master carvers/engravers examples on their gunstocks that are next to none. I have one of their old catalogs as a reminder of quality workmanship. The have very traditional scroll, oak leaf designs and wildlife (of course) but a good way to see the really good and compare to the really bad.
Tools:
I have about 40 chisels but do my all my luthier carving with a 1/8 V, 1/4 V, 1/8 flat, 1/4 flat, 1/8 U and 1/4 U Gouge. All palm tools. You can do any relief with just a V, U and flat or skew chisel.
I once had to used y foredom and carbide bits to carve an extremely hard rosewood peghead once..but never again.
Playability:
I have 2 banjos that are radically carved on the pegheads. One with a Gargoyle head carved in and the other with a Rams head. They don't bother my playing....I'm not very good at banjo either. I do play the classical guitar fairly well. As an experiment, I attached, with double sided tape to the heel of my personal guitar, pieces of 60 grit sandpaper face up where a proposed design would be carved and concluded that my playing was not hindered by a relief carving in that specific area. I find that it is reasonably safe to carve the area on each side where the heel begins to flare. Like I posted earlier, I do require a section between the carvings of 3/8 to 1/2 in. wide along the ridge of the neck with no carving for my thumb to slide freely. Keep in mind, it is possible that a persons individual technique may be hindered by any kind of heel carving. So, there are no hard fast rules here. I stress the importance of very shallow relief carving on the heel to minimize any problems and keep the carving restricted to the basic heel area and less of the neck.
Kent Bailey

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Wood Creations by Kent A. Bailey
EXCELLENCE IN SCULPTURE, CARVING, LUTHIER, ARCHITECTURAL MILLWORK AND DESIGN

http://www.kabart.com

i'll try to check later on today which issue it was exacty, but a while ago there was an article by (i think) John Greven about decorative heel carving, with some good photos,descriptions and explanations.

Udi.

American Lutherie #75 / Fall 2003
Jonh Greven p56-59