Carved wood house number plaque

[Micktoon]

I have been carving a house number plate / plaque for a friend of mine. The wood is some sort of mahogany, it used to be a bar top at a pub , so many a drunken fella will have been slumped upon it over the years I expect. Its nice wood and turned lovely.

This is the chucnk of bar top I had , its been joined so the widest bit I can get is about 11 inches


I marked out the maximum size circle with a compass


Then bandsawed the rough shape out


I trued it up on the wood lathe and skimmed the front surface , I could small beer as the shavings came off !


I have turned a sort of round bead around the edge , this will be carved to look like a rope wrapped around the outside of the plaque


A square block of scrap wood is attached to the back so it can be held in the vice for carving


This is the design on tracing paper with carbon paper behind it to trace the design onto the wood , I have altered the numeral 1 so that the incised 'V' type carving will look better as the serifs were too long for this style to work


Once the design is maked the numerals are cut quite deep along the middle of the figures, this is so the wood will split and chip out at the cut rather than splitting right across and over the oppisite side border line


The straight cuts use a straight chisel but the curved ones use various curved gouges to match the line


I have been asked about the tools, this chisel / gouge is an J.B Addis , the 10 prize medals markings indicate it will be from the 1890's so will have passed through a few hands no doubt, I have some that will be older than this but still cut as good as ever


This is the J.B addis over Sheffield markings that are just visible, a few of the old carving tools have several names stamped on them where they have been handed down to the next generation of carvers


This is the selection of tools used to do the lettering , the one at the end closest to the camera is a V tool or parting tool, its an advantage to have all odd handles as once you have a few chisels lying on the bench its quicker to locate the one you want when they all look different


This is a close up of the V tool blade, it will cut a vee shaped groove or can be tilted to cut on one adge to go around a raised section


The numbers are now just carefully carved away sticking to the lines, because of the centre cuts the wood flakes out at the cuts


This is it after carving out then fine tuning so the centre lines look even and the outer lines are uniform


This piece of wood with cuts in it shows the various tools that have been used and the cuts they make


Next the rope pattern was marked out , this was not as easy as it looks and took some time to sus out how to do it so it was right


A smaller V tool is then used to make the initial cuts between the bands of rope


Then it was acse of just carving away wood from one side of each section or rope with various curved gouges until it started to look like rope


Once the basic shape of the rope was right from the carving gouges I then refined things with files and then Abranet wrapped around a stick of wood ( Abranet is a sort of metal sheet abrasive mesh that comes in various grades ) its good stuff and does not clog like sand paper


This is after the sanding is finished , as you can imagine , its no five minute job and a dremel type sander is used to get into bits that are hard to reach


I then gave it a coat of sanding sealer , then two coats of spray laquer , as you can see the colour really comes out with some finish applied. The other reason for the laquer was bacause I wanted to apply gold leaf to the numbers so they would stand out






This is the finished thing , I did take photos of the gold leaf getting done but my memory card packed in so they were lost. its the first time I tried it and I think I could do a better job the next time as learnt a few tips from trial and error. You paint where you want the gold to stick with size ( like pva glue ) then once tacky stick small bits of gold sheet over the glued areas , then brush in and rub off excess then burnish with a soft cloth , then laquer the whole thing again.


Its turned out nice and should be easy enough to see from the road I would think


Hope this has been of interest

Cheers Mick.