Spoon Blanks by Hammer and Chisel (Without a Hatchet!)

Unrefined spoons, just captured in the wilds of northern Wisconsin!

Let's say you have

the standard, basic shop tools for making furniture, cabinets, or doing basic household maintenance. You've noticed that lots of the woodworking you see on social media is spoon carving. You, too, would like to carve spoons, but you don't have a hatchet or a chopping block. What to do? Here are a few ideas I had last week that involve hardware-store hammers, chisels, and a vise.

I found myself home in Wisconsin with lots of wood to turn into spoons and none of my usual spoon-making tools. With the splitting tools I have up there in the shack, it was easy to make nice square bolts, which I sent home in boxes to carve later (storing your blanks in the freezer is a good way to keep them fresh for a few months). But while I was there, I wanted to carve some spoons during the long dark hours of December, when the family gathers to crack nuts and tell stories around the kitchen table. Spoon-making is the woodworker's version of knitting, so family time around the kitchen table is EXACTLY when I want to do it.

It's possible to take half a log and a knife, and whittle away until you have a spoon. Possible, but not fun. Sort of like surfacing rough lumber with sandpaper. You could do it, but the tedium would erase most or all the pleasure, and the (inferior) results would take far longer than other methods.

What I wanted was a quick way to get the riven blocks I was pulling out of the woods into a rough spoon shape. That way, when I sat at the kitchen table with a knife and a piece of wood, the heavy cutting would already be done and I could create a tidy pile of fine shavings on the table as I made refining cuts.

The regular way to make a rough blank is with a hatchet, working on a chopping block. When I say “regular,” what I mean is “orthodox” among contemporary greenwoodworkers. This is what Drew Langsner taught me to do in his class. This is what you see when you watch this excellent video by Niklas Karlsson. It works quite well, especially for the birch Niklas is working. It's also a photogenic, telegenic, videogenic, crowd-pleasing activity that draws a crowd to you at the craft fair.

But seeing this video of Anna Casserley planted a tiny seed in my brain, which perhaps had sprouted and grown a bit. Here's the seed:

As you can see, she's holding her rough spoon blank in a bench vise that she's mounted atop a stump or low bench. The spoon she carves in this video has a nearly straight handle, so the parallel jaws of the vise grip it well.

I looked around my stepdad's machine shed, which is full of old logging and farming tools, and found a post vise mounted to a bench. I thought “Anna Casserley uses a vise . . .” and realized that the square blocks I was riving out in the woods would be held quite securely by that vise. I could use a combination of saw cuts and hammer-driven chisel cuts to get a rough spoon blank, ready for the knife. I could even use a gouge (or hook knife) to hollow out the bowl of the spoon, far earlier in the process than I usually do it, but securely held in the vise for quite aggressive cuts.

What follows is a group of photos showing my process, from cutting up the tree, to hauling out the blanks, to roughing out the blank in the post vise. I doubt this will become my normal procedure, though aspects of it may. I show you these images so you can see how maybe you might improvise ways to do a process with the tools you actually have on hand, rather than waiting until you get the tools social media tells you you're supposed to have!

To be honest: I do use a chainsaw to cut the tree to lengths.

Some basic tools I have out at my shack. Hatchet, 32 oz hammer, splitting maul, wedge, handsaw. These are all cheap hardware-store versions. They are perfect for splitting rounds of wood into roughly rectangular bolts. The handsaw didn't get used, but I had it along just in case.

These two photos show the keepers (in the top photo) vs. the waste. The ratio is roughly 4 to 1 (there are some more waste pieces behind the front row). The "waste" will help heat the shack next winter.

How I get it out of the woods. I'm no purist! In the summer or fall, I drive my pickup back to the shack. In winter, though, no motorized vehicles are allowed on our woods roads, because they are groomed ski trails. So wood removal has to be by ski. This kiddie sled works great with an extra loop of rope added to the handle. The big loop goes over one of my shoulders. The only tough part is keeping ahead of the sled on the downhills!

Skipping ahead a bit, but here you see three of the four tools I used once I was indoors: a 2" Buck Brothers chisel ($11 at the big box store), a cheap crosscut saw labelled "fine cuts" ($15) and a dead blow hammer (we already had it on hand).

Here's a blank in the vise. The first several steps here are to make saw cuts that define the "crank" on the top side of the spoon and the curve on the bottom. I leave the blank full width as long as possible for easy gripping in the vise.

Once the crank is defined, I sketch the outline of the bowl with pencil and hollow it out. I used the Mora hook knife I leave in the shack. This knife needs lots of work to be usable when you buy it, but the steel is hard, and once the extra-steep bevel is removed, the ergonomics are good. I still have trouble making really fine cuts with it, but that's at least partially due to the fact that I was wearing gloves and the temperature was 10 degrees below zero (F). You could also use a "spoon gouge" like the Hirsch bent spoon gouges sold by Highland Woodworking (I'd link, but the photo they use doesn't show the actual product). If you want to carve spoons, you will need to come up with a curved or "hook" tool to carve out the bowl. For beginners, I think the Narex 3-piece set is a good starting point.

I apologize for the bad focus here. Again: it was COLD out there! Here you can see I've penciled in the leading edge of the bottom of the spoon's bowl.

And here I'm removing the waste indicated in the photo above. You see that 2x6 the spoon blank is up against? Its other end is up against the wall, so it's acting as a bench stop. The wide chisel is addressing the work with its bevel DOWN. That makes its depth of cut very controllable. The back edge of the bevel acts as a fulcrum for steering the chisel up out of the cut. Working bevel down is crucial to this technique: with the bevel down, you can use the hammer to drive the edge of the chisel right along pencil lines whether they're straight or curved, as long as you don't go against the grain. Trying to go uphill on a curve will take you against the grain, and you'll split the wood along its grain, instead of cutting to the line.

Here I'm removing waste from the underside of the handle. I've already split wood back to the saw cut from the end of the spoon; next I'll use bevel-down chopping to shape the curve from the back end of the bowl to the thinnest point of the handle. Again: note that the blank is still full width.

Skipped a step here: rounding the leading edge of the bowl. Bevel down, right? Now, at the very end, I begin reducing the width of the blank. I've made two sawcuts to the narrowest point of the handle, right behind the bowl.

The first cut is mostly a series of splits, then a final trimming cut that follows the pencil line.

That makes room for rounding the back half of the bowl. Bevel down!

Here are top and bottom views of the roughed-out blank. I could have made some more refining cuts with the hardware-store chisel, but the cold out in the machine shed limited me to working in 30-minutes spells, and I decided to continue with the knife inside the nice, warm house.

There you go. I think this concept, especially the bevel-down chopping, would be better conveyed in a video. Stay tuned . . . I guess.


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Edit: January 28th, 2018. Here is a video. Crude, low-quality video, but it gets a couple points across! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT7PdrXYYOI