Kick Ass Adze

They say it’s all in the tools. If you have a notion to carve in wood I recommend a couple of suppliers who make high quality carving tools.
Both are located on islands in the San Juans. One on Lopez, the other on secretive Waldron Island. On Waldron is the Northbay Forge  Check it out and enter the word of bent knifes, drawknives and scorps, wonderfully sharp tools that allow you to carve the hardest wood. The Northbay Forge site has some video to show you how to use them. They are very sharp. Opening the package wearing heavy leather gloves I sliced through the glove and my thumb. But, used properly, there is little danger of injuring yourself. The photo is of a tiki kind of thing made from maple. Maple is very hard wood and this was done with a large and small curve blade and a straight knife. Kestrel Tools makes great adzes These babies are quite expensive. But, if you buy them unassembled there is a huge discount. The problem is you have to then carve the haft to the proper shape and tie the adze blade to the haft with seine twine. I don’t know what seine twine is. I guess they use it to repair nets. Seine twine is very strong and tough and winding it around the blade properly took a couple of tries. You can really waste some wood with a sharp adze as one can see from the pile of chips. Amazingly, the tool is quite accurate once you get the hang of it and can be used to almost carve something like this boat.