5 Spoon Carving Tools You Can't Live Without
One of my favourite things about spoon carving is the minimal tool kit required. If you buy some spoon blanks all you really need is a straight knife and a hook knife. But these 5 tools are the essentials that should be at the core of every spoon carving kit.
Pruning Saw
Totally not compensating. Shut up.
Designed for cutting through green wood, a pruning saw is great for cutting logs to length, ready to be split. They’re also useful for putting in stop cuts when roughing out a spoon. A few quick passes with a good saw and you won’t be axing off more wood than you intended.
When selecting a pruning saw, you typically want a blade length that’s twice the diameter of the logs or branches you’ll be cutting. But that doesn’t mean bigger is always better. A small saw will struggle to get through a big log, but an overly large saw is unwieldy and harder to use for small tasks like stop cuts.
Personally I like folding saws because of their compactness. It makes them easier to store, the dangerous pointy bits tuck safely into the handle, and you can more easily take them places. I also think they punch above their weight compared to bowsaws, the other popular choice for green wood saws.
Fun story, I once had a forgotten Bahco Laplander folding saw in the bottom of a backpack I used for a flight. It was completely undiscovered until I switched planes after a layover. For some reason the staff at Denver International decided that what’s essentially a 7” serrated blade wasn’t okay for me to continue flying with.
My Pruning Saws
Bahco Laplander. Great so long as you don’t try flying with it
Silky Katanaboy: Bought as a backup incase my chainsaw dies. I actually use it more now than my chainsaw.
2. Splitting Wedge
This is a great one you can make yourself. Wooden wedges are a lot of fun. Really satisfying to split wood, using wood. Steel splitting wedges aren’t too pricey, especially secondhand, so it’s easy to have several wedges in various materials.
Having a few wedges lying around is great for controlling where a split goes on larger pieces of wood. If you don’t have a desire or the inclination to work with larger wood, I’d still recommend having at least one. We’ve all been there, hammering our hatchet poll deep into a stubborn log, only for it to be swallowed up. Leaving us standing there feeling like an idiot, unsure of what to do. Raising the axe with log attached overhead and slamming it on the ground, into our chopping block, against a wall has no effect except getting us out of breath. With a wedge you can insert it into the split and take the pressure off the axe, releasing it from being entombed in a piece of firewood.
3. Carving Hatchet
Probably my favourite tool to use. Any hatchet with a relatively thin bit you can get really sharp will work for spoon carving. I started carving with the Gransfors Wildlife Hatchet, a general purpose camp hatchet. There are hatchets out there designed specifically for carving. They’ll usually have flat or hollow ground bevels, a curved edge and a beard.
Need help with the names for the parts of an axe? Check out this guide.
The work done with a carving hatchet is usually the most transformative. You can quickly go from a lump of wood that very much looks like a section of tree, to an elegant items thats almost a spoon already. Seeing your creation quickly emerge is very satisfying and achieved most easily with a carving hatchet.
My Carving Hatchets
Kalthoff Small Carving Axe: I reach for this one the most
H Karlsson Carving Axe: the axe I use for my carving classes
S Djarv Little Viking Axe: My first dedicated carving axe. I recently rehung it, so hope to start using it more again
Gransfors Bruks Wildlife Hatchet: The axe that started it all for me. I still use it for tasks like splitting and removing bark, when I want to preserve the edge on my main carving axe
4. Sloyd Knife
It’s nice to have several, until it comes time to sharpen them all.
Specifically a Morakniv 106. It’s fantastic. Cheap as chips for what it is. I prefer it over the shorter 120. The 106’s length is useful in a few different techniques. For example, its length creates a narrower tip, which is great for navigating narrow concave curves, such as the transition from spoon bowl to handle. It seems that the more recent versions have a slightly fatter tip, but it’s still an excellent sloyd knife.
It’s not perfect. The plastic sheath is bad and the symmetrical handle doesn’t let you index where the edge is by feel. But to get a better knife is going to cost 2-3 times more. With the Mora being as good as it is, it’s difficult to make a knife that’s 2-3 times better than it is.
5. Compound curve spoon knife
A compound curve spoon knife (the blade exits the handle without much of curve but the curve gets tighter towards the end of the blade, kind of like a spiral) has a lot of solid functionality. I love my twca cam. It has a constant curve (basically a circle but with a bit missing). I use it a lot, so I’ve gotten pretty good with it, but a compound curve spoon knife can get places my twca cam can’t.
The tight curve is great for hogging out material. You can cut quite deeply with it, quickly getting your spoon bowl to the desired depth. The flatter section of the blade can be used to smooth out the textured surface the tighter part leaves.
With spoon knives where the tip curves past 180 degrees, like the Morakniv 164, you can use the tip for push cuts, turning this right handed hook knife into something more like a left-handed knife (or vice-versa, depending on what you’re starting with).
My Compound Curve Spoon Knives
Morakniv 164: make sure it’s the newer model that comes with a leather sheath. The older ones with the pointy tip are to be avoided. These are better, but they’ve still got issues
Nic Westermann Fawcett knife: Love this little hollow-ground gnawers of wood.
Nic Westermann/Lee Stoffer scorp: A right and left handed hook knife rolled into one. Great to use, a bugger to sharpen. It’s eaten at least two of my strops.
So those are the 5 spoon carving tools I deem essential. Disagree with my list? Feel free to list my many failings in the comments. Agree with my list? Let me know which of the five is your personal favorite to use.
