How to carve out letters in wood
Letter Carving With A Simple Utility Knife
Timecodes:
hi i'm eric
kimball and today in this video i'm
going to introduce you to the
concept the idea of
letter carving in wood using nothing
more than a common
utility knife like you see right here it
was
35 years ago that i first started using
nothing more than a utility knife to
carve letters in wood
and i know it was 35 years ago because
at that time my nephew was born
and i made him a stool a child's stool
like this
as a gift and i carved his name in it
35 years later he still has that stool
this stool
i made for my first grandson jackson
eight years ago i've made a number of
these stools
as gifts over the years and
i'm making four of them now because i've
got four more grandchildren
so this is a good opportunity for me to
show you this
idea this way of carving now this is a
top
for one of my grandchildren i'll show
you this
close up and i'm going to show you how i
do this
all right let me just show you here a
little closer up look
at this carving that i've made with the
utility knife and
i have not sanded the top there's a
little bit of the outline
that i made around the lettering
but that gives you an idea these are in
sized
letters got nice shadow lines there
all with a utility knife not a problem
going to show you how it's done
in order to get your letters for carving
onto the wood you need to create a uh
i'll call it a pattern
this is tracing paper but first you need
your
your font and this is
times new roman font on my word
processor i found this
i blew it up to 210 points that's about
two inches high
that is an ideal size for
carving with a utility knife two inches
so i took my tracing paper i drew a line
on it
turn this around so it's right side for
you put a line on the tracing paper
lined up my letters and trace them
got the spacing so it looked good by eye
of each of the letters
trace them onto here then
i drew get rid of that drew a line on
here
on the wood and and i put
got this adjusted where i wanted it use
masking tape to hold it down
and then very simple i used some carbon
paper
now i have what i'm going to be
demonstrating for you here
this is another grandchild and i've
traced over these lines
using carbon paper and this is my
outline that i'm going to use
for carving okay before i get into the
carving i want to talk about
tools briefly any
utility knife will work for carving like
i'm going to show you here
this is a vintage 10 499 i love this
knife
but it's not ideal for carving i've used
it for letter carving it'll work
but it has some drawbacks this
stanley number 199 it says
is perfect for carving with a utility
knife
it is this is an old style but it's a
new knife
and it has a fixed blade it doesn't
jiggle around
this one jiggles around but more
importantly
it is smaller it's shorter you can see
that
it is more rounded here
around the perimeter this is squarish
being more rounded it's more comfortable
and it tapers a bit
from being wider here and down here just
a little
but it's enough it all adds up to
comfort and
uh better uh control okay
so uh like i said any utility knife is
going to work for you
but this one in my experience works
best as far as blades go any
utility knife blade is going to work for
you as long as it's
sharp okay but
these lennox gold titanium edge utility
blades
are remarkably better
the you pay more for these and you pay
more for a reason
they are better they're sharp they stay
sharp
this is the blade if you want maximum
satisfaction when it comes to
carving with utility knife this is the
blade you want
now i i'm pretty sure you can get these
blades
and this style of knife at lowe's or
home depot
if not i've got a affiliate link
down below what i'm showing you here is
essentially
chip carving with a utility knife
and if you're familiar with chip carving
you know that there's a special chip
carving knife that is
typically used and i'm not suggesting
that this is as good or
better than a chip carving knife not at
all what i'm saying here what i'm going
to demonstrate here is that you can do a
decent job
with this kind of lettering with the
size of lettering
with nothing more than a utility knife
like this and the beautiful thing about
this is
if it gets dull you can just change the
blade with a chip carving knife you
gotta
you gotta sharpen it to get started this
is a good way i think to go
now the other difference between this
and chip carving
is that generally when someone's chip
carving
they are holding the wood or
manipulating the wood
turning it around and carving with one
hand
okay and that's not what i'm going to be
doing
i'm clamping this securely in my
black decker work mate and instead of
moving the wood around
i'm going to move around the wood okay
and
instead of using one hand i'm going to
use quite often not always i'm going to
use
two hands to get the cuts that i want
and you'll see that
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i hope this video and that little
demonstration has inspired you
to try your hand at letter carving in
wood
using nothing more than a basic utility
knife
like this granted this is
an amateur technique to letter carving
and wood
but if you take your time you can do a
pretty respectable job
you can do a job that will impress
you if you've never done this before to
begin with and it will impress
your friends and family anyone who sees
this is going to be impressed
by what you've done with nothing more
than a basic utility knife
like this now i want to thank my
youngest son
james easton's daddy for helping me
film those close-up shots where i was
carving the letters
but after james left and i was watching
the videos
i realized there was no picture
showing the overall grip that i was
using
to make the cuts so i've just shot a
little bit of a
film showing you in detail how
i'm holding the knife i think this is
important if you've watched this far i
think you'll
want to see this also in the video that
you just
watched i was not
going around the work piece i i for
filming purposes stayed in one spot and
i was able to make
all the cuts without really moving the
camera much
and i held the knife in different ways
but the basic
way that i hold the knife for most of
the cuts the preferable way
is what you see right here i'm holding
it here
i've got my thumb here for stability i
put my knuckle down
for stability and i'm drawing the blade
along
this is essentially how a chip carving
knife is used
but i'm also adding
quite often some stability more
stability and control
by putting my index finger on my other
hand against my thumb
and then against the blade here so
i'll show you here just
see my thumb is down this thumb here
and my knuckles up a little bit but i've
got this stability here
with this finger i'm not making one long
sweep i'm just coming along with
controlled shortcuts like that
all right so that's the basic grip that
i'm using
and you can do what works for you
but give that a try and see if that
gives you
the comfort and stability
that you need
i would typically i didn't do it in this
video but
i would walk around to this other side
and use the same position to make the
cuts but i
found that for video purposes i was able
to
put put my i've got the thumb down here
again and i'm putting
my finger under here for stability
and i'm bringing it along okay
so do what works for you bottom line
but that gives you an idea of what i
was doing here to
make these cuts in this video
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