2015/11/05 – Carving my kuksa

From one of the birch burls I found earlier this month, which has been drying in the garage, I started carving my kuksa.
The previous one cracked when I pored boiling water inside of it.. Won’t do that again.

The burl harvesting you can see here.

The tools, my carving set and a set of chisels, and loads of sand paper later on.
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The kuksa as it was.
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Chopping away the rough parts, to see what I can really work with.
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Outlining the kuksa shape. At this stage I avoided the dark brown spot as I wasn’t sure how deep it would go.
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Chiseling the bowl part.
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By going deep, I noticed that the dark brown part didn’t go that deep, so I moved the edge a bit more to the side to gain a bigger cup size. If the dark brown part would not hold, I could still chip down the edge without loosing much depth.
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Cutting away larger chunks with my new opinel saw.
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Lot’s of carving with the carving knife. Trying to use all the right and safe ways. After that lot’s of sanding from rough grid to fine grid..
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Results so far. The right and safe way of carving didn’t work out that safe for me, I had luckily lot’s of band-aids ready.
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Two boils of each 1 hour with very salty water.
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Then 5 days drying. The boiling roughed it up a bit, so lot’s of sanding again.
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First 2 layers of olive oil, and then thick layer of Tung oil, and in between drying.
Tung oil is a food save oil that leaves a nice hard finish on the wood.
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The final result, i’m very pleased with it !
This kuksa will be added to my cook kit for my hiking trips.
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