Carved Fretwork Eagle

FrankEV · January 17

Back of December 26,2013, Dan posted his attempt at a Carved Fretwork Cat that he had wanted to try for many years after reading an Article in Scroll Saw Woodworking and Crafts, Fall 2008 by Dick Miraglia. Well, his very successful attempt got me thinking about trying to do another carved fretwork piece.

I had recently obtained an Eagle head illustration from a stock vector website called Freepik.com that I converted into a scrollable pattern, and I thought it would make a good subject for a carved piece. I was able to use Inkscape to convert the illustration into a scrollable pattern. I made two versions of the pattern, one for printing on 11x17 inch paper and one for printing on Suber B 13x19 inch paper. I’ll post them in Pattern Exchange for anyone who may be interested.

As I most frequently create my Art Panels in very thin materials, I do not have a stock of thick - full one inch or greater – materials available. And, since working with a thick panel is well outside my comfort zone, I was reluctant to order some expensive material to experiment with. However, in Lowes, I found some Live Edge rough sawn full 6/4 x >13” x 6’ - unmarked, but I think - Southern Yellow Pine slabs that were on-sale. Unfortunately, the piece I purchased was too wide to fit through my planer or I would have reduced the thickness to a 5/4 or a little less. Because the slab width was greater than 13 inches, I was able to use the larger pattern for this project.

Although the pattern is an easy cut, the cutting itself was VERY slow. The SYP is very hard in the heartwood areas, while quite soft elsewhere. I used Pegs #5 MTG R and Pegas #5 skip tooth blades to do most of the cutting. The skip tooth blade seemed to work better of the two. In some small areas I used a Pegas #3 MGT R blade. For cutting such thick wood, it was imperative the blade be perfectly perpendicular to the table, so the cut-out material would slip out easily. In many of the complicated shaped areas the cut-outs were done in sections to make removal easier.

In order to lower the bacground I had to use AC glue to attach additional pieces of wood on each side flush to the top surface in order to maintain the base of my Trim router level while lowering the area beyond the image out to the edge of the panel. I had to replace the standard Trim router base with a much larger base to span the lowered area that was wider than half the width of the standard base. I used a 1” diameter Surface Planing Router Bit, in multiple passes, to lower the area about 3/8 of an inch. My only gripe about doing this kind of project is the sawdust mess the router makes when lowering the background area. My router table has dust collection, but the handheld Trim router does not. My shop s small and the sawdust get all over everything - poor me .

I decided that, since the cutting was to be an unframed plaque, I would not make it square and I chose to make large radius rounded corners. So it was necesssary to cut the perimeter after all the fretwork and lowering was completed, but before carving. To do so, I had to attach a second pattern to the reverse side so I could flip the panel over to cut the perimeter in order to follow the cut line. After the perimeter cut was completed I used my bench mounted belt sander to smooth the perimeter to the line and then rounded the perimeter top edge on my Router Table using 1/4" round-over router bit.

Carving was done using a combination of large sculpturing bits mounted in my Guinivere Wand which take off a lot of material fast but leaves very rough surfaces, and small sculptuing bits mounted in my Dremel Wand for the more detailed work. This required finishing by power sanding using my sanding mop and my small detail sander followed by a lot of hand sanding.

The carved image was hand painted with Artist Acrylics, using the original illustration as a guide, and the completed plaque was protected with multiple applications of s spray Clear Gloss Acrylic Coating.