Does cherry carve well?

[GrandpaPhil]

Does cherry carve well and hold detail well?

 

Bearing in mind that I paint everything.

Edited January 26 by GrandpaPhil

[Jaager]

I have worked a lot of Black Cherry (Prunus serotina) and it is OK for frame timbers, keel,  beams etc.  but I have not tried to scrape a mold pattern in it.

I seems a bit soft for micro detail, but that is just an impression.

I was a wood ghoul  and traded cleanup labor for the small trunk of a wind downed Sweet Cherry (Prunus avium).  I billotted and seasoned it and the grain is very similar, but the color is yellow green.

Not something that I would leave natural.  The Wood Database says that Sweet Cherry is harder.  It may carve better.

 

I think one of the many varieties of ornamental Pear (Pyrus calleryana) would work better.  Near ubiquitous street planting in some places.

 

[barkeater]

 

I've used cherry a lot. It is relatively easy to carve as long as you make sure your piece has no knots. It is not quite as easy as pear to carve but close and it has far better color and grain texture.

Rich

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i've used

[GrandpaPhil]

Thank you both very much for the information.

 

I am planning on building the 17th Century Dutch 80-gun warship De Zeven Provincien next and am looking at options for making the carvings.

[Jaager]

16 hours ago, GrandpaPhil said:

I am planning on building the 17th Century Dutch 80-gun warship De Zeven Provincien next and am looking at options for making the carvings.

I checked my files of Blom and Emke - I partook of the same hallucinogen but recovered before I went out too far to make it back.😉  

 

At least there are not decades of port laurels.  For those, my first thought would be to carve a master.  Make a negative using clay.  Fill it with a wood flour-PVA mixure.  guild that.  I wonder if this would work for balustrades?

 

For the free standing and relief statues, what I would try for a carving substrate:

Boxwood - Buxus sempervirens - I bought a log long ago

Castelo

Hard Maple  just to see

AYC - Alaska Yellow Ceder - it is soft and buttery - probably wants short careful strokes with an exquisitely fine edge.

 

Then there is the wood I had to harvest

Dogwood  (Corus florida)

Apple

Bradford Pear

 

and wood that I wish I could have found

Hawthorn of any variety

 

For what you want, you have the advantage of looking in supplies of wood sold for pen turning, general turning, and bowl blanks.  Almost all of it will be very high cost per volume, but your volume need is small. 

[GrandpaPhil]

I have the Seahorse kit that I would like to enlarge to 1/64 scale and then build from that.

 

The cedar that I just used for the carvings I just made for the Revenge worked well, but was brittle from age.

 

I am going to have fun with all the decorations on De Zeven Provincien.

 

The carvings are becoming some of my favorite pieces to make.

[Jaager]

On 1/28/2024 at 3:27 PM, GrandpaPhil said:

The cedar that I just used for the carvings I just made for the Revenge worked well, but was brittle from age.

It is my postulation that it is that wood does not embrittle over time.  Rather, once it is seasoned and is in equilibrium with its ambient humidity, it is its basic nature that is expressed.

Cedar is just brittle.  It was old when it was cut, so sitting around as processed stock for a long time is not the problem.  Its structure will show the effects of it "breathing" water vapor.  

Wood will swell with 100% relative humidity and shrink in a Death Valley-like dry environment.  Lignin bonds may fail - over time.   It may crack along the grain as it moves under these stresses.

 

As an aside, AYC is not a cedar at all, it is a sort of Cypress.

[allanyed]

On 1/28/2024 at 1:08 PM, Jaager said:

and wood that I wish I could have found

Hawthorn of any variety

Dean,

NUTS!!  Going back a little over 50 years ago, had I known about this being a good wood to harvest I might have had 100 lifetimes supply (and would have happily sent you a few hundred board feet) when I sawed down an acre of the stuff then had the stumps backhoed out.  Some went into piles of cordwood and the rest went into a dozen or more wood piles all over the lot and then burned to ash before building our house..  These were Crataegus pennsylvanica, known as the Pennsylvania thorn, which is a species of hawthorn but I have no idea if it has similar properties to the other species of hawthorn.  These were all over western PA and most folks hated them because of the thorns and the little apples that dropped all over the yard.  Live and learn......

Allan

Edited January 31 by allanyed

[Roger Pellett]

Wood is a confusing subject as commonly used names can have no connection with the actual species.  Examples: Poplar, pine, fir, lime, sycamore, and yes cedar.  I have no experience with Yellow Cedar but I have used three other types of wood called cedar, the aromatic type, red cedar, and Northern White Cedar, each with very different properties.  The Northern White Cedar found here in Northern Minnesota, also known as Arbor Vita is used for ribs and planking of Wood Canvas Canoes.  It is a light, fine grained but very soft wood.  It splits easily.  It is becoming increasingly hard to find.  There is also an Atlantic Cedar but it could be just another name for the Northern White Cedar or a completely different wood altogether.

 

Roger

[Jaager]

2 hours ago, Roger Pellett said:

There is also an Atlantic Cedar but it could be just another name for the Northern White Cedar or a completely different wood altogether.

It seems like most any tree-like gymnosperm that did not have needles was called Cedar for colloquial communication.

 

2 hours ago, allanyed said:

I might have had 100 lifetimes supply

We all share have regret of - if I had only known then....    But processing and storing that much wood - let alone having the time to do it   -  at a time in your life when priorities were different. 

 

A recent one for me is the realization that Blue Mold infected Holly is probably more suited for our use than the snow white stock that is sold.   No wood actually used in ship building was white.  The infected wood looks like a sun bleached deck.

[uss frolick]

Apple-wood carves very well and is cheap and plentiful. August Crabtree carved almost exclusively in apple.

 

 

[Jaager]

17 hours ago, uss frolick said:

Apple-wood carves very well and is cheap and plentiful. August Crabtree carved almost exclusively in apple.

 

I have stated before that I think that Apple is king.  I would choose it  over anything else for frames, beams, wales, rails.  It is a dream to scrape for a decorative mold.  However, I can find very little on line.  What I can find is very expensive and not the dark red straight grain stock that I want.

Two foot length, 8x4 heart wood that is " cheap and plentiful" is something that can only dream about.  Will you provide a source?

 

I have been thinking that Crabtree used Washington Hawthorn for a lot of his carving stock.  He called it "firethorn".   I believe that he was originally from the Pacific northwest.  Of late, I have begun to wonder if it could have been most any species of Hawthorn that he gathered while in Washington state?

 

[woodartist]

On 1/26/2024 at 8:17 AM, GrandpaPhil said:

Does cherry carve well and hold detail well?

 

Bearing in mind that I paint everything.

Cherry carves very well, holds detail. is hard to crush, and is not prone to splitting. Below are two carvings I did in cherry.

[Steef66]

Hi there, this is cherrywood. I did it with a small chisel and a cutter on a Dremel. I would say, cherry is very well to use for carving.

[Gaetan Bordeleau]

Cherry carves well. But it depends of the level of details. Cherry will not be able to take extra fine details.

[Steef66]

Boxwood is of sure better to carve, but cherry does the job to my opinion. I used European cherry, old from a piece of old furniture and I can make very small details. Not with a chisel but with very small cutters on a dentist drill. I carved faces in boxwood and in cherry and indeed the boxwood can handle small faces but a face of a diameter of 1 cm. is doable with cherry.

In this picture you see boxwood and it is indeed possible to go smaller with this. For cherry this is to small but twice the size it is to do and keep the details in the face. And to make decals or ornaments non faces but something like curls, I would say, use cherry.

American cherry I can't say if it is the same but the European version is very dense.

 

cherry:

btw, the cherry I made a long time ago and was one of my first carvings.

Edited March 31 by Steef66

[Jaager]

Sweet Cherry Prunus avium is more dense than Black Cherry Prunus serotina.

Only birds eat the fruit of Black Cherry as far as I know.  It is mostly the stone, so eating it would be more work than it is worth.  It is used to make wild cherry syrup - an old vehicle for compounded Rx liquids - mainly pediatric.  The syrup is made from the bark, not the fruit.

I do not consider Black Cherry wood to be significantly hard.  It is easy to work and serious sanding can get you into trouble much more quickly than with Hard Maple.

Black Cherry is not very far up my list of wood species for fine detail carving.