How To Whittle With A Knife
If you want to take off a large chunk at once cut into the grain and split the wood.
How to whittle with a knife. This is distinctly different from something like carving where one uses a chisel and mallet. Youll be making a scooping motion. Its a fairly simple activity to get in to as one only needs wood a knife and a little creativity.
You can also buy wood that either come in blocks or pre-cut with various shapes and use specialized whittling knives to carve with. Theyre portable versatile strong and inexpensive. Links in descriptionI go through tools you you will need techniques to use and give some examples of projects to work on at the end.
Whittling by definition is the shaping of wood by repeatedly scraping small bits of it away. Then use your thumbs on both hands on the back of the knife blade to push the blade forward. First the knife has to dig into the surface of the wood a little bit.
Its all about the angle. As you push through the wood angle the knife up ever-so-slightly and you will have shaved off a bit of wood. A sharp knife will make the whittling process fun and easy.
The best knife for whittling is the best one for the project at hand. Have you ever wanted to try whittling. Sometimes a larger blade is more useful for larger projects like tent stakes and bows but a smaller and thinner blade is perfect for detail work.
This is probably the technique youd see most people using if you went around watching people whittle. In this video tutorial Little Book of Whittling author Chris Lubkemann demonstrates this simple task using a pocketknife and some sandpaper. You will want to use a high carbon steel blade or a knife with a Rockwell Hardness between 58 and 62.