Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)
When I first got into woodcarving, I picked up one of EJ Tangerman's books. The ball-in-a-cage and the wooden chain really caught my attention. I tried both and they came out okay. However, I've been wanting to do a crazy-long chain.
I started with this 7ft long, reclaimed 1”x1” cedar board. It was basic building-grade stuff. Nothing special. There were a bunch of nail holes that I didn't bother filling. Fortunately, this didn't really cause problems.
The first step in making the chain was to shape the board to have a plus-sign cross section. I thought about whittling that part, but that didn't sound like fun. This step amounted to cutting four rabbets, so it was a perfect excuse to use a moving fillister plane that I had just restored.
A pile of wood shavings is so satisfying!
Once the rabbets were cut, then it was time to mark off the links at 2” per link. After doing that, I used a saw to cut where adjacent links meet, then took a chisel to make a bevel on each of the four corners of each link.
Now comes A LOT of whittling. I experimented with various knives gouges until I settled on a regular 1-1/2” carving knife, a pelican knife, and a gouge to do the Whittling. I estimated that it took, on average, about 30min free a link from the board and shape it.
And, of course, there were times when I needed to do repairs. This usually happened when I tried to separate two links.
I set up my work office in my shop when the pandemic hit. The beauty of this is that during a very boring meeting (there were many), I could turn off the camera, put myself on mute, and whittle while I listened. After many years of meetings, I finally felt like they were productive! :)After two weeks of meetings… uh… I mean whittling…
As you might guess, I got a lot of practice whittling chain links. It was very clear after I finished, that the quality of each link was much better between the first one and the last. Therefore, I decided to go back to the beginning and fix the cruder links until they were relatively uniform.Once all the whittling was done, boiled linseed oil was poured onto the chain and hung up to dry for a day.The chain is done, but I'm thinking I might connect something to either one or both ends. I have a few ideas, but haven't settled on anything yet.Thanks for checking you my post!