as with any carving project one of the key things really is having sharp tools and I will drop the tools about every five to ten minutes throughout the process just constantly keeping the edge honed I don't take them back to the stones that often but that honing really really helps this plaque is one you could just pick up it just about any resale store take the metal off of it and you have a great surface for carving in this particular one ended up being black walnut and it's fantastic so it's a good for what we need to do here for adhering the patterns I've started using double sided tape I don't know if it's something I will continue doing but I really like it I ran out of the glue I had been using and this apparently works very well so one thing to to try I like to actually use a regular chisel and a simple knife to do most of my carving I like to keep the the tools basic and I find that the corner of a chisel is actually very useful for going around curbs I'm cutting in basically a 45 degree cut back away from each of the the letters even on the inside lines of some of these tighter curves the the chisel works into it very nicely I could do the exact same thing with a knife but I find I have far more control in this particular work with the chisel than I would with a knife the knife I tend to want to overshoot what I am cutting so this works very well eventually I might get a V couch and do this a little bit easier with that but right now this works works very well so when I once I've cut one half of the V with the chisel I'll come back in with a knife and sometimes I'll just use the chisel to cut the other half of the V away from the the lettering and the knife is really good for then cleaning up all of the the corners and marks that were made and just making everything look nice and sharp now recently I was at a garage sale and I found a gouge with a round bottom with a very tight circumference and so I figured I'd give that a try and so here I'm playing with it and I find that rather than pushing hard if you rock it back and forth you can get a nice little action through there but you still end up having a constant pressure which you run the danger of overshooting your mark and gouging out something you don't want to so most of the time I end up using a chisel mallet to well give it light little taps in order and these light taps actually give you a lot of control they allow you to be able to stop at any particular moment and not go too far and you can do a lot of very fine work with it even to the point of going around the tight circle of the dot above the eye I was able to actually go all the way around with this just tapping away seems kind of slow in a video but in actual work it's very fast and does something I may be doing more of I think it's a good chance I might need to get a few more actual carving tools for the lettering I put in boiled linseed oil into the lettering and I'm kind of rubbing it down in to try and get a full absorption make those letters pop out a little more because the surface was already finished I did go over it all again with the boiled linseed oil just to give it an even shine but mostly I'm just trying to get it down into the lettering each of the four corners of the metal plate had a screw and so I'm covering those up with a little decorative button that I got at a hobby store actually gives it a nice look and I'm fairly happy with the project so what do you do when a relative gets married well if your maker you make them a gift and this is actually really really quick the carving in it ended up taking about an hour maybe an hour and 20 minutes so really not that much and it was a great time to experiment with using the gouge or using the knife I've used the knife in the past you'll see a video over here that I did for actually doing Celtic carving and most of my tools I have carved with a knife but I think I might switch over to using the gouge more so you're probably gonna end up seeing me use the gouge a bit more soon I would like to get a V out this is really kind of an experimental thing for me and I'm still learning carving and so I'm collecting a few tools but this gouge that I was using I actually got at a garage sale for a buck cleaned it up and I can do that with it now so little things like this are great and people love them especially when there are are imperfections in it because imperfections say this was hand done and it really does mean more when there are slight differences and you can tell that it wasn't just spit out by our router or somewhere so that's that I hope you like this video this was a fun little project for me it was an enjoyable time if you did like it please hit like and think about subscribing I want to say a huge thank you to the patrons on patreon you guys are absolutely amazing and a huge encouragement to me so thank you if you did like the video you might find you like one of the other videos around me there a lot more just like this and until next time have a wonderful day