Fall 2023 Showcase: Arbortech Power Carving Unit

Using a power carver has become one of my new favorite woodworking things. I love the fluidity and just the organic nature it gives to the woodworking. I do. Yeah, me too. We're not working in just boxes anymore, right? This project is I think my favorite application that I've ever seen for that. It's a great way to make this river table concept without all the setup involved uh with and you can do it with pretty much any slab that you want. It was a blast to do. So it does happen to be power carving month as we speak. Um which is pretty cool. And um I've said a few times now since I've had the Arbor Tech system in my shop. Um You and I are both avid bolt turners, which is fun. You put them on the lathe. They go around this my new form of bolt turning with the power carver. I have really, really come to enjoy and the marriage between the turbo plane which takes out a lot of material and then the um detail that you can get from the precision carving system. Um and then throw the sanding head in there to clean your work up. Um One spot that actually used a lot. I don't know if I ever told you this. Um, but when I was sanding the outside of the cedar strip canoe, um, about 98% of that sanding got done with this tool because the dust collection on it is so good and it's a hook and loop sanding set up so I could easily change from grit to grip. So um one of the things when we were putting this together that I thought would be cool would be you and I have talked about river tables a lot and the, the very traditional way um If it, if it's traditional, yeah, I don't know. It's too early to be traditional. The very standard way to do that is a slab and a slab and you pour a big river of epoxy between the two and I thought it'd be kind of cool just to take a nice slab and turn it into a river. So a little out of the box thinking, well, it is and, and so as cool as river tables are, I don't think I would ever make one the, as you call the traditional way, the, the the setup involved in that, the cost of all that resin this, this makes it uh to me it makes it more uh you know, accessible. Well, there's a neat creative aspect to this. So you'll, you'll see how this happened in a minute. Um But the bottom line is, it's a slab onto which I drew a river. Um And then I just started hollowing and when it looked river enough, if that's the word, then I stopped and poured oxy in there. Um So enough talking, let's, let's see how that river ran through it. Power carving has become one of my favorite things to do. And what I like about it is that you're not limited to turning around bowl and you can do any shape you want here, it's very, very organic. Now, in this case, I'm not going to do a bowl. I've got an idea. I'm gonna use the Arbor Tech system here, the turbo plane and the precision carving system to make a river table. The way I'm going to make a river table is the first thing I'm going to do is make a river. So I'm working in a white oak slab and I am going to sketch out a river. Now, what I'm gonna try to do right at this. Nat is make an island. I'm going to leave that alone. I'm gonna bring this bank out a little. So I'm gonna treat this the same way. I'm gonna do this excavating same way as a conventional river table. I'm gonna excavate this out and then we're gonna pour epoxy in there to make it into a river table. So I'm gonna start with the turbo plane and one of the things I really like about this setup is I can put dust collection on it. Power carving can be dusty. So I'm gonna run dust collection on this and I am hoping to take away everything that doesn't look like a river. I've done as much as I can do with the turbo plane. And now I have changed to this great ball carver. If you want the bottom of whatever you're doing to be perfectly flat, I could have gotten this flatter with the turbo plane and then we can take the turbo plane off and add a hook and loop sanding disk so we could really even that surface out. What I want to do is detail areas that I couldn't get into with the turbo plane and that's where the precision carver is going to come into play. So I'm going to keep working along the river bank. I'm just trying to define that a little bit more. Then I got to use this to come around the island here or one of the other small cutters so that I can define this and it'll stand out when I pour the river. Now I'm going to go back to the ball and finish detailing around my island. Ok? I really like how this looks. A river runs through it with my little island in the middle. Next step, little epoxy work. First step penetrating epoxy, it's gonna soak into the wood, help prevent bubbles after this is dry. Then I'll do the river port. Now we watch glue dry, got my epoxy mix to pour this. And part of what I was after was just a little suggestion of color in this. I love the texture that was left in the bottom of the river here by the turbo plane and the ball carver. And I wanna make sure we can see that. I added a little bit of abalon that I happen to have here. So in the epoxy, I've got pigment and then I love this that's coming from a little touch of Mica powder. I love it. Gonna let that cure, clean it up. It's gonna be a beautiful little river table. So you folks did not get a chance to see this in its current shape condition. Um Cause last you saw, I had just poured the epoxy and then after that cleaned it up, done. So I did some sanding. I got a coat of finish on there. And man, do I love how that thing looks? Now, one of the details that I really like that came out of this, that I it's like the thing I had the most fun with was when I had the ball carve around and you just saw this on the video and I was working my way through the river bank there and creating intentionally creating that very irregular edge because that's what a river bank looks like. So I think, I think the Big Trout is right there under the bank. Um, so it was just neat to, to be able to use the system to put that level of detail in and just play with it well, and not only the edge but the contoured bottom. Yeah. You know, it's just, it just adds such a depth to it. Yeah. I think one of the things with our studio lights in here today, you may not quite be getting um what Paul and I can see here, but the, the bottom undulates like crazy from the turbo plane and the, and the carving system and that's the way a river looks. You know, it's uh it's kind of like the water flowing over it. That creates that pattern in the sand. That's really what it looks like on the bottom there. It was very, there's a really neat way to make a river table. Yeah, I would argue that's a better way to make a river table. That's a next level river table. Thank you.