Our September meeting was again a little different to our usual insofar as we had a woodcarver as our guest demonstrator and what an enjoyable afternoon it turned out to be; Christy Glynn is his name, a carver and skilled craftsman of the old school. Christy is a professional carver working all his life in the furniture trade (he said he started helping his father in the workshop when he was about seven, he is now approaching eighty) and I was enthralled at his stories of his early days working in the family business. He demonstrated his skill with a partly prepared chair leg or it could be used for a coffee table, a piece of 60 x60mm pine with two pieces glued to the top to give it width band sawed roughly to shape. Clamping this on the bench in a sash clamp he quickly went to work with some very basic tools, a few bevelled edged chisels of different sizes and some well used carving gouges, nothing fancy and as we soon saw, he could do anything with these. He worked with great speed on the foot and in a few minutes, carved a perfect traditional ball and claw, then with a bit of shaping of the leg with a spoke shave he moved to the top and carved a leaf motif, all this by eye without any measuring just a few pencil marks. Christy then showed us that with a twist or turn of the chisel he could do a few variations to the design.
He also had with him a beautifully carved Lions head table leg and a matching blank on which he showed us how he carved some very elaborate details, I refer you to the photos to give some idea of what It looked like. The rest of the demo he spent carving some letters and numbers in different styles and I think I can safely say everybody enjoyed the afternoon judging by the way our guys engaged with him.
All that’s left to report is the competition result as follows, 1st Tom Murphy 2nd Jim Hynes and 3rd Chris Hayes. Again, as was brought up at the meeting, a very disappointing number of entries.
That’s it for now, I hope to see you all next month, till then work safe.
Pat Gannon.