PRIMITIVE WOOD CARVING TOOLS
Primitive Wood Carving
From the age of Neolithic man wood has been fashioned from stock pieces be it in pole or a block form.
This was mainly along utility lines for such items as spears or utensils including such products as North American wood fish hooks believe it or not!
Down the ages the first form to emerge was that of the human figure which became more and more refined. Towards the Medieval period where it enjoyed a kind of renaissance especially in a religious form in the churches where the use of wood became extremely widespread and of very high artistic quality.
Of course along this journey of wood sculpting the tools to render this evolved as well.
Tools for Primitive Wood Carving
Adze
This involves scooping out wood in reverse motion similar to that of raking in the garden
Mallet
choppers
Removing wood from piece from the
side sideways action chopping down. Heavy head axes have a similar principle to the normal axe.
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| Greenstone Hand Palm Wood Carving and sculpting knife |
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| Greenstone Wood Carving and Wood Sculpting Chisel with Wooden Stock Handle |
Maori
Carving tools
In
ancient times Maoris carved wood with shaped Greenstone fashioned tools such as
choppers and chisels. After their contact with the mariners at the time of Cook
they came into contact with and obtained some supplies of steel mainly large nails
and spikes. These they flattened and fashioned into knives and chisels
Types
of Green stone chisel
There
has been reported that there were a few types of tools used here , There was a wooden shaft mounted greenstone head with the dimensions and edge being
similar to today's chisel with widths of about an inch wide. This chisel could be
used with a mallet type hammer to effect cutting. Other tools include a spike
type tool out of one piece of greenstone with a very narrow cutting point at
the tip for finer detailing.
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| 3 Flat sided point Greenstone Wood Carving Chisel |
Then
there was a knife type stubby flat stone shaped and sharpened with an oblique
edge for removed wood in the carving by a slicing action.The tool was shaped for placing in the palm of the hand. There was also
probably available an adze type stone tool for roughing out wood carving.
The
features of using these primitive tools was that there was a limitation to the
depth of cut and the time taken to complete the work . Also the stone wood
carving tools did not give as clean a cut as contemporary tools
Primative type Wooden Chisel Mallet
