All about tools for Wood Carving

A first wood carving tool set is five or six gouges you can sharpen yourself, not twelve you cannot. Sweep and bevel decide how a blade behaves in the wood. The brand decides how the handle feels after six hours. I keep around five hundred gouges in my shop, and on most days I carve with about eight of them.

Does your gouge skid across the grain instead of slicing it? Do your shoulders ache after an hour at the bench? Have you opened a new roll of gouges, tried them, and felt almost nothing happen in the wood? Those three complaints are hardly ever about talent. Two of them come from the bevel, and the third from steel nobody ever buffed.

I came to America from Russia with one gouge and one knife. My teacher gave me the gouge. The knife I made myself, because I could not spend forty dollars on a tool and still eat that month. So I have stood on both sides of this question, the side with no money and the side with a wall full of steel, and what follows is what I would buy again.

What decides whether a gouge works for you

• Steel across the good brands runs between RC58 and RC62, so hardness is rarely what separates them.
• Nearly every maker grinds the bevel a little high, and your shoulder pays.
• Rounding the heel keeps the edge strong in oak while your hand stays low.
• A 12 piece set costing what one and a half good gouges cost can carve a full relief panel. I did it on camera.
• Sweep matters more than the badge stamped on the handle.
• Every new gouge wants buffing before its first carving, whatever the price was.

Which wood carving tools should you buy first?

Buy a few gouges you will actually reach for, one strop, and some green compound. Two things are worth adding to any boxed starter set, and I say that after carving a whole panel with one. A narrow number 11 veiner, around 1 mm and thinner than a sixteenth of an inch, gets underneath a leaf where nothing else fits. And a V tool ground nearer 35 degrees than the 60 most sets ship will undercut all day. That is a working kit. The rest of my wall came later. The lesson on choosing tools walks the shelf brand by brand.

When I landed here I bought what the store had, which was Pfeil, the Swiss brand everybody in the States calls Swiss Made. Walk into a Woodcraft and you will find maybe three names on the shelf: Pfeil, Flexcut, and some small Dockyard miniatures. Online the door opens wider. Ashley Iles from England, Auriou from France, Two Cherries and Stubai, Henry Taylor, and more besides.

Most of my shelf is Ashley Iles. The steel carries real mass close to the edge, the fishtail shape lets me reach into a corner, and the rounded English handle sits easier in my palm through a long day than an eight sided one. Nobody pays me to say that. If I were starting over with money in my pocket, my order would be Auriou first, Ashley Iles second, Pfeil third, and I would be happy with any of the three.

People argue about the eight sided handle because it will not roll off the bench. Fair enough. I carve every day and no tool of mine has ever rolled off a bench, not once, and if yours does, a rubber mat on the bench ends the argument.

Do cheap carving gouges actually work?

Yes, better than the price suggests, and I tested it rather than guessed. A set of 12 Schaaf gouges sells for roughly what one and a half of my gouges cost. Their listing says RC60, which sits in the middle of the normal range. Their listing also says something honest that no other maker prints: if you are not planning to sharpen these, do not buy them.

That warning is true of every brand on earth. A Pfeil arrives ready to carve and stays that way for a day, maybe two, then it wants the strop like anything else.

So I played beginner. I took the Schaaf gouges out of the box, put no grinder near them, and only buffed each one on a felt wheel with green compound on my Work Sharp 3000. Then I carved grapes on a basswood offcut, 6 by 8 inches, 152 by 203 mm, and just under 2 inches thick. The board had a planer snipe on one end. I planed it off.

I used 11 of the 12 tools and rebuffed each one three or four times while carving, which is about what I do with Ashley Iles. One handle came slightly loose. The company replaces tools like that, and I could turn a new handle in an afternoon anyway.

The grapes came out in full round relief. Hobbyists and furniture makers who want a little carved ornament should buy it without hesitation. For professional architectural work it is plainly not enough. I would want a number 11 veiner near 1 mm for undercutting, and their V tool is ground at 60 degrees where I reach for 35 almost every day. Two tools short of a working kit is a fair complaint about a set that cheap.

Why is the bevel wrong on almost every new gouge?

Makers grind the bevel too high, and one brand in my whole collection got it right at the factory. Here is a test that takes ten seconds. Slide your hand under the tool, rest the bevel on the wood, and look at your knuckle. Your knuckle touching the surface means the tool will carve. A gap under it means the grind is riding on its back corner, so you have to lift the handle, and lifting the handle means lifting the elbow, and lifting the elbow means the shoulder, hour after hour.

The obvious fix is a longer bevel. That works in basswood and betrays you in oak. Grind the bevel long and the steel behind the edge goes thin, and thin steel in white oak or cherry chips instead of slicing. Red oak is just as hard. Brown oak is a little kinder than the American white.

So on hardwood I keep the bevel short, about a quarter inch, 6 mm. Short bevels lift your hand, though, and now we are back at the sore shoulder. The way out of that circle is the heel. Take the sharp corner off the back of the bevel and round it smooth. The steel stays thick and strong near the edge, and the rounded back still lets the blade reach the surface with your hand down low.

I keep three number 3 gouges on the bench ground three different ways for exactly this reason. One long, one short, one with the heel rounded away. The one I never touch is reserved for the mallet.

Mallet work has its own geometry. A heavy mallet on oak means striking the last 80 mm of the handle, a bit over three inches, and the tool must lift clear before the blow lands. My oak mallet weighs 32 ounces, two pounds. On that gouge the taller factory bevel is right where it is, so I leave it alone.

How do the brands compare on the bench?

Brand	Made in	Hardness	What I notice at the bench
Pfeil	Switzerland	RC59 to 61	Straight, holds an edge, thinner blade, eight sided handle
Ashley Iles	England	RC61	Thick steel, fishtails reach corners, rounded handle
Auriou	France	Similar	Beautiful, thick as the Iles, my first pick
Schaaf	Set of 12	RC60	Machine marks, carves fine once buffed
BeaverCraft	Ukraine	High carbon	Good handle notch, tall factory grind, bandages included

One German micro brand I own taught me a smaller lesson. Its little tools sat on the same shelf as my Pfeil, in the same air, and only the German ones came up with rust on them. I still use them for tiny work. I would not buy the big sizes.

The Ukrainian set was sent to me, and I told the makers publicly what I liked and what I did not, which is the only kind of review worth reading. What I liked most was not the steel. Somebody there thought to pack adhesive bandages in with the knives. My own hands have been opened more than a hundred times in forty years at this bench, and no other maker has ever thought to put a bandage in the box.

They also threw in a thick shoulder of leather and a tube of green paste, so a beginner can strop from day one. Those two things cost real money bought separately. Their handles have a notch under the thumb that feels good on a long session, and their bevel is too high, same as everyone else. I carved a Byzantine acanthus leaf with them and a low relief furniture panel, and both went fine.

What can a back bent gouge do that a straight one cannot?

Back bent gouges reach behind and underneath, and they are my favourite tools in the shop. The blade bends away from the handle instead of toward it, so the edge comes at the wood from above a high spot rather than digging straight into it.

Undercutting is where they earn their keep. When a panel is carved from one solid board, and nothing is glued on afterwards, the shadow under a leaf has to be carved from the front. No straight blade gets in there. Mine run from huge ones for deep work down to about 3 mm, an eighth of an inch, in several curves.

That shadow is most of what makes a carving look alive from across a room. Shall we carve?

How should the tools sit on your bench?

Lay them with the edges pointing at you, spaced a hand apart, and keep only a few out at a time. Turning the sweeps toward yourself sounds backwards until you try it. Not every maker stamps the sweep on the handle, so with the blades facing you, you read the profile instead of hunting for it.

It is safer that way too. You pick the tool up by the handle, the blade goes away from your body, you carve, you set it back. A student told me he laid his blades away from himself because he was afraid of opening his hand. I understand the fear. The grip you learn from turning them toward you is what actually keeps your hand shut.

Leave space between them for your fingers. And keep two or three on the bench, five at the outside. There are five hundred tools on the wall behind me, and spreading even fifty across the bench would cost me ten minutes every hour.

What takes the ridges out of a finished carving?

Spring steel scraper cards pull the facets down flat, and honestly I like the facets. Tool marks read as veins in a leaf and they say a hand was here. Some of my customers want that surface. Others want it smooth as glass, and both are right.

Gold leaf settles the argument for you. If a piece is going to be water gilded, the ground has to come up very smooth, so the gilding reads as gold and not as sanded ridges. I was working on a gilded piece when I filmed this, which is why I had the cards out at all.

For years I made my own by buying the cheapest spring steel carving tools I could find and reshaping them. Then I found a boxed set of cabinet scraper cards on Amazon, 12 pieces of blue spring steel in a dozen profiles, two working sides each. Probably made in China. Nobody pays me to mention them, and out of the box they were not bad at all.

A scraper needs a hook turned along its edge before it will work properly. Any hard, smooth steel will roll one. I have used a screwdriver shank when the proper burnisher was somewhere else. Put the card in a vise while you do it. Holding it in your fingers while you push is a bad idea.

Small habits like that one save more hands than any guard ever will, and most of them live in the techniques lessons rather than in any tool catalog. None of this is the hard part. Sharpening takes years, and design is the thing almost nobody teaches, and carving itself is still the most important of the three. Tools only have to stop being in your way. If you want somebody to stand beside you while you learn which end of that is which, the school is where I do it, and there are in person classes when I can run them.

Not sure where to begin? The first carvings course wants almost nothing on your bench, the kitchen board gives you something to hand somebody, and the grape onlay is where undercutting starts to matter. The whole course list is one page, and the lesson map shows how they connect.

My teacher handed me that first gouge when I was sixteen. The knife I made myself. Both of them came with me across the ocean.