Which is the best spoon carving knife, hook knife?

I have posted before about the best axe and straight knife for carving and the third tool that is needed is the spoon knife or hook knife. Opinions vary enormously and if you search the web you will find lots of folk vehemently arguing that this or that knife is the best, most folk however only own one or two knives so don't have much to compare to and most folk only want to buy one so how to choose? I forged my first hook knives for my own use 20 years ago and until recently I bought an example of every hook knife that came onto the market. When I run courses it is really helpful for folk to be able to use all the different knives available and to find what works best for them. Here are just a few of mine I have about 50 to choose between.

First what makes a good spoon carving hook knife?

It needs to be sharp and hold a good edge, all the knives I mention below will do that and all except the Frost come ready to use. The curvature of the blade is important, tight curves and short blades are easy  for beginners to use but leave a bit of a ploughed field effect which most resort to sandpaper to remove. A more open curve allows a clean cut surface to be created quickly but takes more time to learn to use. My personal taste is for a gradually tightening curve on the knife this means I have whatever curve I want somewhere on the blade and can do everything with one knife. Next the profile. The blade has to run through a curve and if it is wide front to back the back edge catches on the inside of the curve and makes the edge dig in, this results in chatter rather than a smooth cut. There are two ways round this either you make a very thin narrow blade which works but flexes, or better have a broad blade but grind off the back corner and smooth it so that you have a lovely polished rounded surface running over the inside of the spoon bowl. Finally the handle, this is largely personal preference, some like small handles, others larger. Most makers give us short handles and this restricts the number and range of cuts that are possible. I like a handle around 6-8" long.

What is below then is a subjective overview of the knives I have and I shall also include links to other makers who's knives I have tried but don't own.

Frosts/mora hooks. The frosts 106 is my preferred straight knife, cheap, good wonderful. Sadly the hooks are not as good. The best of the bunch is the 164 which is currently around £17 online, when new they have a rather heavy secondary bevel and are not always sharp out of the box. If you know what you are doing and round the back off with coarse emery paper then sharpen it well the 164 makes a reasonable tool. I toured the Frosts factory with Wille Sundqvist in 2003 and we talked with the owners asking why they did not make better hooks, these hooks have been unchanged for over 20 years and really should be better.

Svante Djarve, these were the first decent hooks that became available in the UK around 20 years ago, they have a distinctive ridged texture to the handles. They were far better than anything else at the time. The small hook is very very easy for beginners to use but it's tight curvature means it leaves a series of grooves across the work. To remove these you need a more open hook or you will have to resort to sandpaper. Many people bought this hook, use nothing else and are very happy with it, if you are serious about spooncarving though you would do well to learn to use a larger hook. Svante Djarve large hook (pictured below), this is a very good tool amongst the top three or four hooks available and the fact it is easily available mail order is good too. At the time of writing these are retailing at £42.50 which makes them a few £ more than others.

Ben Orford, when Ben made his first knives they were straight copies of Svante Djarves small hooks which are always popular with  folk who have not yet put in the time to learn to use a larger hook properly. He also produces a more open thin knife which will smooth out the rough cuts of the small hook, I find these flex in use and chatter if used for heavier cuts. I also prefer to be able to do the job with one knife rather than having to use several. I worked with Ben a little on trying to develop a better profile not sure if this ended as the flatter curve crook knife or medium knife on his site, they were better but still not quite there for me.  Ben's handles are all quite small so folk on courses with small hands always like them, he's a really nice guy and gives good customer service.

Hans Karlsson, is undoubtedly one the best green woodwork toolmakers out there. I have used many of his tools and he is the only smith where I can say every one has worked really well. This is his hook, when I first saw it I though it had drawbacks, the curvature is fairly even without the wide flat section I like and it is quite narrow front to back which sometimes results in flex. For some reason in use none of this matters, it is a wonderful knife in fact this is the knife I recommend above all the others that are easily available at the moment. Currently £34.50 and very good value.

Del Stubbs of Pinewood Forge makes excellent knives, his straight sloyd knives are the best I have used, the hook knives are very good and I would always recommend them to anyone in the US though Del currently has a long waiting list.

Now I have saved the best to last. in 2004 I worked with  a smith at the national folcraft school in Sweden who had completed his dissertation on woodworking tools, surely here was the man who would make me the perfect spoon knife? No he told me that knife was already made by someone else a chap called Bo Helgesson. It changed everything I thought I knew about how these knives worked, the very broad blade should have chattered through the cut but being very rounded off at the back it flowed smoothly through, the high polish and incredibly fine 17 degree edge angle go through wood like it's not there. I was lucky to buy a few batches of these and still use them for my courses though Bo is not always easy to buy from. If you see them in stock anywhere buy one. There are probably only two folk who have used more spoon knives for longer than me, Del Stubbs and Jogge Sundqvist and both rate the Helgesson as the benchmark knife.

It's 5 years since I was last able to get a batch of Bo's knives and it has been difficult having students using them and then having to buy something less good. I have worked with various smiths and companies getting prototypes made in the UK and never been happy. I have now finally got prototypes of spoon blades which are excellent. They are made from flat bar rather than round, I rate them as virtually as good as the Helgesson hook. They come razor sharp and hold an edge extremely well. I am not sure how long the first batch will take to come through so in the meantime there is plenty of choice in the links above.

For the sake of completeness I would like to add three other good makers, I don't have these knives but I have used them.

Dave Budd nice hand forged ethos

Dorset Woodland Blades top quality control good blades

Nic Westerman excellent blades

"Crafted" business advice for craftspeople

Like all craftspeople I love making my work, I love my raw materials, I love my old tools and tools I have made myself, I love the process of making, I love hearing from customers that use my bowls and spoons.

Like most craftspeople I don't enjoy trying to sell my work, or running the business, or filling out my tax return, or deciding how much to charge for a piece of work. This is in part a mental block, there are people out there that enjoy these things and I want to learn to do them better. I want to be able to offer my customers great customer service and I know at the moment it can be rather hard work buying things from me.

Walpole is the group of top British luxury businesses and through the Crafted scheme they offer business advice from top industry professionals to craftspeople who want to be better at business. Perfect then for me, I applied and am absolutely delighted to have been selected as one of this years 9 lucky craftspeople.

We are each allotted a business mentor, someone who the judges think will have a feel for our business and who will meet with us and give voluntary time and advice to help us develop. My mentor is Bill Amberg his studio specialise in luxury leather work, we have not met yet but I love quality leather work and am very much looking forward to visiting the studio.

Last week I was in London for the first of our monthly meetings at which we will learn about such things as branding, marketing and PR, pricing and brand strategy, building your business online, legal and intelectual property and we started last week with "raising finance".

My starting point was that this was perhaps one of the less important sessions for me. I have always run a business model that did not rely on debt. I keep overheads low so have never needed to borrow for the business. I am not closed minded though and the speakers were very very good on their subjects. Top tips for me came from Alistair Campbell of Savoir beds, we learned how he had bought the business when the Savoy sold off their bed manufacturing business in 1997 at which point they had 2.5 employees and one customer (the Savoy) who had wisely enough bought all the beds they needed before selling the business on. Alistair has built the business to now employ 120 people and have a turnover of £7 million without compromising on the time consuming handmade production methods.

I love the tag line of the website "spend a third of your life in first class".

Alastair asked the key question why might you need to source finance? There were two answers

1 because your business is basically unprofitable.
2 because you have a profitable business which you want to invest in to grow.

You can guess which if these is a good reason to borrow money and which is not.

Alistair related stories of negotiations with bank managers  over the years but the best advice was perhaps the discussions about cashflow. His raw materials are expensive huge quantities of things like horse tails which often have to be paid for long before they are delivered and maybe years before the final bed is delivered and paid for by the customer. All craftspeople are in this position and many who make to order have to buy in materials long before the customer pays. If you don't take a large deposit then you are effectively giving your customer credit and running yourself in debt. The more money you can encourage the customer to part with and the sooner the less likely you are to have cash flow problems. Apparently Harrods run a sort of loyalty scheme which offers benefits depending on how much you spend, if you are buying a special commission from them then only the deposit counts toward the loyalty scheme so a very high proportion of customers pay 100% deposit. If a furniture maker takes an average of 3 months from commission to delivery and takes 50% rather than 25% deposit that makes a huge difference to cashflow.

All good food for thought. I look forward to my meeting with Bill Amberg and to the next workshop on branding in February.

why do we work?

This is one of the reasons why I work.

Robin,

I got a couple of quaichs from you a while a ago. One of them was used in our wedding last August and we had it engraved. Last night we used both in our annual (this was our fourth) Burns' supper. I've included a few photos that I thought you might like of us using them. 

By the way, the suit is from Thomas Mahon, from English Cut, who I also heard about from you. Anyways, thank you for all the wonderful craft and writings! I trust this finds you well.

Cheers,

Ben

I feel so grateful for all those lovely people out there that buy and enjoy using my bowls, it feels like I end up playing a small part in lots of interesting, meaningful lives. Thanks Ben for the message, the photos, and for letting me share them.

wonderful film about old folk furniture coming back to life

This is a real triumph of film making and story telling.  I love the old furniture, I love the stories and the people. I dislike the hard gloss paint at the end but then maybe that is just moving with the times? I would love to see these pieces with a nice soft milk paint or linseed oil based paint with natural pigment or at the very least some soft earthy toned eggshell from Farrow and Ball. Great entertainment though.

The best spooncarving films on the web

I have posted links to these individually before but thought it would be good to post them all in one place and some may be new to some folk.

The best spooncarver I have ever seen was Ion Constantin a Romanian Gypsy who I visited with Stuart King in 1998. This is the short film, I have a bunch of slides of the whole process that I must get converted to digital some time. I still use an adze I bought from him on every plate I turn, I also drew round his spoon knife and forged some copies of it. It's not the tools that make him good though it is good technique and years of practice. He made a spoon in 10 minutes from the log including pausing for photos.



Now this is I think the best spooncarving film on youtube.....do let me know if there is a better one out there. Filmed in Sweden in 1923



Good axework from the Algarve



Then this is a series showing how I worked 5 years ago, I have got better since then but it still shows the basics well. This is part 1 showing axe technique.



Part 2 knifework



Part 3 hook knife work



Part 4 my ex Nicola doing finishing work

a tool every turner needs

There must be no bowl turner in the world that can get by without one of these. It's the first tool you use to mark out the wood yet most folk have nasty flimsy ones that don't do the job very well. I love these old forged ones. I like the way they feel in the hand. I like that I can bash them into the wood with a firm push on the broad top with my palm so that the centre sits securely and doesn't come adrift. I like that I don't have to keep buying and sharpening pencils I just scribe the line with the points. I like that the big adjustment screw works easily when my hands are freezing in the winter. I like that I can still pick them up on ebay for £20 which is less than it would cost to forge such a beautiful thing today. Unfortunately I loose the things, if the archaeologists ever excavate my workshop and spoil heaps in 1000 years time there won't be much left since most of my waste is organic but there will be several pairs of these buried somewhere along with a much loved old kent pattern axe. Maybe I should paint them dayglow orange, it would help me find them but I think I'll live with them as they are, a beautiful small functional sculpture that I use every day, what could be better.

big wooden ball film

Well this one is right at the other end of the spectrum from my foot powered turning but I like it anyway. There is something special about really large pieces of wood, I am a fan of Brancusi and Hepworth, these may not be in the same league art wise but they have a presence and are fun and I also love to see oddballs with passion working away at something with dedication.

seeds of freedom

Most of my blog posts are about traditional woodworking and traditional crafts but I am also passionately interested in traditional agriculture globally and locally. Perhaps surprisingly  only 30% of the worlds food is produced by the industrialised farming methods we are so familiar with in the developed West, this system is designed to work with large acreages of land under monoculture, very few people working the land, lots of machines and lots of chemical input. It is a very efficient way of making money for large corporations.

70% of the worlds food is produced by small independent farmers growing a diverse range of local varieties of crops, this provides useful work for many people, the genetic diversity is our best protection against variable climate but it does not produce profit for large corporations. This system is under threat. The large Western corporations would like the 70% to buy their seed and chemicals. There is worldwide resistance to this yet still the UK Government just committed £100 Million to developing GM.

"What is remarkable is not that GM crops have, after 20 years and so much money spent, now reached 19 out of more than 150 developing countries, but that most nations have managed to keep out a rapacious industry" good article

This 30 minute film gives a good overview of what is happening right now.



I am not really one for Biblical quotes but seed saving is so deep in our culture that to make seed saving a criminal offence is to me a crime in itself.

Genesis 1;12 "The Earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to it's kind. And God saw that it was good."

and on the 8th day Monsanto patented seed and prosecuted anyone that saved their the seed so that they could become rich.

If we go that route it really can't end well.

More info on seeds of freedom here

what if money was no object?

Well the truth is money is no object it is a means to an end at best and the pursuit of it can easily divert us from doing the things that we really want to do.