We had a nice warm weekend to start off the year so I decided to gut a wahlfish. I’ve just about got the outside roughed in to the point I can bring it indoors to finish carving, sanding and painting it. It started life as a maple tree that got knocked over during last summer’s hurricane. While I was sawing it up into firewood I thought it might be worthwhile to save some of the larger portions of the trunk for woodcarving. This section was a little over four feet long, and I opted to carve another whale because I’ve already carved a smaller one for reference, and the idea of carving a four foot Guanyin or a wooden replica of a John White weroance is a little daunting at this point.

What I learned was I need to work a bit smaller in order to have a piece I can neatly bisect with a bandsaw and hollow out with chisels and gauges. I couldn’t leave this as a solid piece of wood because if I elected to mount it on the wall, it might bring sizable chunks of the wall down and take someone’s foot off or break a collarbone in the process. Solid weight must have been around eighty pounds.

Hollowing this out with chainsaws proved a little unnerving. It worked, but I don’t want to make a habit of doing it this way until I can get a Kevlar body suit.

I wondered briefly if I shouldn’t put a couple of guitar strings inside and tune them up so the whale will sing when the house is settling.

It would probably just be making an annoying ghostly sound all the damn time.

After I got this part done, we spent a bit of the early evening up at the pond with the mules, and watched the rain move slowly in from the north.