'Bongo'

This was another good idea gone bad. My friend (who’s garage I use) went to the Allman Bros. concert up in Northern Florida. On the way back from the weekend, he stopped at a Cracker Barrel restaurant and saw some cedar logs in the fireplace. He snagged the best looking piece and asked the waitress if he could buy it. She had to ask the manager wo was kind of dumb-struck that someone would WANT a piece of the firewood.. so he gave it to my buddy, who brought it back for me.

So anyway, without a bandsaw I managed to split the thing in two with a maul and used my trusty (not rusty) pruning saw to block out the rough shape. The cedar carved pretty dang quickly (at least compared to the stuff I have done lately) and so I was excited that I might actually finish a piece in a ‘day’.

Well, if I’d had a bandsaw I would have discovered during the sawing that there was a puncture wound deep into where the ‘nose’ would be. I didn’t catch this until some hours work. Being bound and determine that I might be able to work around it I continued on… until the next problem. A few weeks ago I’d splurged and bought this little file for $10 from Woodcraft that really made a difference in the carving process. Somehow… it vanished! Bad omen.

So then I get ready to work on the ‘eyes’. I wanted to inlay something like Turquoise but all I had was oval. So I went to Lowes’s to buy a walnut dowel rod to use. They had no walnut and the only size was too small. I got it anyway. Back at the garage I could only find a bulky hammer drill and did some test drills into a piece of wood to see if I had the right size bit. Not exactly… but I figured I could fill the extra space with pigmented epoxy (ideally, giving a nice outline). Uh-uh. The soft sapwood soaked up the black into every available pore and the result is as you see. With the mosquitoes driving me mad I decided not to go back and fix stuff. I plan to do another version of this, but not right away.

I called it Bongo because the side profile of the eyeballs remind me of bongo drums.

Keep all of your criticisms to yourselves. <grin>