tobytools":jqfw12zi said:
your chisel roll must be huge, just a curious question why so many?
The majority of my 70 or so are gouges - and when it comes to wood carving tools, there's always room for one more.
There's 14 basic profiles (flat; skew; 9 different circle arcs, from a tiny part of a circle up to a half circle; two u shapes (one with splayed upper walls, the other parallel; 3 V shapes (60, 75 and 100 degree angles)).
Each of those profile can come in a range of widths; Ashley Illes makes 18 different widths, from 1/16" (1.5 mm) up to 3" (70mm).
They can combine with four major shaft styles - straight, long bent, short bend and back bend.
So far that's just over 1000 different tools, without repeating. In practice not all tools are essential for all work - although there's definatly some carver out there that need that one weird tool, most carvers have only a few hundred. Grinling Gibbons was alleged to have had around 500, for example.
There's also differences with in-cannel vs out-cannel (vs double bevel), for gouges, and possibly cranked or dog leg shafts, not counting more obscure blade profiles like macaroni, or bull nosed variations.
In practice, I suspect that most carvers will carve most pieces with 10-40 tools at most (but that's a different 20-40 for each piece); with a common core of about 20 that are regular appearances (Again, that 20 will vary from carver to carver - someone who does relief carvings will have quite a different set from someone doing work in the round).
I've a list of a further 30 I want, just to eliminate the most egregious 'missing' tools from my sets…