Help carving furniture detals

[Aram Schiffman]

Hi everyone,

M name's Aram. I'm new on SMC. I've been building furniture for a few years now. One thing I am not satisfied with is my ability to create crisp details on furniture pulls. Here is a simple example to illustrate.

The convex curves aren't too bad. But the inside curves were shaped with rasps. The result is always a little rounded across the width, and not crisply defined.

How would you shape something like this? Is this a good application for gouges? (I own a lot of hand tools -- but exactly one is a carving gouge! But hey, I'm up for a new slippery slope.) Or do I just need to improve my technique? Any advice appreciated. I have some more complicated furniture details in mind (some Krenov-like features) that I want to build up to.

Thanks guys!

Aram

[Mark Yundt]

Hello Aram and welcome,
I've made a few like this and all I used was a bandsaw and a drill press mounted drum sander. I shaped the entire pull from the primary stock and then just cut it free. You can knock them out in minutes.

[Mark Yundt]

But your question was what chisel or gouge to use. If the one you have happens to be around a #2 that would work nicely. A belt sander would also make these pretty quickly , both convex and concave surfaces.
A rasp , as you have tried will work, but as you know any type of file work takes a very steady hand so as not to rock the file ( rasp) as you work across the surface and ruin the edges leaving a less than crisp line. If you then uses sandpaper to clean up the surface , put the sandpaper on a block of some sort to keep it flat as you work it over the convex surface, and wrap it (sandpaper) around a curved surface similar to the radius you want and work the piece over it that way. Simple, but it will produce consistent pieces.