Relief carving, with help from an overarm router

[Kirk Poore]

I recently completed a commission for some medieval style thrones, each with several panels carved in low relief. Each panel had large areas of flat background. In order to complete it in a reasonable time and with decent flatness, I resorted to using my overarm router to clear most of the panel before hand carving the actual design:

Here's the router--a Duro, circa 1950.


First panel, with star pattern and the background routed out:

This panel is 7" x 35" and started out 3/4" thick. There are 22 stars.





Each throne also had a triangular panel:



On all these panels, I used a shallow fishtail gouge to clean up the router marks. Since the overarm router table was much smaller than the long panels, I wasn't entirely successful in keeping the panels from tilting. So there was some digging in.

And assembled:












Kirk

[Richard Wolf]

Beautiful work.

[randall rosenthal]

nice! when i used to do large architectural work i removed vast quantities of stock with a router. beats hand carving for this purpose by a mile.

what are these thrones for?