Getting nearer our goal, with the stanely blade I scrape down both sides of the blade repeatedly to thin and shape, and nibble out a small nick in the handle, and then again scrub with a damp toothbrush

Yippee just a little touching up to do, put in two small nicks in the finger guard to make it stand out from the blade and handle and then scrubbed it with a wet toothbrush to check how it looks, the finger guard is a little on the thick side but to the naked eye it looks fine. The time is now 2.30 in the morning, went to bed with an arrogant swagger, quietly snook into bed not to wake the missus, only to be woken with a hefty slap.................. You guessed it lads, I forgot to put her toothbrush back!!

Thanks for the tutorial Willz and showing us the tools you use.... Can't believe the tools are so basic, so basic in fact I am tempted to try and have a go just to see what I can come up with... .. Stunning work...

Regards

Alan

Absolutely supurb work, well done. Something to try out sometime.

Cheers lads, much appreciated, heres a small update, nearly there

Quick update on the carving, you can go on forever cleaning up carvings, think the trick is knowing when to stop. So here it is finished, I`m happy with it, heres the pics

Wonderful, wonderful job there, something to aspire to.

Thanks for the comments lads, appreciated.
OK onto the band that splashes across the stern, here it is finished, it was originally a little over scale so with a file here and there managed to get it down to a size where I'm happy.
The band had been on my mind for quite a while in the thinking on how to go about it, so in my next few posts I will be doing a mini tutorial on how I achieved it.

cheers Alan, now I`ll show you how easy it is.
Right lads the tutorial.
First I was going to make it in one piece but noticing that the centre is hidden by the prince of whales feathers decided to make it in two, this is a big advantage, if we break it we only break half, once one is done we can draw round the back to make the other a perfect mirror image (well nearly) and finally it gives us a couple of mm or so to adjust the width, we can widen it as long as the gap is hidden by the feathers, or we can shorten it by filing the centres down.

Next the dremel

Switched the dremel to the drill stand, I self tapped a piece of 6 mm ply onto the base of the drill stand and then drilled a 2 mm hole through it and glued in a piece of 2 mm brass rod and left it sticking up .5 mm pic one. Next I selected a cutter appropriate for the job pic 2. Then set the height of the cutter, pic three shows this, the pin is under the cutter see red arrow, then slowly and repeatedly cut out the shape. You can alter the shape you cut out by moving the cutter up or down and also by changing the pin size in dia
You must hold the piece firmly down when cutting otherwise it could ride up on the pin