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I made my first arch with my hands. After that, I got sophisticated and used a large spoon for carving.
Then I faced a problem: a pile of sand so hard that the spoon bent. This was sand mixed with silt, a beach on a Nebraska lake. On our next outing--I was there with a friend because she wanted to make something, and she had a car--I added a tent stake from my backpacking kit to the tools.
I still use that tent stake. For years it was my only major digging tool; it worked, and who am I to mess with success? For broader areas, however, I needed something else so I picked up some scraps of acrylic sheet.
The whole took kit would fit inside a five-gallon bucket. Including the brick I used to pound in the form's stakes, and lunch. In 1995 that all ended.
It's all Bert Adams's fault. He enticed me to his contest in Santa Cruz (no longer running because of refractory City managers), one of the enticements being a copy of Ted Siebert's "The Art of Sandcastling," wherein was described a tool made from scrap steel strapping. The idea was to bend a strip of the material back on itself and then tape the ends together. You'd use the loop end to dig with.
I had some stainless steel sheet that I'd bought for another purpose. I had some strips sheared from this, one inch wide and 24 inches long. I bent a strip around a wooden mandrel and put a piece of wood between the ends. While I was at it, I made a finger-shaped tool, a scraper bent from aluminum, and another loop tool that resembled a shepherd's crook.
Of what is a revolution made? These tools were unpreposessing, rough, crude, simple. You'd look at them and think "Tools. So what." And then you go to the beach and make a sculpture and the whole thing goes twice as fast. Time is the real master on the beach: when you're out of daylight, the sculpture is finished. Suddenly I was gifted with, in effect, a sun that moved much more slowly.
What can be done in a longer day? I'm still working on it. The only limit is my imagination. I'm still working on tools, also: different designs, more specialized, improvements on old designs. Here is an introduction to my tool kit.
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About Tool Numbers
Tool Summary List (includes all equipment) |
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Tent stake: U-section aluminum, about a foot long. Good for general trimming and cleaning the bottoms of deep narrow cuts. Also good for starting vertical openings. |
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#1 Loop tool: This is a 24-inch piece of 1/16" stainless steel, bent 180 degrees on a 3/8-inch radius, with a wooden handle between the free ends. It's good for making narrow cuts, general carving, delicate work and rough surfaces. I need to make a longer one.
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#2 Steel Finger: Another strip of stainless, this one bent into a crooked finger shape and reinforced with a wooden handle. It's about 18 inches long, and good for vertical holes, small spaces and light trimming. |
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#3 Vertical roadgrader: I bent a 4X12-inch piece of sheet aluminum 45 degrees about an inch from one edge. It's good for making long flat surfaces and removing bumps. It's also good for landscaping the sculpture's base. |
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#4 Big Loop: Another strip of stainless, this one bent into a circle about 1.5 inches across at one end. The other end has a wooden handle. It's about 14 inches long, and very good for digging around corners. It's also good for delicate work because I sharpened the edges. |
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Potter's rib: Potters use these for smoothing the curves on thrown pots. They're flat wood, cut into multiradial curves and beveled. Very useful, in the large size, for concave surfaces, but they wear out too fast. I've made a replacement in aluminum, but a big Pismo clam works better. |
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Small Knives and Spatulas: I can't work steel that's stiff enough to make tools like these, so I buy them and modify them by regrinding the edge, or putting a crease in to make it stiffer. |
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#12 Sand Knife: This was an attempt to replace the tent stake. It works for outside slicing and trimming. |
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#13 Steel Pinky: A smaller version of the Steel Finger, this tool is essential for small openings and detail work. |
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#14 Pointer: I had a need for a tool that would skim over a carved surface and undercut an adjacent surface, so I made this tool. It doesn't work all that well because it doesn't clear away the waste sand. I need to make another with a turned-up tip. |
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#15 Super Slicer: I attempted to improve upon the Sand Knife's design by offsetting the handle so my knuckles would stay clear of the work. It worked in that regard, but brought on a new problem. The offset handle allows the blade to dig in; a centered blade resists this. |
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Pismo clam: Clams have a wonderful shape. Their shells are made of tough material. I can't make a carving tool this good for carving concave surfaces, so I pick these up whenever I see them, which isn't often. |
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#19 Shaver Tool: This was my first attempt at a tool for inside shaping. It didn't work, and has been rebuilt. It still doesn't work. Replaced by the Sand Scorp. |
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#20 Powerloop: This was another experiment in inside carving. It didn't work for that, but does work very well for heavy-duty digging. |
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#21 Bigger Loop: I intended to make an improved replacement for the #4 Big Loop, but found out that this tool's bigger loop made it a new tool. |
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#22 Long Sand Scorp: Another tool made for inside carving, and this one works. Very well. |
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#23 Medium Sand Scorp: The Long Scorp worked well enough that I immediately wanted a smaller one for more delicate tasks. This one also works well. |
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About Tool Numbers:
I use a rather Byzantine numbering system for my sculptures, so why not use something similar for tools?
It's actually pretty simple. Tools that I design and make are numbered sequentially. If tool is rebuilt, usually by putting a new handle on the same blade, it gets a letter revision. If an entirely new tool is built to do the same job as the old, the new one gets a "/2" designation to show that it's the second of the type.
Examples:
#1 Loop Tool: This was the original.
#1B Loop Tool: Same blade, with a new handle.
#1C Loop Tool: Same blade, with another new handle.
#1/2 Loop Tool: A new tool to replace the lost #1C. Its design is somewhat different but the job is the same.
Note: Some numbers are missing from the above list. That's because this page only describes tools I still use. Failed experiments don't stay in the tub. You can find out about them on the complete Tool Summary List.
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