Project: Christmas Ponies (Part 1)

It has been 10 months since we moved to Bolivia.  Due largely to luggage constraints, I left the vast majority of my tools in Montana.  I have been slowly accumulating woodworking tools, but to this point haven't used them for anything worthy of mention.

I grew up with woodcarving.  When I was a kid, my dad had a woodshop in the basement of our house.  I spent a lot of time there, mostly working with handtools.  My favorite was the drawknife.  I remember carving a boat out of a chunk of 2x6 with it when I was 10 or so, and a very crude snowboard at age 13, among other things.  I worked my way through Bible college and mission training as a carpenter, but mostly doing framing, remodeling, and finish work.  Finally, I have a reason to shape wood again.

My daughters (at least, the older two) love horses.  Two years ago, Addi got a little rocking horse for Christmas, and we found Anne a stick horse shortly thereafter.  Like my tools, they, too, had to stay in Montana.  So I decided to make stick horses for all three of them.

I bought a chunk of native mahogany from a carpenter that has a shop down the street.  It measured 36.5" x 7.5" x 1.625" and weighed 12 lbs.  I paid 40 Bolivianos (currently $5.80).

Getting the pattern right was the hardest part.  I'm certainly not a drawer.  My wife told me the first one looked more like a Great Dane:

I figured I could easily find such a simple, useful tool as a drawknife here, but I was wrong.  Instead, I used a combination of Skilsaw, backsaw, hand axe, rasp, spokeshave to carve out the heads:

From there, I'll let you just look at the photos (click to see full-size):



I also made a time-lapse video of 32 minutes of shaping (from rough cut to sand-ready), compressed to 3 minutes: