twca cam: Carving a Spoon Knife

Nic Westermann makes a Welsh take on a spoon knife

I grew up in Surrey and went to university in Aberystwyth, staying on in the surrounding area after my degree. My first forge was set up on a remote farm and over lunch breaks the elderly farmer started to teach me Welsh – his English wasn’t that good, having been learnt from his children. He was unable to translate individual words and I, in turn, learnt whole sentences by rote. I had no real idea how I was progressing but do remember being surprised when he was talking about a farmer from Dolgellau, about 20 miles away, who rented some fields. He confessed that he only understood about half of what he was saying. A year later I moved to a new forge near to Dolgellau and, not surprisingly, found my language skills severely lacking.

Nearly 30 years later I still live in Wales, and still don’t speak Welsh. But language isn’t static, and obviously location dependent. The phrase ‘twca cam’ comes up increasingly often in spoon carving circles, but what it means precisely will depend on who you speak to. The author and carver from this magazine, Dave Western, recently posted some pictures online of old Welsh spoon knives he had seen in St Fagans museum, labelling them quite correctly as ‘twca cams’. This triggered some debate as to what it actually means, as most people’s first port of call – Google Translate – could make no sense of it.

Twca cam translates literally as ‘knife bent’ – so in Welsh, any spoon or crooked knife is a twca cam, regardless of shape or whether it was used for a painstakingly detailed lovespoon or a run of cawl (soup) spoons. But language changes over time, and now it is generally taken to mean a larger, constant-radius spoon knife with a longer handle – and to be fair, many Welsh spoon carving knives had these two distinct attributes. There is perhaps also a leaning towards it being a more specialised tool used for production carving, cawl spoons being a mainstay of many spoon carvers in the past. The constant curve means that as long as the spoon bowl isn’t too deep, the hollowing can be finished with a single knife, no need for a left- and a right- handed one.

I got chatting to Dave, having greatly admired his intricate work for a good few years, and the idea of reproducing some of these older designs was raised, and I was keen to give it a go. I have been making what I sell as twca cams for a long time now, but these are my more modern take on the basic design parameters.

I’m not aware of any manufacturers forging production runs of twca cams in Wales around the early part of the last century and have not seen any with a company maker’s mark, so I assume most were made by the village blacksmith or even by the carver themselves. Many examples of tools made from old files can be found though, as these were a ready source of high-quality tool steel.

I love the sharkskin effect you see in tools forged from files so decided to use one for this project. An old file was chosen, modern ones are not always suitable. However, all the cuts that formed the teeth of even a good-quality old file are potential nuclei for a crack to form. Also, the first time you heat treat a file it is always just a best guess what is appropriate. So, to be safe I also forged one from a known tool steel. When you are forging steel, half the time is generally spent waiting for it to reach a forging heat in the fire, so forging a pair can take virtually no more time than doing a single unique piece.

First, I had Dave send over whatever source material he had. These images these images didn’t show a great deal when zoomed in to look at fine details but they gave me an idea of what to aim for and I recognised a few forms that naturally occur when forging steel. My guess is that most of these tools dated from the early part of the last century. Although I couldn’t see a lot of detail I gleaned a fair amount of information, including the size of the tools as the final radius is really important, especially for production carving.

I made a few rough sketches. I’m no artist for sure, so quickly got down to what I am actually good at – forging. I shouldn’t forget though that this is a woodcarving magazine, and I feel I would be going off topic more than usual if I were to detail the specific techniques I used to forge these blades. But most people who work with their hands find it relatively intuitive – if you can imagine forming this from clay or plasticine you are on the right track. I just had to work a bit quicker, and couldn’t use my hands. I say that as, years back, in the middle of a forging demo I asked in all seriousness why I was using a hammer and couldn’t I just bend the steel with my hands if it was that soft? No reasonable reply came to mind.

For me, one of the joys of forging steel is how allied yet different it is to carving wood, which is a reductive process and you have to have a firm idea of the final form of what you are carving before you start removing material. I was a very poor student of German at school but remember enough to know that you can’t start a sentence unless you know the ending, like carving. Forging steel is transformative. As you can see the twca cam take on its final form it seems to grow from its tiny blank, you can move the steel to where it needs to be, and to some extent make it up as you go along. Like speaking English, you can start a sentence not really knowing what you are talking about or going to say and there are multiple ways to finish it as it progresses.

Yet, different as I make it sound, these are transferable skills when I am teaching. If a carver comes on a course with me, they invariably take to forging very easily. You can see the progression in these photos. After forging, the blades were ground close to the finished shape. It is easier with softer steel and there is no issue if you do inadvertently overheat or blue an edge at this point. The blades were heat treated, quenched to harden the steel then tempered to make them tougher and less likely to break in use.

This shows I think, a drawback of reusing files – even if you think you have removed all the teeth, you can see that there are often remnants of the teeth left behind which will cause weak spots, especially if not fully ground out of the cutting edge. But I do like the look so didn’t grind them all away – they add provenance to the forging. As you can see in the later images, the contrast between the highly polished surface with seemingly random sections of scales were really stunning.

As files are meant to cut steel, they are designed to get very hard, but neither are they intended to deal with shock loading or f lex, so the steel they are made from can often be quite brittle. To reduce the likelihood of the blade breaking, I performed a differential temper. After an initial temper cycle on the whole tool, I heated the spine of the blade to make it even softer, which makes for a tougher tool, and to stop the edge being softened further it was submerged in water. It took a bit of setting up, but I managed to get an action shot.

I was very pleased with the final look and feel of the blades. The interplay between a highly polished surface and a rougher forged surface never gets old for me. I had intended to leave them ground more roughly, but I couldn’t resist working through to a finer grit then buffing them up, so rather than being a slavish copy these are definitely blades influenced by the earlier examples. I made a few test cuts, largely to check that the repurposed file had held up to the heat treatment intact. The cuts were promising but my next step is to send these to Dave as he will put handles on them and put them through their paces. If the postal service works as intended, no doubt you’ll read about that in the next issue.

The sharpening clinic is open

As the name suggests, I would like to help carvers with sharpening problems – this will allow me to focus my articles on tools that are relevant to you, the readership. I am looking for readers to send a brief email with a description of the tool, the sharpening equipment they are using and problems they are having. Please do not send images at this stage as it clogs up my email system far too quickly.

I will try to answer all emails but will only be selecting one tool per article. You would then send the tool to me at your expense, I will sharpen it and make it the subject of the article and send it back to you at my expense. Turnaround will be up to a month as I will need to get the tool well before the deadline to be certain I can fulfil my obligation to WC of turning in a quality article each issue. If not selected, please do not send me your tools. I don’t have time to sharpen them in my day-to-day business, and I don’t have the budget to return them to you if you do. Also, due to the time scales involved with overseas post, currently this is only open to carvers in the UK.

If you are interested, and I hope you are, then please email me at nic.westermann@btconnect.com

HEWN & HONE

This article is brought to you by Hewn & Hone, a company which draws its expertise from respected carvers and tool makers to bring you blades and sharpening supplies. All our designs and innovations emerge out of hard-won, practical insight into what will bring out the best performance in your tools. To learn more visit: www.hewnandhone.co.uk

PHOTOGRAPHY BY NIC WESTERMANN, UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED

Further reading