Duplicarver
Resin casting
Rod Naylor explains how he copied a resin casting of a dancing figure into ebony.

The inspiration for the Deco Dancer was a cheap, broken polyester resin casting. Although the basic idea was good, I didn't like the finer points. The overall line was not very fluid and any detail which did exist was crude.

My solution was to re-glue the pieces, and partially coat the original with a layer of epoxy resin. This had the advantage of slow setting time, during which it could be manipulated like a piece of clay. After hardening, the whole sculpture was re-carved using ordinary tools.

The final ebony (Diospyrus spp) carving was copied from the resin. As a professional carver, I find using traditional pointing methods too slow to be profitable. When you produce a carving, you are judged on the merits of the end product, not on the way it was achieved.

So I believe anything which may enhance the result is legitimate. My solution was to use a Dupli-carver copier.

First, I glued and screwed the resin onto a piece of scrap board which was then screwed onto a turntable.

Then I glued and screwed a roughly rectangular block of ebony, about 6mm, 1 1/4in larger than the pattern, onto another turntable.

I placed an extra piece of scrap underneath, as I didn't want to copy the base of the pattern.

Both turntables were then fitted onto the Dupli-carver (see right). These copying jigs work on the principle of a three-dimensional pantograph. Any movement made by a stylus is repeated by a high speed cutter. As the stylus is moved over the pattern, the cutter repeats every movement, passing through any material which gets in the way.