I look at your heavily pyrographed pieces and cannot but wonder whether you wouldn't be better off with a power carver? After all, it cuts the material instead of burning it, so no smoke and no burned edges. Should be a lot faster, and certainly better for your health.
And if you want the burnt edges, you could still do that later, but with much less effort. Am I missing something here?
Hi Wolfgang
In much heavier carving/texturing you are right it is a better option, although while there is not the smoke there is very fine dust which is also a problem. I do indeed use both methods, however the problem with power carving is that on softer woods such as sycamore no matter how fast and sharp the cutter you can still get some fluffy edges unless you have a very very high speed carver. Finishing with diamond burrs and finishing cones is something I co but it is another process and on very fine detail is a real pain.
Branding not only gives me exceptional detail it also gives me exceptional control as well as sealing/burning the edge to finish without sanding.
With a powerful unit I can carve to a depth of 1-2 mm pretty much as quick as with a burr (If I had the NSK rotary tool then I would be able to carve much quicker, but these are around £600 just for the carver then you need a good compressor, so you are looking at a big expense, then you have the dentist drill noise, dust) the Micro motor I have goes to 45,000 rpm and is more than good enough for my needs. But yes if you have the money to invest in a 300,000-400,000 carver there are other options but they are very expensive.
Also for very fine and intricate work the fine pyro blades allow you to obtain very fine detail that I can not with a micro burr, lines parts of a mm are difficult to cut with a burr as the point is so fine that the center speed is so low it can be problematic with the burr veering due to the grain.
During my travels I have been privileged to work with masters in texturing and all of them for fine detail use pyrography for these very reasons, so having learnt from these people I work as shown.
You can achieve so much more with a powerful pyro unit, but yes when more material removal is required then I use a micro motor but for these pieces you are only texturing 1-2 mm deep max and the positives of a powerful pyro for me unit outweigh the use of a rotary tool by far on this wood and detail. But yes as shown on the piece at the bottom, indeed it was a better option to first carve and then finish with a pryo ball end wire.
Currently I am having 'another' workshop move around, seems like déjà vu as I only had my last move around and to take care of the smoke as soon I will not be able to sit outside I am installing a cooker hood with inline fan to extract straight out of the workshop, a cheap cooker hood can be picked up for £50 or you can make something similar out of 2 ply to catch the smoke, inline fan £30 some piping and you have excellent extraction straight out of the workshop.
hope this clarifies when and why I use a pyro unit.
