I must admit I was a bit nervous when I was standing in front of the huge block of wood with a chisel in my hand and had to start forming the first piece. Everybody, both amateurs and professionals have looked at me in a strange way when I said what I was going to do. Oh! -  They say. “That is quite a quest”. Or – “have you done anything like this before?”

Anyway, I had sharpened my Stanley chisels on a diamond whetstone so I could shave with them – but why would I do that?  I used my polyurethane model as a guide and started to cut away those parts of the wooden block that I did not need. For this purpose I used a heavy sword saw from Bosch that could cut through the 10 cm thick wood. I left a couple of centimetres extra wood around the actual form to safeguard from mistakes and wrong calculations. This showed to be a good policy later on when the three dimensional forms were so complicated that I could not really understand were they would lead me. Despite of that, I almost cut away too much on a later section.

After doing this rough form I started to do the 2 cm wide cut that the top of the railing should fit into. As this was quite an easy section it was not to difficult, but I found it very tiring to cut away all that wood, that still was left, with my hand chisel. It actually took me a couple of days of just hard work and after that I still had the delicate work to get a perfect fit. I realized that this would be a long story.

I had however seen a power tool that could do the job faster and started to look for it on Internet. Bosch has a power chisel, but that is only for small hobby jobs in soft wood and would not be of any help to me. Browsing the internet I found what I was looking for in Australia. It is a very powerful power chisel made by the company Arbortech. It seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, but how do I get it? The French dealer did not carry that product and the British one only sells to companies. I finally found it in Norway at Verktøy AS in Stavanger. They could deliver it right away so after less than a week I had the tool in my hand.

This was really the tool of my dreams. I fell deeply in love at first try. It was like cutting in cheese instead of wood. The second section of the railing that was almost exactly like the first one took less than half the time to finish and I felt that I had total control all the time.  

I have another tool also that is quite handy to do the cut for the top of the railing. It is a small mini circular saw that I can fit on my Dremel. It just cuts 5 mm which is exactly what I need.

Next chapter will be about how I made the two first sections and how I managed to join them together.