Best Wood Carving Burrs for Beginner Dremel Wood Carvers - Kutzall

Okay, look at all those Quetzal bears. So many different shapes and sizes. When you're a beginner you kind of don't know which ones to buy. There's just so many. They're quite expensive. There's different colors. There's different sizes. And I want to make things a little bit easy. I use three of these mainly and I think they're great ones for beginners as well. So I'm going to sort of like show you the three that I use and talk a little bit about Quetzal today and how to use them. Okay, so I do all of my carvings with my Dremel. It's a Dremel 4000 and I use a flex shaft on it. Now the good thing is that they fit Quetzal bears very nicely in the collet that you get in the pack. So that's the collet there and this is the flame bear. So it goes in and you can tighten it up. And so that one-eighth collet will come in your pack with your Dremel. And you can also use a quick release chuck and that will also fit the one-eighth flame bear well with the one-eighth Quetzal bears. So what you don't want to do is you can see here I've got two Quetzal bears here and this is the one-eighth shaft. So this is the one you want to buy. Whereas this is the quarter-inch shaft. So this is to go in sort of like die grinders and some rotary tools that are designed to take quarter-inch shafts. Okay, so I'm going to quickly show you the Quetzal site where you can buy the bears and just so you don't get confused. So click on bears and you can go down to quarter-inch or one-eighth and you want to click on that one-eighth bear. You can sort of see here all the one-eighth bears have shown up. So we can click on something. Let's go for the flame bear. So there we go. Click on that and that will come up. And if we go over to that part there we can sort of see what the colors are. That's gold which is fine and silver which is coarse and very coarse or slash extreme is the black. So and we can also check up in that top bit up there and that is the one-eighth shaft flame bear. Okay, so there are a lot of different Quetzal bears, different shapes, but I've boiled it down to kind of three that I mainly use and the other ones I might use on special occasions. So the first one is the Quetzal extreme flame and the second one is the Quetzal fine taper bear and the third one is this one-eighth shaft fine sphere. Don't be confused by the quarter inch here that refers to the head of the bear. Okay, so I'm going to do a little bit of carving and show you sort of like how I carve with these three bears and what sort of level you're going to take them up to until you need sort of like to go to the diamond bears and all that kind of stuff. So we're going to use this carving but first I'm going to say a few things about safety and the danger of using these bears. Okay, so if we look at that extreme bear we can see it has a lot of kind of points on it compared to the silver, the gold bears. So it's going to grip a lot. It's like a motocross tire, you know, it's going to grip onto the wood so it's going to pull one way and in certain areas it's going to pull more than other areas. So on the flat plane it's not too bad but say if you're getting up to this point up here just on that point it's going to really rip over that and probably shoot off and you just need to be aware of that so it doesn't happen to you and you haven't got your hands in the way. Now you can always wear leather gloves as well for added protection and there is a link there to a video that is especially for safety. Okay, so the first demonstration is with the Cutzel Extreme Flame Bear and you want to put it into the collet sort of like almost all the way in. The manual says you need to be a little bit further and then halfway. I like to go sort of like about there. Depends on the carving as well you can leave it out a little bit further but just don't press it as hard. So and we can see there that the Flame Bear is curved so it's really good for concaves not so much convexes but if you move it very fast you can do convexes as well. Okay, so I am running this at full speed and essentially the Flame Bear is really the shaper. It sort of blocks out carvings so I'm going to put in the main kind of shape of the beard and the moustache and maybe deal with that eye and cheek a little bit on the left hand side as well. So the Flame Bear really has like that side bit and the pointy bit on the end so just be aware of that when you're shaping things. You don't really want to plunge the Cutzel, any Cutzel Bear into the wood too hard because you'd run the risk of breaking a flex shaft. I think I've only broken one in about six years so I'm well my approach is a very sort of like a light carver you would say. I'm not really that aggressive when it comes to carving. So we have here I'm just sort of like showing you sort of like sort of you can get sort of like a lot of control with that Flame Bear and I'm sort of doing a convex there just by going quickly going to work on the eye mound now and sort of making it look like the other eye. Now if you're carving eyes you would tend to do both eyes at once but this is sort of like a practice piece that I've been using and you can sort of see me I sort of like put in a little bit of a well a dent or well you know I carve a little bit and then I'll look at the other side then I'll go back and this is the way I tend to carve is you're always referencing either the other side of the carving or a reference photo. So when you're carving 3D you've really got to be aware of what you're doing sort of always keep on sort of like looking side profiles front profiles even like downward profiles that's always good to do as well. So you could really see the Kutzel Flame Bear is all about putting in the shapes and getting it ready to put in detail. So you can sort of see we've got up to a really good point there with the Kutzel Flame Bear but now we need to go in and put in some sort of like better details so like the eyes there so sort of like go deep in the eyes there so I'll get that eye mound looking really really good just so I can go in with the detailing bears. What I mean by detailing bears is sort of like after Kutzel kind of bears you want to go in with maybe diamond tip bears or cutter bears and I will cover that in a different video. So virtually I'm still putting in just shapes but making them more refined and just leveling them up with the other side of the carving. So you can sort of see I'm using the point of that taper bear it's really really nice and it's got actually a pretty fine point for a sort of like a bear like this and you can get some really really sharp lines there. So going under the eye but I probably wouldn't like I wouldn't try and attempt to put in the eyelids or anything like that with this bear and you can see I'm using the flat plane of this bear to carve the convex of the eye just sort of like trying to make it the same as the other eye. So it's looking pretty good there and I want to tell you sort of like a little secret about the use of these fine burrs. A lot of people buy them because they think they're going to not have to do any sanding and maybe that's true to a degree if you like that kind of rough rough finish but what what I really like about them and what are not a lot of people talk about is they offer a lot more control because essentially they're easier to sort of like manipulate and they're not going to run off on you and they have a finer point on them as well. So and they're going to take off less material so you're not going to go and make big mistakes by just sort of like touching the carving. So you can sort of see there I'm going under the mustache and when you go sort of like drag it through there try not to drag it just on the point but sort of like drag part of the whole burr through as well. Sort of more like not like that but more like this. If you get what I mean. And that way it sort of doesn't bump up and down as much. And this is quite a good burr to start putting in sort of details like the mouth underneath the mustache. I might not I'll just put the general shape in there and manipulate it with maybe diamond burrs a little bit later on. But it's really good for just getting that kind of shape started. And sort of like it's good to sort of like just to try and work out where that mouth's going to go. What looks natural. And with this burr if it looks too far forward you could always press a little bit harder and take it back a little bit. And sort of see I'm putting in sort of like the underneath of the lip there where it sort of goes down a little bit. But I'm not really too worried about sort of like refining these details just at the moment. I'm just trying to get an overall kind of good look at things. I'm just putting in that convex there. Sort of like using that flat plane again. Okay so now we're going to move on to the cuttle sphere burr which is also fine. What I find with this one it's really really good for smoothing things out and taking general kind of shapes back a little bit and all of that kind of stuff. It's really good for that transition between the nose and the cheek. It's sort of like a good general burr. You're not going to get much detail with it but it's it's quite a sculptural burr. And what I mean by that is it's sort of like good to make sculptural kind of forms. It sort of flows into each other and all of that kind of stuff. So you can get really kind of smooth lines kind of happening if you want. I sort of use it to to sort of like level out sort of sharp edges and all of those kind of things. Maybe the end of the nose and all of that. And if you go really really lightly it leaves a semi-okay finish. And what you might notice about these fine burrs is they do clog up a lot faster than the say the extreme burr. Now I kind of think that you don't need to clean them all the time because I haven't cleaned this one for a very long time and it still seems to be taking off the material. It doesn't look very good but it's doing the job to the way I like it. I'm not going to use this burr to take off a lot of material. I only really care about sort of flattening things out with this. So it might be a little bit duller than usual but that's okay. And what you've also probably noticed is I haven't recommended any silver burrs and I kind of think the reason for that is you can go from the extreme burr to this fine taper burr without a transition in the middle. It's not really needed that much. Now I would probably recommend if you're first starting carving to carve in sort of softer woods. You don't want to go too hard because carving hardwood is extremely difficult and usually puts people off carving. And I do carve hardwoods but if you notice I'll tend to make my designs quite user-friendly so I'm not carving big wood spurts and taking off a lot of material in certain areas on that hardwood. And what you'll notice when you're carving soft and medium sort of like hardness woods is your burrs are going to last a lot longer. So hardwood carving is really tough on your tools. So when you're first starting just stick to sort of like medium density to soft woods such as cedar. So where do you buy all of these Kutzel burrs from? Well I've left a link but I'm going to say this that the link really works really well if you're in America because you've got free shipping there. I think the shipping costs are quite expensive outside America through the Kutzel site. You can also look on Amazon they have some Kutzel burrs there but you should also look in your own country sort of put in like I did for New Zealand. I put Kutzel and then I put New Zealand after Kutzel and I found a supplier here. So they are quite expensive in other countries because they import them and then put their import tax on and all that kind of stuff. So it's just a matter of trying to find the cheapest way of buying them for yourself. I can't really tell you how to do that but that's how I did it. Thank you everybody for watching if you could hit that like button that would be awesome and if you want to see me carving this seafaring guy just click on this video here. See you next time. Bye!