Making a Spoon for Eating-Discussion, plans, and photos

Hi Everyone,

Next Tuesday is my oldest son't birthday and as he's a historical re-enactor who plays the part of a young soldier in battle, I was trying to think of something that I could make for him. It occurred to me that he might like a spoon to eat with. I think lots of soldiers loose their kit in battle and probably wind up with no eating utensils and have to make something like a spoon to eat with until they can get a replacement. So here we go, we're off to make an eating spoon.

Eating spoons are a little different from cooking spoons in that they are smaller, shorter in length, and the handle is contoured to make it easy to get the bowl of the spoon around the face and into the mouth.  This does present a few difficulties-the spoon has to be small in size and this can lead to breakage and the contouring has to be done on a bandsaw. But by working carefully and slowly, we can get around those problems. And if we make it out of some hardwood, it shouldn't break.

I've got some maple scrap from previous spoon projects so we'll make our spoon out of that.

Here we go:

I decided to use an ordinary spoon out of my cutlery drawer as a pattern for this spoon:

As the handle for this is very curvy, I sketched out the handle on the side of the board and proceeded to cut it out on the bandsaw:

In these next two photos you can see the face of the spoon blank and a side view of the blank:

Here is the blank with a patten of the spoon drawn on to it:

Here is the entire thing in a vice. I'm going to cut out the bowl first:

Here is one half of the bowl carved out:

And I've turned the blank around and carved out the other half:

This is the finished bowl. It's shallow on the narrow end and deeper on the wide end, just like a regular spoon is. Now to cut it out on the bandsaw:

Here is a side view:

 This is the face view with the entire spoon cut out from the blank. You can see how very rough it is:

 I spent the next 40 minutes or so filing, sanding, and carefully carving on the spoon. Here it is at this point:

I kept on sanding and filing, being careful not to bend the handle or the bowl of the spoon so as not to break it and I must say it's coming out rather well:

Here we are about 20 minutes later. It's much smoother after more sanding and it is usable as an eating spoon.  I normally sand spoons very smooth and I'm debating whether or not to sand this one. It needs to look like something made in the field. I am going to put a brief birthday message on the underside of the bowl with a burning pen. It won't be seen and it will have my son's name on it so if he loses it, it will make it's way back to him....hopefully.

The inside of the bowl could stand a little more sanding so I'm going to go back out to the shop and do that and then I'll oil with flaxseed oil so stay tuned for another photo or two.

More late,
VW