How I carve

All my signs are made by hand, the letters are hand traced onto the workpiece with a pencil, and then a mallet and a large selection of chisels and gouges are used to cut them. If the letters need to be coloured, then they'll be primed and painted by hand. The sign will then receive a UV resistant oil finish. Most of the chisels used are at least a generation old, but all the mallets I use, I've made myself, usually from exceptional pieces of wood rescued from the firewood pile!

Here are a few photos showing me at work carving a big sign (click on any picture to see a larger view):

Some of the tools I use and a work in progress.

This is me, possibly looking a bit worried about the camera!

The first word of the sign, in Trajan Pro font.

Not all the work is done with a mallet. With a sharp chisel, it's possible to do the finer cuts by pushing only.

Later that day the sign gets it's first coat of oil. Looking good!

Are they really hand carved?

Many signs nowadays, even some of those those misleadingly offered as "handcrafted", or "hand engraved", are made with machines (routers, sandblasting, etc.). I have deliberately gone in the opposite direction with my carving, my goals are to create truly hand made signs of the highest quality, along with excellent customer service. Each sign I make represents hours of careful layout and precision chisel work. Machine made signs are almost certainly not made with this much care or attention to detail.