I recently received this whittling knife as a gift and decided to document my process of whittling a ball in a cage.

The idea of the “ball in a cage” project is to carve a ball into a block of wood, ensuring it is small enough to move around within the block, but large enough that it will not fall out of the block. I started by marking the block of wood with guide lines for cutting.

It was hard to get started as I needed to carve on a flat surface without allowing the knife to slip.

I began to use a circular technique to get a general cone shape in each rectangle.

First clean hole through the block of wood!

Passthrough achieved on top and bottom of cage.

I then worked on shaping the ball within the cage, which was difficult because there was no definite grain to the wood on the ball and if I cut too hard I risked breaking too deep into a column of the cage.

After working on the ball for a while, progress slowed down and I decided that it would be easier to thin out the columns. I measured and marked some more guide lines on each column.

Once the columns were thinner, the ball was almost free.

At last the ball was free!

Since completing this project, I’ve sanded the ball down to be more spherical as it often got stuck at certain points as it moved about the cage. This was a fun project and I escaped with minimal injuries (blisters from repeated cuts, knife slipped into index finger).