[Woodcarver] Repaired Statue

[Alex Bisso]

    Believe it or not, I finally got the Quan Yin statue repaired.  This actually turned out to be a more difficult task than I expected.  I drilled in the neighborhood of 10 - 12 holes from the bottom way up into the chest of the statue and then managed to core out a large center hole.  I am pretty sure that this relieved the internal stresses in the wood since most of the cracks now terminated in the cored out center.  
    Then came the tedious job of cutting and fitting/glueing  pieces of wood into the cracks, some of which were quite large.  Even though I tried to carve and sand the sides of the cracks to facilitate fitting the pieces in, this was still a slow process involving repeatedly inserting the pieces into the crack using thin graphite paper to mark where the pieces needed to be trimmed to go in further and fit evenly.  I found it easier to work with shorter pieces of filler wood so every crack required multiple pieces of wood to fill.  Since the statue was going to be repainted, after glueing pieces of wood in all of the cracks, I used bondo to fill some small spaces between the pieces of wood and at the ends of the cracks where they tapered away.  
    When I was repairing the cracks it became apparent that most of them had originated before the carving was initially finished due to there being paint and plaster on the inside of them.  Also, upon close inspection I saw several significant horizontal (across grain) cracks in the finish and a little prodding at these places opened up big holes where worm-eaten holes had been just covered with plaster and painted over.  Some of these did have plugs of wood in them.  I wound up digging out a lot of worm poop and repairing places, some quite large, where bad parts of the wood was just plastered and painted over.  In the end, I was amazed that anyone would spend the time to do such a nice carving in such a badly worm-eaten and cracked piece of wood.  
    Then I spent a lot of time scraping, sanding repairing surface blemishes in preparation for refinishing.  This was seeming to be an endless task until I found a bottle of something called Paint Etch on my garage shelf.  This was Jasco Liquid Sander that my wife bought.  It removes gloss, wax, and grease and supposed eliminates the need for washing and sanding before refinishing.   I was very pleased with how well this product worked.  I put it in a spray bottle to apply and used a toothbrush to scrub it in - stated at the top and sprayed, brushed, sprayed, wiped dry my way to the bottom.  It did a great job of cleaning the statue and preparing the surface for the new paint job.   
Painting began with a coat of Gesso which was then lightly sanded.  I thought this might help smooth over some of the flaws/bumps/pits in the plastered areas and it did help some.  It also made visible edges of my repair areas that I thought were flush but were not.  This made me do a bit more carving on the repair edges which were the gessoed and sanded again and this time the repairs were not visible.  Then I turned the statue over to my wife to paint and she did a great job on it - mostly gold but with some subtle color touches.
I put a photo of the finished piece in my picturetrail album if you want to see it.  The link to the site is:
woodcarver at six.pairlist.net
Alex Bisso
Billings, MT
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