Cut out my eyes...

This handsome chap with his classic sculptural wooden look might look solid, but little does he know that his seemingly robust solidity is about to be deconstructed and shortly after this photo taken he was to have both his eyes and lower lip cut out

OUCH!

Not so demure now

This is because this solid wooden head was carved from a block that was in fact three pieces held together with a large retaining bolt.

Here is the block being unbolted.

Here are the pieces being unhinged.

Reminds me of the ante-room scene in Resident Evil.

The reason for this three-part block of head, is that this will be an animated head, much like a ventriloquist's dummy. It needs to be hollow, so carving something that can be taken apart and hollowed out is by the easiest.

But enough shots of a deconstructed head, next up th eeyes needed hollow out. The first thing was to drill a hole.

Drill holes looking a lot like pupils. Changes the look completely.

These were enlarged with the rotary burr in the die grinder 

Giving a softer look...

The face was clamped to the bench before using a thin saw in the multi-tool to cut out the eye wood...

looking a bit creepy now...

Yep, creepy...

The holes cut roughly with the multi-tool saw were reamed out with the die grinder

Actually this isn't looking any less creepy. Oh well, time to cut off the lower lip.

The cutting line is drawn on with pencil.

Also a good excuse to muck about with glassy eyeballs

Anyway, back on the bench for lip removal surgery...

The multi-tool allows quite delicate precision as long as held carefully.

The mouth was reamed out too. Here I put the head back together so you can start to see the final look. The white eyes here are ceramic door knobs I bought a few years ago in case I needed some glassy eyeballs. I probably won't use them for this build, but they look amusing.

Next time - eyeball mechanisms for left/right glancing and blinking eyelids.